Music Sunday: The Work in Music Edition

I've been thinking about work a lot lately. This probably has to do with the fact that I don't have a job, want one badly, and can't find one to save my life. It's really frustrating. It's stressful. And, lately, many people seem to be under the impression that the only reason people don't have work is because they don't want to work. Apparently, these folks don't know much about the economy and the unemployment rate, which is still a lot higher than it should be.

I could rant about the lack of work and the attitudes of people who have work and who don't have work from here until next Sunday. But I won't.

However, since I've been thinking about work so much, I thought I'd look around to see what kind of songs about work and workers are available. Turns out there are a lot of them. It also turns out that there aren't all that many songs that have a positive attitude about work, or at least about working conditions. I suppose that some people would read these songs as being by spoiled musicians who would rather fart around all day than actually work. But I don't read them all that way. I see them more as documenting all the crap that most working men and women have to put up with on a daily basis in order to keep their jobs so that they'll have a paycheck to take home every week or every month.

This is pretty plain in this song by Huey Lewis and the News, "Workin' for a Livin'" (1982):



The song doesn't say that the protagonist doesn't want to work, just that being an actual working person (as opposed to the bosses, who get paid more and get to decide how the workers are treated) can be a struggle on a day-to-day basis.

"Manic Monday" (1986), performed by The Bangles but written by Prince, is a song in the same vein. Yeah, there are other things the protagonist would rather be doing, but work is necessary. It's just that the realities of the workaday world are frustrating sometimes. Getting up early, maybe missing the bus or the train before even getting to work, knowing that if you're late you might get yelled at or get your pay docked...this is all stressful before you even get to the stress of the actual work day:



"Wichita Lineman" was written by Jimmy Webb and first recorded by Glen Campbell in 1968. It is a song that celebrates the worker who is out there when needed, sometimes lonely and working for long hours in all kinds of conditions. Personally, I like this cover, from R.E.M. best:



Other songs about work are more directly snarky. One of the best of these is Dolly Parton's Grammy Award winning and Academy Award nominated "9 to 5" (1980) from the film of the same name. She wrote the song as well as singing it in the film:



Another song in the same vein and even more direct, although it is only partly about work (it skewers family life pretty strongly, as well, and has some deeper philosophical ambitions as well) is The Police's "Synchronicity II", which was released in 1983, talks about the humiliations that sometimes come along with working for a living:



I'm tempted to end this edition of Music Sunday with Johnny Paycheck's "Take This Job and Shove It", but I don't want to do that. I know that it is a common sentiment. I've had that sentiment about a couple of the jobs I've had. But work isn't a bad thing. Work is a good thing. I am in absolute earnest about wanting a job, and it irritates me when people bitch and moan about their jobs when they should be glad, in this economy especially, that they have one. Yes, there are irritations. Yes, there are frustrations. And, yes, in some jobs the expectations are ridiculous and occasionally humiliating. But those are not the fault of the job. They are the fault of the culture, both in the workplace and in the culture, and of those who have the inclination to make things difficult for those they work with.

That is what these songs do, I think. They complain about working conditions, not about working itself.

And, with that, I'll get off my soapbox and let you enjoy the rest of your Music Sunday.

Music Sunday: The Pre-Christmas Potluck Edition

I was watching a movie yesterday, something called "Layer Cake", a gangster movie, basically, and at one point I noticed that the song "Ordinary World", by Duran Duran, was playing in the background. It seemed very appropriate given the things the main character was going through in the film. After the film was over, I wandered over to YouTube to watch the video of the song because I hadn't heard it in a long while and I do really like the song.

What? We all have our musical guilty pleasures.

Anyway, the video is visually stunning. I also thought, as I watched the video, that some things in it looked quite familiar. I did a little research and discovered that the bulk of the video was filmed at the Huntington Gardens in San Marino, California. No wonder. I used to live maybe fifteen miles from Huntington, and for a period of time in my late teens I visited the gardens, and the library and art gallery there, fairly often. So, I thought I'd start out this Music Sunday by sharing the song, and video:



Another video that I find just as amazing, visually speaking, even though the images could not be more different than those in the video for "Ordinary World", is this video for R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts", another song that I like very much:



Another video that I find visually interesting, again for completely different reasons from the two above is this one, for "Take On Me", by A-Ha. Not a brilliant song, in my opinion, but I like the way the video mixes live action and animation:



Because today's post is a little bit of a potluck and all over the place, and because a little Annie Lennox is always a good thing, I thought I'd also share The Eurythmics' "Would I Lie to You?":



Finally, I'm leaving this here for you because it is nearly Christmas. I'm not a fan of Christmas music, and especially not of religious Christmas music. However, I found this while I was looking around, possibily the oddest reading of a religious Chrismas song that I've ever heard or see, this is Annie Lennox, again, with an original take on "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen":

Music Sunday: The Lots of Love Songs, Dysfunctional Categories, Edition

Sometimes it is difficult to find a theme for these Music Sunday posts. Last week, for example, I went for the birthday theme because I really couldn't come up with anything else. This will probably happen again in the future. Some days it's just harder to feel the music than others. But sometimes the theme of the week comes easily, and from some seemingly unlikely places.

