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He was looking for a job. Then he found
a job. Heaven knows, he’s miserable now. Quite what
would cheer Morrissey up is a mystery to us all, of course,
and the mere commencement of regular employment was never
going to be equal to the task. The Mancunian song-writer’s
travails with travaille are typical. I once read a review
that observed that there are many songs about the telephone,
and all of them are sad. There are many about work. Nearly
all of them are bitter where they are not caustic. |
The themes have been that work is at
least emotional enslavement; that commerce is dirty and
only artists lead authentic lives. The following song lyrics
are typical:
'Working nine-to-five
That's no way to earn a living'
'And I'll never pine
For the bad days and the sad days
When we were working from nine-to-five'
'Tired of doing day jobs, with no thanks for what I do
I'm sure I must be someone, now I'm going to find out who'
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Much of the time, being at work is
like being at school again. Music touches the free soul
within us, so how can that spirit feel liberated if we are
being told what to do? Perhaps music is more than that;
perhaps it is the voice of the soul. Johnny Marr, Morrissey’s
guitarist in The Smiths, testifies: ‘If you’ve
got a certain vocabulary on the guitar, you know how to
play what you feel. You can voice it without all the hassle
of turning it into words and concepts … You don’t
have to translate to make your point. You don’t even
have to be making a point – it’s turning your
daydreams into sound.’i |
And in which context is the mind most
prone to daydream? Work is manic, a bore, a grind. It is
the bad days and the sad days. We gotta get out of this
place. It is slavery, and music is liberation. In many religious
traditions, this duality is expressed as body and soul.
Yet, as well as being opposites, work and music, like body
and soul, are intimate with one another. The history of
music – at least, folk and pop music – is intertwined
with that of labour. West African women sing as they pound
the corn, and maintain the metre with each strike. The babies
in their backpacks learn perfect rhythm at an early age.
In the Hebridean islands of Scotland, there are songs composed
by the weavers to accompany their time-consuming labour.
The song-writer draws upon the monotonous activity for material
both while and by trying to escape it, or to make the working
experience less arduous and more comforting. Music is also
communal; the most intimate and emotional form of expressing
solidarity, joy and mercy, as the slave workers in North
America found with their field hollers. |
In 1872, freed slave and vice-presidential
candidate Frederick Douglass wrote: |
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'While on their way (to work), the slaves would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness … They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone … I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject.' |
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The term ‘The Blues’, describing
both existential ennui and a type of music, is derived directly
from the working experience, and its style was probably
the biggest single influence on what we would today consider
to be rock or pop music. So the structure and syntax of
the latest R n B single would be very different without
the influence of slavery. |
Curiously, the lyrical content of blues
music rarely touches on work itself – as though it
were too horrible a subject to commit to paper. If one looks
at the words of ‘classic’ Delta or Chicago blues
songs, the dominant theme is sex. |
It was left to song-writers from later generations, and often more privileged backgrounds, to pen the most poignant observations of the plight of those condemned to hard labour. Oscar Hammerstein II, grandson of the tobacco millionaire and theatre impresario Oscar Hammerstein I, composed the following legendary lines for Old Man River: 'You and me/Sweat and strain/Body aching and wracked with pain/Tote that barge/Lift that bale/Get a little drunk/And you land in jail.' Without explicitly mentioning race or slavery, it is an impressive polemic. Paul Robeson, in his performances, tweaked the lyrics to make the protest a touch stronger: 'You show a little grit/And you land in jail'. |
Prison occurs frequently in popular song. For Jim Croce, at least, it seems to be a mere inconvenience, and preferable to a dead-end job: 'Well I just got out of the County Jail/Doing 90 days for non-support/ … Now I got those steadily depressing'/Low down mind-messin'/Working at the car wash blues'. |
In general, lyrics portraying the bitter poverty, hardship and suffering of labourers or slaves tend to be penned by professional singer-songwriters. In addition to Hammerstein, examples are Sam Cooke (Chain Gang) and Bob Dylan (North Country Blues). Allen Toussaint, writer of Working in a Coal Mine, had humble beginnings, but spent his adult life in the music industry and never actually worked as a labourer in any form, though he did complete his national service. Those who actually had experienced extreme poverty and discrimination, such as Big Bill Broonzy or Robert Johnson, tended to write about other aspects of life. |
The listener, of course, does not know if the description is documentary or fantasy; auto-biographical or research. Regardless of source, the messages contain the power to be absorbed. |
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i Johnny Marr in interview with Alan Yentob, The History of the Guitar, BBC series, first transmitted October 2008 |
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