Songs where the rich rockstar laments the lives of the humdrum little people who have to go to work for a living

Is this almost always arrogant posturing disguised as "stick it to the man" rebellion?

What are the better examples? What are the most egregious?

There are a few of these, but I'd say Blur's 'The Great Escape' turns this into a concept album

The Guess Who's "Bus Rider"--definitive, although too condescending for a lament.

Speaking of concept albums, The Kinks’ Soap Opera is mostly this.

Given that Guess Who did "American Woman", it's probably sarcasm in that lazy hippie way that's on too many records.

I think we should be glad that most of us were babies or not even born in that era.

Ray Davies has shitloads of songs about the stupid little guy ("Shangri-La").

Synchronicity II is an obvious choice here.

'Salt of the Earth' by The Rolling Stones

Does "A Day in the Life" count? "Eleanor Rigby"?

I mean Synchronicity II is a banger but it's so fatalistic. I'm never sure if I should jam or revisit a really bad (belching smoke) memory.

A lot of the Springsteen catalog, obviously. Not always persuasive, although "My Hometown" and "The River" are pretty great portraits of '80s malaise.

disagree for the most part re: the great escape, the characters are mainly proxies for Damon, who was clearly not in a good place (Top Man / Charmless Man / Ernold Same are the exceptions and two of those are hardly humdrum little people)

Weekender by Flowered up, also a banger but

Weekender, fuck off
Fuck off and die I'm hating you

lol c'mon now

Speaking of concept albums, The Kinks’ Soap Opera is mostly this.

Soap Opera is like a critique/parody of this trope, at the same time as being an example of it, which may make it less obnoxious or even more obnoxious depending on your taste.

Mr Sheep by Randy Newman is another parody of this type of thing, the rockstar sneering at the 'straight' guy.

Lots of Talking Heads songs cover similar territory, big city hipsters and artists vs small town ordinary folk, but I think Byrne has a more complicated/ambiguous relationship than the average sneering rockstar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1V7fYeBAkc

some of the Paul McCartney songs about humdrum little people feel like laments for the ordinary life he never got to live on account of becoming a rich rockstar

Springsteen always feels empathetic not condescending

A lot of the Springsteen catalog, obviously. Not always persuasive, although "My Hometown" and "The River" are pretty great portraits of '80s malaise.

Is it different if the writer themselves come from a working class background? I was thinking of a lot of country music, where the songs may be about mundane drudgery or whatever but that's almost a badge of honor. Like, Garth's "Friends in Low Places," he (the character) is *proud* of where ("low places") he's from. In the case of Bruce et al., those chroniclers of regular folk, it's not a source of pride, per se, but he's empathetic. Most of the examples given so far have been somewhat snide, satirical or mocking.

jinx!

you said it much better, but yeah.....Springsteen generally writes in first person also might be a difference

XTC - Day In, Day Out

Coincidence or no that lots of the examples so far are British?

Black Flag - Clocked In
Superchunk - Slack Motherfucker

There we go. USA! USA!

Of course, not sure those bands count as rich rockstars, and it's more in the mode of punk protest. (See also: "Career Opportunities," etc.)

The Replacements' "Waitress in the Sky" sort of splits the difference.

XP - very true!

I suppose all of Quadrophenia would count

I'm wary of any self-appointed voice of the working class who has never filled out a job application or been forced to buy groceries at a Dollar General, let alone one who holds deeds to multiple palatial estates. This goes for filmmakers and authors, too.

Black Flag were sleeping on floors and barely eating

The indie rock songs about shitty jobs are autobiographical usually

xpost I feel like this is going to get pretty reductive and dumb pretty quickly

like how many years of your parents' W2s do we need to see?

also we are mixing up middle class, working class poor, and the declining working middle class

Yes, "Soap Opera", for instance, is not really about the working classes - neither is "Shangri-La" for that matter.

... certainly much less working class than Ray Davies' background!

wasn’t Damon just ripping off Ray Davies?

Figure the Flowered Up song was punching up against Acid Teds and the like?

yeah it's definitely not a rich rockstar perspective and maybe it was punching up in its own way but i feel like there's an element of scorn for anyone unfortunate enough to have to have a 9-5.

sleeping on floors and barely eating

in a restaurant, in a West End town

'Salt of the Earth' by The Rolling Stones

― Ward Fowler, Tuesday, 20 February 2024 13:45 (three hours ago) link

This song has always felt a bit mean-spirted to me, probably cuz whenever Jagger thinks he is doing "earnest human sympathy" it reads as sarcastic

The thread said "people who work for a living".

