Here’s a quarter-baked idea, but it’s a busy day and I want to get it out there while the gettin’s good. Remember when rock was concerned with authenticity? Remember when authentic rock titans the likes of John Lennon walked the earth, or at least hovered above it as if they were actually putting some wear on the soles of their shoes? I do.
I remember being about 14, catching up on my Beatles-infatuated boyhood to see where the band members’ solo years led: cool album tracks that I’d missed during my early years of puberty and my last dash of dreams of being a major league baseball player. I’d been reading those Lennon interviews in Playboy and Rolling Stone, really concentrating on every word the coolest and most authentic member of The Beatles uttered. I recall being very excited to hear “Working Class Hero”. This seemed like a song I could really sink my teeth into. This seemed like a song that would speak to the me I thought would be cool to be!
The first few times I heard the song I was disappointed. It was too slow. It “told” me rather than “showed” me. It sounded like folk music. It wanted to express anger, but I wasn’t feeling much of it. To this day I still find “Working Class Hero” a boring song. But Lord knows it strove for authenticity and grappled with issues of serving The People.
I miss that sort of grappling in rock, and when I do hear it from the likes of Springsteen and earnest alt.country types, I’m often equally bored. Good idea, but difficult to pull off unless you’re John Fogarty in his CCR prime. Beside the boring Americana music that typically accompanies these sort of songs, the lyrics usually strike me as insincere, like so many of those John Mellencamp songs we typically balk at hearing.
So Rock’s New Honesty is, in some ways, a good thing. Indie rock’s roots are heavily associated with college education. We’ve all come through the Working Class Hero mythology, and our artists may be more likely to make sincere works reflecting their middle class backgrounds and aspirations. Wes Anderson and his buddies aren’t pretending to give a damn about The Little Man, and that’s cool. Did the idealistic songs of the ’60s and ’70s that Lennon was grappling with really help anyone? The members of the Jefferson Airplane, for all their musical idealism and revolutionary rallying cries, probably couldn’t dress themselves without assistance. Maybe it’s better that we sing of what we know, but at what price? Is the trade-off the musical equivalent of Wes Anderson films?
‘Rock Authenticity’ has always struck me as a justification by unimaginative artists for their boring, uncreative music. They know they can’t compete on a higher level, so would rather force everyone to hold themselves back to whatever the accepted limits are.
They’re basically teachers telling the brighter kids in class to not show their intelligence, so the slower kids don’t feel bad about themselves: “This way everybody wins!”
Performance is artifice. Songs are pre-written and rehearsed. I’ll take ‘Revolver’ or ‘Hunky Dory’, (inauthentic), over ‘Let It Be’ or ‘Tin Machine, (authentic), any day of the week. Who cares if the Monkees couldn’t play their instruments when the singles were concise and hooky?
Critics seem to have forgotten that when Bob Dylan first emerged he created a personal history / biography every bit as genuine as Vanilla Ice’s own attempt at the same.
Fine points, homefrontradio, but let’s not lose sight of rock’s new honesty. Is it helping?
Hm. I was thinking about this the other day while listening to Brimful of Asha, initially because I was reading over the lyrics to it, and it struck me because I’d never even given them a second thought before to exactly what the lyrics were about.
There’s a part to it that is about forgetting about the news and the political and just enjoying life – even though it’s mostly a song glorifying Indian cinema, singers, and Indian radio…
Billy Bragg is still quite a big purveyor of politically charged songs, and I don’t find them at all boring. “There Is Power In a Union” even now strikes a chord for me, maybe even moreso because of a Union rally that Billy played at during the Detroit Free Press strikes years ago (I had an uncle who worked on that paper). But then again, a lot of the songs we now hear him play also come from his folk-hero, Woody Guthrie. But does it make them any less poignant to hear them in our time as it is now?
It’s also hard to sing about what we know – or even know where to begin, because sometimes, even that is what the media is feeding us. I think although it’s comedy, it’s also tragedy, which is maybe why we laugh (in the face of adversity, so to speak) – Flight of The Conchords seem to have a real handle on how to use the media, real life, and make fun of it –
“Children on the streets using guns and knives / Taking drugs and each other’s lives / Killing each other using knives and forks / And calling each other names like dork”
I watched a few Tiny Masters of Today vids this afternoon, and they have a song called “Bushy” about their thoughts on the President that’s taken from a kid’s standpoint. Thom Yorke’s album The Eraser was supposedly inspired by the issue of “climate change”…
Do you mean in the sense that it’s being glossed over and glamourised? I’m trying to understand, but not sure if I am.
Good stuff, Sally C!
