Growing up in the 70s and 80s and 90s, there was a lot of music that dealt with the plight of the working man and disenfranchised classes. Some of it was political. Some of it was just artists singing about their life experiences. Some was just about normal people just doing normal stuff.
Some examples off the top of my head:
Bob Dylan
George Thorogood
Billy Joel
Tom Petty
Bruce Springsteen
Bon Jovi
John Mellencamp
Kid Rock
Green Day
U2
Classic punk is an entire genre about the poor and working classes raging against the establishment.
And let’s not exclude the early works of rap artists like NWA, Public Enemy, Dr Dre, Ice Cube, Notorious BIG and other artists describing life in the ghetto.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t really hear music like that any more. Rap and hip hop is mostly about posturing and complaining about life as a millionaire. Most pop music is just disposable, inoffensive dance music suitable as background noise at the beach.
Have we entered a new age where pop music no longer speaks to regular folk? Are the days of songs like Working Class Hero, Jack and Diane, Living On A Prayer, Anarchy in The UK, and Straight Outa Compton gone forever?
Music is cyclical. In the space of a few years, we went from folk/rock/protest to… disco, the music of the (largely faux) ruling elite. Then punk and post-punk pushed the proles back to the center… and then we got the glitter divas, who seem to have gone on forever. Rap/hip-hop can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s about street homies or posse leaders who take an Escalade everywhere because their bling is so heavy they can’t walk.
Me, I think it’s time for Phil Ochs, young Bobby Dylan and a Guthrie to make their way center stage.
Hmm, what about **Sia and Sean Paul **singing “Cheap Thrils” - the song is about having no money but experiencing the pure joy of dancing, music and friends.
There’s a new wave of folk-esque music out there (I’ll pin Fleet Foxes as the poster child), but they don’t get so much radio play, and honestly, they’re mostly rich hipsters who’ve read John Muir.
Kendrick Lamar usually tends to rap about poor African-American life (though more on “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” than on “To Pimp a Butterfly”). And Kanye West used to rap about being a poor black guy back on “College Dropout” (not much since then, though he does uncork a great song about racism every now and then).
So it’s out there a bit. But it may just be cyclical as mentioned above - a lot of pop music appears to be channeling 80s dance these days.
Sting did a lot of it through his career, but at this point, it always strike me as odd listening to him singing about murder, prostitutes, theft, etc.
Macklemore sings songs about shopping at thrift stores (Thrift Shop) or buying an $800 moped (Downtown). Even his ode to old school Cadillacs (White Walls) sounds like a working class perspective.
Hip hop does a lot of this. Kendrick Lamar was mentioned, Run the Jewels have a very punk rock style working class anti authoritarian streak too. A lot of modern hip hop is Sullivan’s Travels style fantasy though, as is much of non hip hop pop music. Kendrick Lamar’s song Backseat Freestyle is more or less about how hip hop has turned into wealth/power fantasy music (and makes this statement without judgment). His album To Pimp a Butterfly deals with this too, but there is a whole lot going on in that album.
County Western makes singing about poverty into a weird fetish. Mainstream pop is in a disco style “let’s just forget everything and dance” phase. Nothing wrong with that. Alternative/indie music has been the realm of the upper middle class for a while, so it’s unlikely that it would come from there. The pendulum will swing the other way eventually. The signs are already starting to point in that direction. But make no mistake these are for the working class. They are just not about the working class. Right now what the working class seems to want is fantasy. Even the poverty fetish music in country western is a fantasy. It’s just a different fantasy.
Disco…the music of the ruling elite? I remember disco as being a three-way cross between Saturday Night Fever working class machismo, and flamboyant pimp funkiness, and barely concealed gay pride just beginning to burst out of the closet. Unless you count rampant cocaine abuse as being of the ruling elite, I’m hard pressed to see anything elitist about disco at all.