Besides he's paying for a TV and a radio on credit.

Is owning a house not "working class" now?

This song has always felt a bit mean-spirted to me, probably cuz whenever Jagger thinks he is doing "earnest human sympathy" it reads as sarcastic

― chr1sb3singer,

The verse:

When I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and black and white
They don't look real to me
In fact, they look so strange

On paper it looks mean; when Jagger sings it he's like Bowie a few years later singing "Sweet thing, you're born once again for me." They sound like aliens legit fascinated by what they see.

Jagger's sarcastic on stuff like "Far Away Eyes" though.

Lots of songs where a rich Country star talks about how cool it is to work on a farm

More Jam: Smithers-Jones, Man in the Cornershop and of course: "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" by The Jam - What Does It Mean?

i'm more annoyed where the songs valorizing the lives of the humdrum little people who have to go to work for a living, so noble and virtuous

"chamber of 32 doors" by genesis springs to mind most immediately

Well, tbf, that is sung in character, isn't it? I would think Rael would rather trust a man who works with his hands. Not that I have any idea what's going on, plot wise, by this point!

I guess there might be songs where Paul Simon does this with the most obvious one being The Boxer, but to be fair those lyrics are amazing.

I think Jagger is consciously roleplaying as a middle class revolutionary in "Salt", just like in "Street Fighting Man" really ( I don't buy "poor boy" as a economic signifier); he'd obviously been reading up on world revolutions (viz "Sympathy's" lyric), so he's explicitly writing from that pov. Doesn't mean the main verses aren't heartfelt (if corny when you realise the cosplay pov), and Keith sells the first verse remarkably well.
But yeah, the disgust breaks through like it did for certain French revolutionary leaders.

Paul Weller wrote a bunch of these. The one that leaps immediately to mind is "The Planners' Dream Goes Wrong." Oh, and I suppose "Man in the Corner Shop," which, tbf, is a great song.

Is Taking Care of Business one of these?

To be fair, the core message of "Takin' Care of Business" is, quit your lousy job and join a band. I don't see it as derogatory so much as aspirational.

"Workin' for a Livin'" by Huey Lewis fits. Though Huey wasn't actually rich yet when they recorded it.

Is owning a house not "working class" now?

When was it working class?

XP "Couple Days Off" from '91 then?

Does "Luxury" by The Rolling Stones count?

"Money for Nothing" is pretty much this, inverted but the sentiment is the same aiui

he's basically saying these little people are too basic to appreciate how much work he puts into his craft, right?

Bowie's 'Hours' LP has got a bit of "hey what if I was just a normal guy" stuff on it - eg Thursday's Child

Bowie further expanded on the song, revealing that it was about "somebody that maybe felt that he'd achieved anything that he was ever going to achieve in his life and that the way forward looked as bleak as much of his past had done.....until it was changed by meeting this particular person that he falls in love with. So it's like a glimmer of salvation in his own life"

Like I don't think it is meant to be sneering/judgemental - if that is the thrust of the thread - but inevitable there is going to be something a bit tone deaf about the fella with the supermodel wife and the 'pleasure dome' in Mustique making up little stories about Imaginary Dave from Stechford.

Well, tbf, that is sung in character, isn't it? I would think Rael would rather trust a man who works with his hands. Not that I have any idea what's going on, plot wise, by this point!

― Paul Ponzi

my understanding of the plot of the lamb is that a lamb lies down on broadway and then rael winds up in a cage and then he has unsatisfying sex and then he has sex that is good but somehow awful at the same time and then there are a couple guitar solos and then he gets his dick cut off

and frankly "chamber of 32 doors" doesn't fit very well within that narrative

The Fall - Container Drivers

some of the Paul McCartney songs about humdrum little people feel like laments for the ordinary life he never got to live on account of becoming a rich rockstar

"on my way to work" (from 'New') is exactly this

Come to think of it, "Man in the Corner Shop" is about how everyone envies everyone else's life.