As for my Wes Anderson line, beside being one more attempt at making a crack on that guy, I meant that if mostly middle-class, college-educated rockers sing about the aspirations of middle-class, college-educated rockers, does the rock risk getting too insular? Should artists at least try stretching out and writing about things they may not really know directly?
This is America where everybody is (or pretends to be) middle class. That thing of having working class cred is more of a British thing. So if people start singing about middle class life, it shouldn’t be insular, it should be keeping it real.
I’ll be more convinced if indie rockers start singing about downward mobility and mortgage foreclosures.
BigSteve said:
I’ll be more convinced if indie rockers start singing about downward mobility and mortgage foreclosures.
I say:
BRAVO!
Waitaminnit. What on Earth does the lyric to “Working Class Hero” have to do with Darfur?! This is awful! Well-intentioned, but really stupid.
Groan.
Dude, Yoko licenses John’s solo catalog so that bands can cover his songs and sell them on a CD that benefits Darfur. I think I recall this correctly.
Hrrundi, what’s your take on Rock’s New Honesty: a step in the right direction?
Didn’t The Who sing “Here comes the new honesty/same as the old honesty”?
I dunno, to me this isn’t about honesty, or cynicism, or rock’s new/old post-irony, etc. To me, songs about The Working Man are always relevant… always “trendy.” What’s changed over the last 30 years is that pop music has skewed even further into “I must tell the world about ME and the tortured thoughts inside MY head”-ism. The reason Fogerty, and Weller (in his Jam “Tube Station” prime) and Dylan (for a brief time there) were so successful at singin’ those workin’ man blues is because they never really signed up for Tortured Self-Expositionist duty like so many others (most notably John Lennon) did.
For my money, the truly Great workin’ man’s music was made by troubadors during America’s adolescence, from the turn of the last century until maybe the jazz age. As Townsman Massimo can attest, those guys wrote some of the simplest, most direct, and (in their own unvarnished way) most harrowing lyrics about what it meant to stay alive in our wild new country.
I was playing a house party with Uncle Steve the other day, and was thrilled to finally find a venue where I could trot out one such song — or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof — “I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water,” by “Country Joe” Babcock. Let me tell you, it gave me so much more pleasure to sing that lyric than it did to have to groan my way through The Band’s “The Weight” (and others of similar vintage and poetic earnestness). I mean, come ON:
I was born in Macon, Georgia
Met my daddy in the Macon jail
He said, “Son, if you keep your hands clean, you won’t hear those bloodhounds on your trail.”
But I fell in with bad companions
Killed a mailman up in Tennessee
Well, they caught me up in Nashville
And they locked me up and threw away the key
… and it goes on from there. I dunno, man, but *that* says a lot more about the human condition (or at least an interesting slice of it) to me than “Working Class Hero” ever will.
I give you Philly’s own Atom and his Package, whose songs include “I Am Downright Amazed At What I Can Destroy With Just A Hammer,” an ode to DIY home repair written shortly after Adam Goren and his wife bought their first house.
Had he not stopped performing, I have no doubt that 15 years from now, Goren would be writing songs about prostate exams.
Maybe they’re too blunt, but at least Lennon’s working class hero lyrics can be applied to people raised in abusive, conformist situations. There are probably a lot more of them than people born in Macon who killed postal workers. After all, it’s the mail carriers who are supposed to be firing into crowds when the catalog season comes.
You romanticize the violence of a guy who won’t work for a living, won’t be part of the “system” – not much different than gangsta rap. It’s the anti-working class hero.
Hrunndi, I’m down with you on the greatness of a lot of American music from 1920-50. But you’re dangerously close to claiming that it’s REAL music, unlike the pretentious bullshit of The Band and John Lennon. You’ve often accused me of saying the same (although I never have), and here you are doing it yourself.
Do I have to give you a Bonehead of the Week award? Surely you can’t mean what you’re saying? Please explain.
Heh heh.
To answer your question, no. While there is a tendency to fall back on the myth that you must write what you know, the best artists try to go outside themselves. It’s like when actors research their roles; directors can do something similar in the process of making a film.
GREAT answer, Dr. John!
Mwall sez:
But you’re dangerously close to claiming that it’s REAL music, unlike the pretentious bullshit of The Band and John Lennon. You’ve often accused me of saying the same (although I never have), and here you are doing it yourself.
I say:
Well, I guess that makes two of us, cuz I’m not saying it either. I said that the adolescent American artists made some of the greatest *workin’ man’s* music I’ve ever heard, which is not quite the same thing. This is *not* to say that contemporary artists couldn’t do just as well — most just don’t, choosing instead to gambol self-indulgently down the primrose pathways of their own minds, and wasting a lot of our time by telling us how they *feeeeel*, mannnn.