This week, for example. This week's theme came to me while I was reading a book.

This isn't really unusual in itself. I read a lot (if you're a regular around here, you know that about me already), so it figures that at least sometimes I will get ideas for this blog, both generally and in regards to Music Sunday, from things I'm reading. It seems a little more unlikely, however, that I would get an idea for a Music Sunday blog post while reading a book written by an anthropologist and a neuropsychologist...a book that is titled How to Think Like a Neandertal(by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge [2012, Oxford University Press; 210 pages]).

Yet, this is exactly where I found today's theme, love songs. In the chapter that discusses the idea of whether or not Neandertals had a concept of marriage, and whether their style of pair-bonding was similar to that of modern humans, the authors pointed out that there are only two primates (and, yes, we are primates) that always pair-bond for life and are thus truly monogamous. Modern humans are not one of those two species; that very short list consists of gibbons and siamangs (p. 82).

That got me thinking - a dangerous thing, as I note here from time to time. What it got me thinking was that the fact that because humans do not naturally pair-bond for life, but most often rely - at least in Western culture - on things like romantic love to hold relationships together, we have developed a wide range of love-song types.

Love songs, of course, are not the only kind of songs we have. But, in truth, they probably make up the vast majority of songs in Western popular music. So, I thought that on this Music Sunday it would be nice to look at some of the variety of forms of love songs.

Or, maybe, not so nice, as in the case of the obsessive love song. This type of song is, I think, exemplified by "The Spy", by The Doors:



A more recent example of the obsessive love song - you might also call them stalker songs, really - comes from The Police, in the form of "Every Breath You Take", here in a live performance in Madrid from 2008:



And there is the "I love you but you don't love me and I'm so sad" song. There are a lot of these around, but the one that always comes to my mind first is "I Honestly Love You", by Olivia Newton-John, released in 1974. I'm not sure when this performance, taped at the Sydney Opera House, took place:



A sub-category of this kind of love song is the "I love you and I need to tell you, but will I ever get the chance?" song, exemplified by Heart's "Alone":



Lest you get the idea that this is a category of song that only women sing, here is an example of another sub-category, the "I love you but I can't tell you because you belong to someone else" love song, this time sung by a male to a woman with an engagement/wedding ring on her finger. This is "Midnight Confessions", from 1968, by the Grass Roots, which got to number five on the Billboard Hot 100:



Apropos of absolutely nothing, "Midnight Confessions" was my favorite song when I was in the eighth grade.

Another category of love song, the "I love you but you're so far away, please be true to me because I'm being true to you", is illustrated by Journey's "Faithfully", which could also be put in the category of the "it's so hard being in love with a working musician" love song:



There is another permutation of the "musician on the road" love song, the cautionary "beware of musicians that tell you that they love you, because they're probably lying" song, here illustrated by R.E.M.'s "The One I Love", which starts out with "This one goes out to the one I love" but then confesses that the object of the singer's love is just "a simple prop to occupy my time", followed by the later admission that "another prop has occupied my time". Yeah, life on the road can be hard, and not just for the traveling musician, but also for all the ones he (or, presumably, she) has left behind. No real pair-bonding going on here:



Another category of love song is the "I don't love you anymore, please let me go" song. My favorite example of this sort of song is "If You Could Read My Mind", by Gordon Lightfoot. Here, he doesn't blame his former love, and he isn't even really glad that he doesn't love her anymore. He doesn't really understand why, but "the feeling's gone and I just can't get it back". Yeah, love songs can be really depressing sometimes:



And then there is "Sometimes When We Touch" by Dan Hill, originally released as a single in 1978. This song has made many "worst songs" list. On the other hand, I've also heard it called "the ultimate love song." Well, I suppose that depends on one's attitude toward love and taste in music. It definitely fits here, however, as perhaps be best example in the category of the "I love you, but this whole love thing is really, really complicated and I'm so confused right now" love song:



Maybe one of these Sundays I'll share some happy "Silly Love Songs" (and maybe even that Paul McCartney and Wings song, which isn't really one of my favorites, honestly). But not today, because this post has already gotten long and out of hand, even though I could have probably come up with as many more categories of love song as I've shared here today.

Oh, and just a word of apology for the videos I've shared that have ads at the front of them. When I haven't been able to find those with no ads attached, I've tried to find those with either the shortest ads, or ads that can be skipped after a few seconds.