Blur’s Fade Away is properly unsettling. The whole album has that vibe through it but that one is the stuff of nightmares. But yeah I guess it’s more about lower middle class working life than working class people. ‘Their birth had been the death of them, it didn’t really bother them.’

The Fall - Container Drivers

Not sure about this one. MES wrote it from his experience of working as a shipping clerk in Salford Docks. It's more reportage than anything.

Come to think of it, "Man in the Corner Shop" is about how everyone envies everyone else's life.

Read this as, "Man in the Corner Shop" is about how everyone envies everyone else's wife. A song I wouldn't have minded hearing.

xp MES also not exactly a rich rockstar, especially so in 1980.

Indeed!

When I started this thread, I didn't strictly have "working class" in mind, rather that trope where the rockstar sings about what they imagine "ordinary" life must be like (and invariably how sad and miserable it must be to live in the suburbs and have a day job or whatever).

Wuth Paul McCartney, things like Eleanor Rigby likely do fit "All the lonely people, where do they all belong?"
But also you get stuff like Penny Lane and a number of others that paint a cheerier picture of everyday life.
My understanding is that Paul came from a fairly working class background as it is, so these songs don't strike me as especially condescending

Thing is though, whatever their backgrounds, guys like McCartney and Ray Davies (and Davies' background was considerably more "working class") have been working musicians since they were teenagers and have barely done a "proper job" in their lives.

Another Jam one in 'Just Who Is The Five O' Clock Hero?'

with paul what i think of is stuff like the bridge of "a day in the life", where to me there's a real contrast between what that means to john and what that means to paul - "found my way upstairs and had a smoke and somebody spoke and i went into a dream". what kind of smoke? in the acetate he "found his coat and grabbed his stash" and, i mean, we are talking _paul mccartney_ here.

but there's this tension in which he tries to be productive and has this idea of "ordinary life" which is at odds with his apparent desire to be constantly high. that's not a criticism by the way. i used to be more critical of that, but more and more "constantly high" seems like a pretty viable way to live. maybe i'm overly sympathetic to rich rock stars, maybe i'm reading too much into it, but i can see coming at it from the perspective of "i nearly got killed by ferdinand marcos last year because i didn't go to one of his stupid fucking parties, christ almighty i wish i could live an ordinary life".

I dug out The Great Escape this morning. There are a great many songs lamenting the lives of, if not the working class then certainly the suburban lower middle class of the time, while also struggling with the fashionably rich millieu Blur had just found themselves thrust among.

In the world of Damon's character songs, ordinary people are a throng of sexually and vocationally dissatisfied drones yo-yoing to-and-from their semi-detacheds to their button-punching city jobs, then going home to blankly stare at the telly, dreaming of holidays and lottery wins while their partners go out and have affairs.

The More Specials influence gets clearer each time I listen to this album, but the Specials' brand of kitchen sink cynicism seems to come from lived experience as well as things like British new wave cinema.

I would be surprised if Damon and Co had ever really had much first-hand experience of the kind of lifestyles they were singing about on these songs before finding success in pop. These stories are more likely taken from Damon's idea of what everyday people get up to.

But that album was likely written at a time when Blur were transitioning from being a successful indie band to legitimate famous chart toppers, so you also get Country House and Charmless Man which coruscate the nobbier end of society. The difference being, I suspect, is that these are based on real people Damon has met as opposed to literal stereotypes

wasn't Country House about the boss of their record label?

(I just read that the other day while reading something about Teardrop Explodes)

Yes it was about David Balfe, whereas Ernold Same is about a Reginald Perrin type caricature

Was that not Tracy Jacks

Thing is though, whatever their backgrounds, guys like McCartney and Ray Davies (and Davies' background was considerably more "working class") have been working musicians since they were teenagers and have barely done a "proper job" in their lives.

― The British Boy of Film Classification (Tom D.), Wednesday, February 21, 2024 9:55 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I like that when McCartney did have a proper job for 5 minutes he's immediately put on management track. I 100% believe he has sit around and wistfully thought about being a coil-winding executive living in the suburbs.