That’s painting with a broad brush, I know — and “Feeeeling Rock” has its place, too (Lord, how I know THAT’s true), but I think, I hope, my point still stands, in some half-baked kind of way.
More importantly, how you doin’ out there?
I like Dr. John’s answer. I don’t so much need someone to convey how they feel so much as how I feel. It doesn’t need to be honest, but I need it feel sincere. Working Class Hero never did it for me because I don’t necessarily agree with it, and I never liked the fact that so many rock critics told me it was a masterpiece.
I think “The Ballad of John and Yoko” is much more honest than “Working Class Hero” because it reveals his mixed feelings about being a pop-cultural icon and realizing that people all react differently to him.
Ultimately I prefer the humorous way he expresses his hope for a spiritual resolution in “Ballad” over the bleak pessimism of “Hero.”
I couldn’t disagree with you guys more about “Working Class Hero.” It’s one of the later Lennon songs that really is as good as it’s claimed to be. I think it’s a perfect expression of the feelings of what it’s like to grow up with lots of rules and limited options. I don’t see the “tell, not show” part either; the details in that song are precisely claustrophobic. I’m not sure I see the “bleak pessimism” either. There are two ways to read the central mantra there. One is as a sincere hope: becoming a “working class hero” is done by fighting against your upbringing and becoming something that other people from that background admire, even though they hated you the whole time you were getting there. The other reading is more ironic, but only partly pessimistic; you’ve saved yourself, maybe, but what has really changed, and if nothing has really changed, maybe you haven’t saved yourself. But that’s a series of questions, not an absolute pessimism.
I think sometimes people on this list dislike working class based sentiments, and I often wonder why. As if talking about the middle class suburbs would be more “honest” if you didn’t grow up that way. I think some of you guys need to stop pretending that every musician grew up just like you did, or needs to speak to your experience.
“The Ballad of John and Yoko” doesn’t reach nearly as far back into Lennon’s experience; it’s a late “prices of fame” song, fine enough in its ironies, but certainly much more limited in its scope–the life of the confused celebrity.
My problem with Working Class Hero was always the chorus. “A working class hero is something to be.” Yeah, but what?
I did like the definitely not working class Marianne Faithfull’s version, but just because of her voice. I could listen to her sing anything.
Me too. I’m glad I’m not the only one who prefers her version to the original. Then again either beat the pants out of the horrid Green Day version that I heard a few months back on satellite radio.
Honestly, my main problem with that song has always been the line “but you’re all f*&^% peasants as far as I can see” (or whatever it is). Is there a more egregious example of self-righteous douchebaggery in the Lennon canon? Keep in mind, I really like Lennon and everything he stood for, but that line always stood out like a sore thumb.
At least when Marianne Faithfull sings it, she has an aristocratic air about her that screams “I don’t give a damn about all of you”, but from Lennon you (or at least I) want something with a bit more empathy for the “common” man and woman.
Steve: “something to be” as in 1) your only choice to make something of yourself, or as in 2) raising exactly the question you’re raising. That is, your question itself is part of the song, not your view from outside it.
Like the Pistols “they made you a moron,” or a dozen other “wake up” moments, it’s a cry of frustration from within a situation, the way somebody tries to get people to work up the necessary anger to change a situation. It’s an old style of rabble rousing: “wake up and see the chains you’re still wearing.” And it’s also the sense of frustration that maybe people won’t wake up. It’s a very common lyric move in reggae, for instance, like the Culture song that goes, “The more brutalization they put on your backs/the more foolish you become.”
“Me, what chains? I have wings.”
“Wake up, moron.”
What did Lennon stand for, exactly, since you like what he stood for? I’d love to hear your explanation.
I don’t think “Working Class Hero” has aged very well. I agree with BigSteve and Berlyant. Between the finger-pointing in the verses and the glorification of poor people by a rich guy in the chorus, it’s all a little hard to take now. I guess the chorus has the slight redemption of Lennon admitting his shortcomings, but Steve is right about the problems with this chorus. We all take the piss out of Bruce Springsteen for his working-class pretensions; why the free pass for John?
And I also prefer the Marianne Faithful version. I’m a fan of that half-past-dead vocal.
My new favorite thing to say about the “write what you know” conundrum comes third-hand from one of my girlfriend’s best friends: Write what you DON’T know about what you DO know. And I think that’s what Working Class Hero does.
