Songs about Class/ Class Consciousness

Livin' On A Prayer
Rain On The Scarecrow

american country music to thread...

the who - "the dirty jobs", "helpless dancer"
the animals - "we gotta get outta this place"
the band - "king harvest"
bob dylan - "workingman's blues #2"
duke ellington - "work song"
the faces - "debris"
otis rush - "sit down"

"Pink Houses"

Wham - "Young Guns (Go For It!)"
T Rex - "Ride a White Swan"
Yes - "The Revealing Science of God"
Biz Markie - "Make the Music with Your Mouth, Biz"
Vanilla - "No Way No Way"
Sal Solo - "Poland (Your Spirit Won't Die)"
Ratt - "Lay It Down"
Imagination - "Just an Illusion"

Sex Pistols - "Holidays in the Sun"

Rihanna ft. Jay-Z - Umbrella
Kate Nash - Foundations
Avril Lavigne - When You're Gone
Enrique Iglesias - Do You Know
Hoosiers - Worried About Ray
Timbaland Ft Doe/keri Hilson - The Way I Are
Natasha Bedingfield - Soulmate
Fergie - Big Girls Don't Cry
Lee Mead - Any Dream Will Do
Kelly Rowland Ft Eve - Like This

Everything ever by Gang of Four

One of the key themes of most Oi! acts

"gut of the quantifier" the fall

Derek and Clive's entire oeuvre.

Clash - "Career Oportunities"

The Specials - Rat Race

In Every Dream Home a Heartache - Roxy Music

Tuomas' internet connection must be down ;_;

Does it have to say the word "class" in it, or is any songs about work/getting paid/dealing with a boss/partying when you get off work a song about "class"?

Does it have to have a particular ideology about class consciousness -- marxist or otherwise?

Class is a rock and roll metatheme. Whole careers have been organized around it -- not only the Gang of Four and the Clash, who have been mentioned, but Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger and Huey Lewis and the News (from good to bad to awful) not only wrote about working for a living but assumed that the whole point was to entertain an audience that did. "Maggie's Farm" and "Like A Rolling Stone" and "Street Fighting Man" make no sense without class analysis.

Right now Todd Snider and The Coup and Wide Right write song after song about class, and Aesop Rock and Amy Rigby have done whole albums with class at the center. The skits on Kanye West's Late Registration are about the fraternity Broke Phi Broke -- of which Kanye is, of course, thrown out.

Until quite recently it was pretty much a rock and roll given that rock and roll stood in a class relation to "classical music": it was by and for working people as opposed to that other stuff that took 100 instruments and decades of training.

I must have 1000+ songs about class on my iPod. Here are a few, without repeating any artist I've already mentioned:

Cyndi Lauper -- Girls Just Want to Have Fun
Linton Kwesi Johnson -- What About di Workin' Class?
Red Crayola with Art and Language -- Keep All Your Friends
Chumbawumba -- Tubthumping
Johnny Cash -- One Piece At A Time
Bottle Rockets -- Welfare Music
Kid Creole & the Coconuts -- No Fish Today
Macy Grey -- I've Committed Murder
Michelle Shocked -- Fog Town
Creedence Cleatwater Revival -- Fortunate Son
Patti Smith -- Piss Factory

From the point of view of class consciousness in the political sense, these songs have three different points of view:

1. Working class political solidarity
2. Working class social solidarity (that is, we're done working, now we go have fun)
3. I'm getting the hell out of the working class -- I'm getting paid

Just 'cause it's about class doesn't mean it has class consciousness.

W.O.R.K. by Bow Wow Wow

Thanks for that, Kenny.

I think what i was looking for were songs that explicitly highlighted class and class conflict; songs that point out that objective social relations determine people's lives and attitudes in ways that can't be transcended by 'love' - either romantic love, or some hippy-ish 'we are all God's children' agape. Something like 'We Gotta Get out of this Place' is interesting in this regard; class relations and conflict are localised; getting out will result in the lovers finding a place in the sun for two. As always, Chuck Berry is incredibly clever in this regard; managing to tie really specific situations to that same 'universal' desire to transcend the binds of class (and I guess race). 'You Never Can Tell' with its lovingly rendered fetishisation of consumer durables alongside its message of hope is a prime example, but 'Promised Land' and many others would do as well.

What's rarer are songs like 'Common People' or 'Working Class hero' that point directly at class as an immovable source of conflict and pain, but also as an anchor of identity; pop has always tended more to identify its protaganist as outside of society, 'a bit of a rebel', equally at odds with his or her origins, as with where he or she is headed. Thus, either aspirational escapism or 'Jenny from the Block' kind of sentimental reaffirmation of ones roots are more common than any kind of realism about 'the ties that bind' and as you said, Springsteen for all his faults, is one of the few songwriters to give full weight to the inescapabilty of the social order as a limit and a blight on peoples lives.

The Kinks - Arthur (the whole album)
The Kinks - Muswell Hillbillies (pretty much the whole album)

... and lots of other Kinks' songs

Also, The Fall to thread!

I I I I I'm not your stepping stone
I I I I I'm not your stepping stone

You're trying to make your mark in society...
using all the tricks that you used on me....
You're reading all those high fashion magazines...
The clothes you're wearin' girl are causing public scenes.

I said
I I I I I'm not your stepping stone
I I I I I'm not your stepping stone

Not your stepping stone,
Not your stepping stone..

When I first met you girl you didn't have no shoes...
Now you're walking 'round like you're front page news....
You've been awful careful 'bout the friends you choose...
But you won't find my name in your book of Who's Who!