Xp true, Damon clearly a big fan of the show

I think the songs on The Great Escape are mostly about Damon's own life as a pop star, but expressed through songs about Reggie Perrin style middle class suburban commuter types - I remember reading that Fade Away was about him and Justine Frischmann's relationship becoming strained as they were both away on tour all the time, "when he's in, she's out".

wrt working class vs middle class, the type of thing Dog Latin is describing here seems like something where the humdrum little person is often implicitly a bowler hat wearing, briefcase and umbrella carrying type, especially given what people were saying about a lot of the examples being British? The little dull lower-middle class man type is maybe a more important cultural figure over here than in the states?

Xp In fact Colin Zeal, one of Albarn's early character songs, that got me thinking about this first. "Looks at his watch / He's on time yet again / He's so pleased with himself..."

Imagine being on time for things, lol

Ray Davies also seemed to be using his songs about these types as metaphors for his own disillusionment with being a pop star, songs about people living a relatively happy successful life who still feel unfulfilled. I think it's similar to a vibe you get in lots of 60s and 70s comedy, Reggie Perrin already mentioned, but also Hancock, some of Monty Python:

"It's the old stockbroker syndrome, the suburban fin de siecle ennui, angst, weltschmertz, call it what you will...to be blunt, your cat is in a rut"

Ray Davies hardly lived the typical life of a rockstar at the time. Two Sisters is another metaphor comparing his lifestyle to Dave's

The More Specials influence gets clearer each time I listen to this album, but the Specials' brand of kitchen sink cynicism seems to come from lived experience as well as things like British new wave cinema.

Obviously there are a lot of forces pulling in different directions in the Specials that mitigate this, but imo you can read Dammers early on as a middle-class scold (especially towards women). Son of a fairly senior churchman!

punk rock style van touring or playing three sets a day like the Beatles did is hard work

Being in any band can be hard work but it's not the same kind of work as those humdrum little people who have to work for a living.

I listened to The Great Escape again, as remembered it's a deeply sad and weird album.

Stereotypes - Yeah this a snooty, condescending song, fair enough!
Country House - I know it's about Balfe, but imo this ridiculous song is just a massive distraction constructed to hide "blow, blow me out, I am so sad, I don't know why" in plain sight.
Best Days - just undisguised existential despair.
Charmless Man - About an unpleasant posh man that Damon hates, generalised but suspect he had someone in mind
Fade Away - Bleak look at the tension between the push of a failing relationship and inertia caused by hopelessness, clearly about Damon and Justine
Top Man - Character study of exactly the kind of twat who became Britpop's core audience from this point onwards
The Universal - Think Damon had just read Brave New World lol
Mr Robinson's Quango - Character study of a lazily drawn character in a sitcom, embarrassing.
He Thought Of Cars - Think Damon had just read some J. G. Ballard lol
It Could Be You - Damon doesn't like the national lottery, fair enough
Ernold Same - This is the one song on the LP that fits the description perfectly.
Globe Alone - Character is just a stereotype created to criticse lad culture
Dan Abnormal - Clue here is in the fact that the name is an anagram of "Damon Albarn"
Entertain Me - A song about ennui and despair, only a vague hint of a character here, also suspect that this lyric is co-written by Graham as it fits his later songs about alcoholism.
Yuko & Hiro - "I never see you / we're never together" - the moment Damon gives up on the character portraits.

TGE is deeply sad. A lot of it comes off as cynical, but I don't know if that's the intention. I think it comes from a place of misplaced empathy, "I'm sad and lonely, but how can I transpose this into colloquial settings?" perhaps...

Best Days - "Cabbie has his mind on a fare to the sun / He works nights but it's not much fun / Picks up the London yo yos / All on their own down soho"

Country House - yes, this song would be nothing without the "Blow, blow me out" counterfoil

Fade Away - Their most Specials-y song and yes, an allegory about his own life, but still dressed up as a story of suburban ennui. Genius says of the song: "A story of a newly-wed couple, who spend their lives doing mediocre long-shift jobs that leave them both dissatisfied. They no longer spend time together and watch themselves grow older whilst they work themselves to death.", which is the core sentiment of TGE

Mr Robinson is so embarrassing, like really really poor and amazing that it was even allowed on the album.