Or Bob Dylan’s “A Pawn in Their Game” (I think that’s the title) or other “wake up, you’re getting screwed” songs. I get it. The difference is that the line in “Working Class Hero” (and the song in general) feels more like he’s putting down others and proclaiming his own superiority whereas the other examples (esp. “God Save the Queen”) are much more convincing because the singer himself (in this case Johnny Rotten) seems to not only be taking the piss and having fun with it for provocation, but genuinely angry at the royalist tendencies of those who wished for the return of the empire. I hope that made sense.
Sorry for not answering this in my previous post. What I meant was that Lennon, more than any other rock star with the exception of Kurt Cobain, used his podium to try to bring about social change (in Kurt’s case it was also trying to introduce the masses to great underground music, too) and that’s something I’ve always liked about him and Yoko. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t mean the “Lost Weekiend” years, the drunkeness, leaving his first family behind or any of that stuff. He wasn’t perfect, to say the least.
So you’re saying, Oats, that a guy who was 30 years old, who was poor until he was 22, and who in the following eight years has gone through massively rapid changes in a crazed public environment, doesn’t know what it was like to be poor anymore? My guess is that if you’re poor until you’re 22, you probably never forget what that was like. And where do you see “glorification” in that song?
Berylant, are you saying that “Working Class Hero” is not a genuinely angry song?
The implication is, I guess, that once you have money, you don’t remember anger, you can’t be angry, and you don’t remember what it was like to be poor? Because once you have money, everything is roses?
Well of course it is, but it just feels like pompous, self-righteous and overblown anger, at least to my ears.
Where did I say that? Firstly, I don’t want to get into this argument, but are you certain he was “poor”? I’m just saying that his mode of expression on “Working Class Hero” (and all over Plastic Ono Band) is rife with a lot of hubris that I find difficult to stomach. “If you want to be a hero than just follow me.” Hey, maybe I don’t want to be a hero. Isn’t this the guy who then spends a whole song later in the album talking about the heroes he doesn’t believe in anymore?
This is not the John Lennon I value.
I like the witty fuck-up, the rock ‘n roll lover, even the guy who knew how to use the media to get his ideas out there.
I’m actually not going to quibble about the issue of whether how much money his family brought home every week qualifies him as able to be angry about the working class in that song. But you’re welcome to tell me the precise amount of money that would disqualify him.
And maybe the “just follow me” is ironic. That Lennon was a hero to his fans is a fact. That he himself doesn’t really believe in heroes–but also isn’t really sure he doesn’t, since he’s tried so hard to become one–is also part of the point.
In other words, you like the John Lennon image, and you’re annoyed when he punctures it. If he had a lot of fans like you, no wonder the guy was pissed off.
I’m pleased to see the life this post has taken. Many fine points have been made, and I wonder who actually gets the song, myself included. It’s as much a part of that album’s “I don’t believe in The Beatles…” anti-mythology, isn’t it? My main beef with the song is that it’s boring. But don’t let my brief thoughts slow down discussion here. I think a lot of you are getting into areas I had not considered. Where will it lead?
Hardly! When I say “witty fuck-up,” I mean the guy on Walls and Bridges Really! I like that album. When I say “rock ‘n’ roll lover,” I mean I love the way he sang every word with conviction, even if I ultimately think those words are bullshit. Seriously, my favorite thing about the guy might be his singing voice. And that stuff about the media, I mean it. I think the bed-ins and the Mike Douglas stuff are in their own way brilliant.
I gotta say, I’m always a little shocked that people seem unwilling to allow that Plastic Ono Band is maybe a wee bit too onanistic in its self-regard. Yes, yes, yes, raw production. Yeah, yeah — “honesty.” I think one of the most honest moment on the album is “Hold on, John.” The fact that he makes a Cookie Monster joke in the midst of a song about doubt and uncertainty and hope is more human to me than raw production.
Actually, I don’t disagree on this point regarding the album. I just disagree that the fault can be found in the song “Working Class Hero.” That song seems to lodge its anger, ironies, and uncertainties in a situation that’s beyond simply that of the self, the family, or the mythology of the Beatles. It’s got the true grit of much larger problems in it. Not that the family and the self aren’t significant problems in their own right.
I won’t debate Mr. Mod’s feeling that the song is boring, except to say that many others don’t find it so.
I don’t know, mwall – If Lennon was poor for 22 years, and then by 30 unbelievably wealthy with the world hat his fingertips and almost everyone he met kissed his ass just because of who he was, then I think it’s pretty realistic to think that for nearly half the time he was poor he was what anyone’s definition of wildly successful was and yeah, he could easily forget just what’s it’s like to be poor. A full stomach for years and a job where you pretty much get to sleep or party whenever you want, anywhere you want, with whomever you want, makes it way harder to remember just how worried you were when they were going to kick you out of your apartment in the winter unless you found some work. Working Class Hero just sounds condescending to me. Plenty of rich guys (including John Lennon) have said things that I can really relate to and get behind, but just not that.