I said
I I I I I'm not your stepping stone
I I I I I'm not your stepping stone
Not your stepping stone,
Not your stepping stone

what is SO WEIRD about this song is that it comes off like a growl from the gutter, a rage against "high fashion magazines" and "who's who" - but in order for the addressee of the lyrics to use the singer as a stepping stone, he'd have to have been ABOVE her to the extent that he was useful in launching her into that society - the singer is UPPER CLASS and the girl is LOWER CLASS, regardless of the friends she's chosen (even the newspaper reference seems designed to put her in her place; real class isn't publicly traded like the front page of a newspaper, it's discreet)

"Blue Suede Shoes"

should be obvious

there's not a single line in "stepping stone" that suggests the singer is upper class. maybe he's a dj at a local club who introduced the girl to some influential people. maybe he's the bass player in a struggling rock band who the girl liked, even looked up to, when she had no shoes. maybe he's the doorman at the whiskey.

I wuold say the Who's "Substitute" touches on it, as well.

2 more Kinks songs:

"Slum Kids"
"Get Back In Line"

2 More
David Watts
Dead End Street

Blur - Charmless Man

and several others i'm sure. lots more pulp, too - I Spy, for example.

sonofstan, I think these may have the specificity you're looking for:
Who - Bell Boy
Rush - Working Man
Magazine - Model Worker
Alex Chilton - Underclass
Quasi - The Happy Prole

Forgot about 'Underclass' - a long time fave; Saw Quasi once supporting/ backing Elliott Smith and was impressed - what records should I look for?

All I really know of them one show about 5/6 years ago and Featuring "Birds." That includes The Happy Prole and is A+.

in the current/recent hits category:

toby keith, "high maintenance woman"
carrie underwood, "before he cheats"

everly brothers, "man with money"

Sonofstan,

There's certainly a lot of crap ("aspirational escapism") in pop songs ostensibly about class, and I suspect that we have overlapping political and aesthetic interests. For all that, the reason I wrote what I wrote is because I have no idea what to say about "Piss Factory." If you're a class conscious leftist, the song does the opposite of what you want it to do: after "pointing directly at class as an immovable source of conflict and pain, but also as an anchor of identity," it's narrative pushes the heroine out of class consciousness and into what we would probably call Bohemian consciousness: "I'm going to get out of here [New Jersey], I'm going to New York City . . ."

Add to this that, whatever choice she made in her early 20s, Patti Smith has turned out to be one of the more reliable leftists of rock and roll and the question of what constitutes class consciousness becomes more complex.

So while sentimental reaffirmation of one's roots may not be of any interest, political or aesthetic, the "realism" of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" (which appears immediately the devastating "Money Changes Everything" on the album) continues to impress me as I try to figure out what class consciousness is.

Hey also, "This Boy Is Exhausted" and "Everyone Choose Sides" by the Wrens talk about being in a rock band like it's a working class job like any other, which seems a lot truer to most people's experience than your average rock debauchery travelogue.

"Just Got Paid"-ZZ Top

"Just Got Paid" - Johnny Kemp

Kenny,
Oddly enough, I was thinking about another- much lesser - Patti Smith song in my previous post, when i wrote about the protagonist of the classic rock song aspiring to be 'outside of society'. 'Piss Factory' is problematic in the ways you say, but it is radical in that in the detail and unflinching realism of its protrayal of working life, it paints a picture of exactly what is being escaped from, inviting identification from the listener, not with an emotional state, but with an objective state of affairs. We identify with patti's need to escape, not because she is a genius, ready to illuminate boho NY, but because we know if she doesn't, in 20 or 10 or 5 years, she'll be just like them; just like 5 or 10 or 20 years ago they were just like her. They don't hate because she's different and wild; they hate her because they see in her what they lost.

As you say, class is a metatheme of Rock n' Roll, but work - in any kind of detail - is pretty absent; 'too much monkey business' 'Wichita Lineman' 'Workin' in a Coal Mine'..... of the top of my head I can't think of many more songs that describe actual features of a working life.

a very large chunk of bruce springsteen's oeuvre describes actual features of a working life, from looking for a job to cover the rent/mortgage ("atlantic city"), to waking up to the alarm clock, packing a lunch and walking through the factory gates ("factory"), to lugging a firehose up 100 flights of stairs on a sunny day in downtown manhattan ("the rising"). just fer some examples.

Yeah, and there are approx. 1000000 country songs about truck driving.

i'd also suggest that working part time at the five and dime "doing something close to nothing" for a boss who doesn't like your style works as both a specific and universal descrition of the working life. just fer another example from someone else's oeuvre.

well yeah, don't know'the rising', but the other two Springsteen songs describe the circumstances of needing to work or going to work but not, like, the actual work - I take your point about truck driving songs though; 'Mama Hated Diesel' or 'Willin' ' (or Container Drivers!) do go into detail........

Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White

Eddie Cochran's "Somethin' Else" makes love seem as class-determined as any Gang of Four song. It's totally focused on money keeping the things we want out of reach, and it's kind of neat how it treats as fantasy the idea that hard work can help you reach those things ("I'll keep on dreaming and thinking to myself, if it all comes true, man, that's something else"), even as it indulges in that fantasy.

Sonofstan,

I'm new here. Can we branch this and start a companion thread of songs about work? I'd love that.

Kenny

Down in the Boondocks, of course. "People put me down cause that's the side of town I was born in."

Johnny Rivers - "Poor Side Of Town"

Kenny -
Off you go - I started this one, so your turn....

Manics: The Masses Against The Classes

(and a lot of other Manics stuff too)

Divine Comedy: A Lady Of A Certain Age