He Thought Of Cars - again, I always read it as a kind of suburban ennui mixed in with some proto-OK Computer apocalyptism. Maybe not outright "humdrum little people" but that's the image that it conveys - all the people, so many people, all going hand and hand to their doom

Yuko & Hiro is basically all the above but spiced up by making the characters Japanese

Fountains of Wayne is very much this, they literally have an album called Welcome Interstate Managers

Mr Robinson's Quango - Character study of a lazily drawn character in a sitcom, embarrassing.

the corny sitcom characterisation is part of the point though, like how The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is to some extent a meta-comedy about a man trapped in a crap 70s sitcom with all these stock sitcom characters, and how real people find themselves becoming stock cliched sitcom types who talk in catchphrases, and when you try to escape and live an 'authentic' life you inevitably fail and just become another kind of cliche. Like 'Stereotypes' is lamenting/lampooning this tendency in his own songwriting to focus on these lazily drawn sitcom characters, but the horrifying truth is that the real world is full of lazily drawn sitcom characters and that you are probably a lazily drawn sitcom character yourself at the end of the day.

the feeling I have here is that Damon was just so into the habit of making character songs that he did it as a reflex, the cab driver in Best Days is abandoned immediately, the couple in Fade Away are barely drawn, Yuko & Hiro are nothing more than a strained metaphor. all the time he's trying to express his unhappiness, but he's scared of exposure.

Would pinpoint the moment he drops all of this as the b-side St. Louis, which is not an amazing song but compelling as you can hear them just giving up.

That first Bruce Hornsby record has a few iirc. Every Little Kiss, The Long Race, the title track and so on.

xp Oh sure, definitely. It's multifaceted, real life reflecting on his inner life reflecting on an imagined reality (or something).

"When he looks at her, without looking at her, speakinng the driest of words, with his mind on what's on the telly", it's just so miserable

Ray Davies hardly lived the typical life of a rockstar at the time. Two Sisters is another metaphor comparing his lifestyle to Dave's

― PaulTMA

i tended to take it as being about their actual sister, the one who lived a bohemian lifestyle and gave ray his first guitar and died young... not as a result of her bohemian lifestyle as best i can tell, but god knows i was taught plenty of horror stories about the dangers of living a bohemian lifestyle (and as it turns out a lot of those stories were true, they just missed out some pretty important stuff), so i can see ray davies interpreting it that way

that said davies does rather strike me as a sort of rock star pj o'rourke... no, perhaps more of a rock star g.k. chesterton. i don't know if ray davies is actually catholic, but i do think he'd make a fine british catholic intellectual

as far as mccartney... i can't comprehend the insane levels of privilege mccartney has had in his life. more comprehensible to me is how hard it is to have to, in a sense, stealth, which mccartney has had to do for most of his life... i can't remember what thread, but i think someone mentioned that nowadays he probably _could_ go out and take the subway without being noticed, which just wouldn't have been possible before.

he _probably_ could. no way to know for sure, really.

but what's he gonna do? whine about being famous? talk about how "genius is pain" or some shit? world's tiniest fuckin' violin there, sir paul.

xp I think there's some half digested 90s pomo stuff about barriers between reality and media breaking down, but most of the songs on The Great Escape are really about loneliness and being unable to connect with other people in an authentic unmediated way, so it makes sense that the characters he describes come across as indistinct and poorly realized

I thought this thread was in re the Residents

"Two Sisters" is usually considered to be about Ray and Dave, I don't know whether Ray said as much, but there could be elements of his actual sisters' lives. He had plenty of sisters to chose from!

I hate to mention him at all and offhand I can't think of any examples but Zappa is almost certain to have done this I would have thought.

I feel like Zappa spent more time deriding the self-styled bohemians who deride the normies than deriding the normies themselves, but he probably derided the normies too?

he only derided people he thought were pathetic morons (everyone in the world apart from himself)

This here song might offend you some.
If it does, it's because you're dumb.
That's the way it is where I come from.
If you been there too, let me see your thumb.
Show me your thumb if your dumb.

Hey now, better make a decision.
Be a moron, and keep your position.
You oughta know now, all your education,
Won't help you no-how.
You're gonna wind up workin' in a gas station.
Wind up workin' in a gas station.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FRAeFyBX1w

Feel like Roger Waters has probably been guilty of this vibe but can’t think of a specific song, I guess more the career-long tendency to pontificate on human failing while being obscenely rich and also a seething tangle of neuroses

Corporal Clegg has a touch of it, I think that's one of the first songs he wrote for PF

haha I'd never seen the Mr Wells sketch