Huh. And here I am, thinking a song about how unhappy he was growing up meant he remembered what it was like growing up, when in fact he didn’t remember it at all and is really just whining because he’s too rich and indulged. Come on. This kind of generic fantasy about the “rich rock star” and how it compares to what Lennon was actually doing and thinking has weird resentment written all over it. And it’s actually that kind of resentment that is one of the main subjects of this song.
I don’t see the condescending part either. I suppose saying that his neighborhood was full of poor people with a heart of gold who just wanted to help each other out would be more down to earth? It sounds more like bullshit propaganda.
But I do see why this happens. Guy who makes it out of the muck goes back and accuses the people still in the muck of wanting him to be stuck there, and not even knowing that the muck is muck. The truth hurts sometimes, I guess.
Mwall, if those fires get too close to your home, I trust that you have the power to put them out. Nice work here – you too, Oats. I’m “agreeing” with many of you, in an honest if confusing way. I totally agree with the simple greatness of “Hold On” and Mwall’s ability to dig into the lyrics of “Working Class Hero” make sense. AND he’s man enough to acknowledge that it’s not all that as a piece of music.
Mr. Mod, you’re “all these layers” and shit like that. You’re this, that, and the other thing, but maybe not. You’re saying what you don’t mean and meaning what you do say, and then some. What’s “not all that as a piece of music” mean? Not that I don’t realize that you haven’t already not said. Know what I mean?
Mwall, the song certainly seems pessimistic, no? Perhaps bleak is too strong a word, but there appears to be no solution to the problems Lennon describes, which is emphasized by the sarcastic ending line: “just follow me.”
I do agree that Lennon argues that the working class does bear some degree of responsibility for thir oppression; yet
the song will only convince those who aren’t in that class. And that’s the real problem with the song.
Ah, good Doctor. How on earth can you possibly know who it will or won’t convince?
Speaking of “God” – that’s the one with the “I don’t believe in…” lines, right?
I always remember in a Rolling Stone interview, Wenner asked John why he said “I don’t believe in Zimmerman” instead of “I don’t believe in Dylan”. John answered something to the effect that “Dylan is bullshit, his name isn’t Dylan, it’s Zimmerman.” I always thought this line encapsulated John’s contradictory personality, given that he had changed his name to John Ono Lennon.
mwall, I just said it sounds condescending to me. I’m sure I’m in the minority there, since it’s so often considered a masterpiece. But to me, it always sounded like, “I did it. I got out, so you can, too.” On some days it sounds like, “You won’t make it all the way out like me, but you can at least be the foreman at the crappy print shop.” Either way, it sounds condescending to me. I’m sure I’m missing some deeper point, but there was honestly a time where I really was working class (and coming from my comfortable enough middle class background, I was very humbled to find out that this shit was a lot harder than it looked), with all the problems that seemed to come with, and John’s sarcasm was just lost on me.
I’m usually okay with songs by bands where they openly mock their fans and their fanaticism or idolatry and John Lennon’s sarcasm is usually something I agree with. But that song just rubs me the wrong way. It’s probably because we disagree with that “just follow me” line. Sometimes when you’re being sarcastic you just end up sounding like an asshole.
2K Man wrote:
My wife tells me this every once in a while.
Attacking the very people you’re trying to persuade is rarely successful.
I don’t think that’s true. I mean, it may not get them to vote for you, but Lennon’s not a politician. The whole point of certain kinds of shock tactics is that it gets people to wake up, some anyway, whereas others go another way, of course. I know how I was at 15. If I’d heard that Lennon song then I would have said that’s right, I want out of here, which is how I still felt when I heard it at 18. The reason I was listening to lots of metal at 15 and 16 was because it said the same thing. That’s how punk worked too. And it doesn’t automatically just “attack the enemy.” It says “hey mofo, you’re part of the problem. Wake up and do something about it.”
Lennon’s vision in the song is dark, but that doesn’t mean somebody isn’t going to take strength from its implication that you have to devote everything to resistance. It’s interesting the way that song is both an anthem and an anti-anthem simultaneously.
And on a related subject, sure, sometimes when you’re being sarcastic you end up sounding like an asshole. But sometimes when you’re being sincere you sound like one too, or when you’re being enthusiastic, or rowdy, or angry or whatever. There’s no tone of voice that can protect any of us from the stupid things that come out of our mouths.
Wow, I’m really honest today.
Dr john said:
What an idiotic thing to say. You should really change your mind and agree with me.