The Politics of Not Working, in Song

Hey anybody here remember the Wham Rap?  Is this song for or against leaning on welfare when you’re young and sexy?  I literally can’t tell.  The lyrics about how people should not do things they do not enjoy, those feel earnest.  But the characterization of the narrator, who advocates living off of welfare programs, is as selfish, looking out for number one.  It’s ironic people see social welfare as greedy when the main reason rich people don’t want to pay a reasonable tax to support society is because of absolutely inarguable baldfaced greed.  People “on the dole” need food and shelter.  Rich people don’t need a second yacht.  They just fucken don’t.  Anyway, dubious politics aside, it’s a bop.  Glad I remembered it exists.

One could make a whole study of references to welfare in music, and what they say about social perspectives.  Roots Manuva had a song called Mind 2 Motion with the line “Social survivor still scratching on, I’ll pay that money back when I get my hit song.”  This is eminently reasonable.  Rely on what you need when you are needy, pay your taxes when you are not.  And yet, I heard that he’s just another boring conservative greedlord.  Unsurprising if true.  One day Biggie Smalls was talking about how he lived in the projects and suffered poverty, feels blessed by his wealth.  The next he was literally saying “fuck the world, don’t ask me for shit.”

Sticking to the UK for another moment, commie rapper Bobbi from QELD and Pavlov’s House reliably hates on working for a living.  Warnings for flashing lights, doom-tinged chorus, and tankie feelz.  Austerity politics will get you feelin’ that kind of way.

The USA has its own communist rappers.  Boots Riley from The Coup is the number one guy on that scene, blowing up the World Trade Center on an album cover before that became unpopular for reasons.  But on the topic of social survivin’, I’d like to quote Killer Mike’s guest rap on The Coup’s WAVIP:  “I’m over here with the welfare recipients, we ain’t ever payin’ but we stay gettin’ shit, I am with the people on the bottom fella, we gon’ riot loot rob ’til we rich as Rockefeller… The one percent better learn this shit is VIP, if we don’t nut up everybody gonna D-I-E.”

There are more low-key ways to say Fuck a Job.  In Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s seminal extremely hateable dogshit buttrock classic “Takin’ Care of Business,” the drunk guy on the mic sez, “If you ever get annoyed, look at me I’m self-employed, I love to work at nothing all day.”  I don’t know why I find that more offensive than intentionally offensive punk rock on the subject.  All he’s saying is “get an easy job.”  Could be worse.  I just don’t like the genre.  Speaking of punk rock on the subject, little known Desperate Bicycles had a song about making rock, with a very likeable message.  Backup vocals by the literal child on the drums.  “It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it.”

As for the intentionally offensive punk rock on the genre, the Dead Milkmen have two strong examples.  Nutrition is an all-around classic, covered by other bands, well-liked, and a good tune.  It captures the vibe of feeling like you were born to work but just don’t wanna, feeling simultaneously petulant and ashamed about it.  A lesser tune with a more didactic message, just literally “fuck working,” is Chaos Theory, from a later album.  “I used to get up and do my job, now I enjoy doing nothing better, I think I’ll go bum around, I think I’ll enjoy this lovely weather.  Maybe some day there’ll be a revolution, maybe some day we’ll have meaningful jobs, until that day I’m gonna be lazy, I’m not gonna be no working slob.  I am the god of unemployment, the antichrist of the american dream, I used to fight for church and country, but now I don’t give into the corporate schemes.”

That’s just being a bitch about it.  Not saying that’s my number, but I did spend a few years on unemployment at one point, and spent a lot of time back then walking around under blue skies.  Like the part in One Bourbon One Scotch One Beer when George’s landlady saw him leanin’ up against a post…  This could go on forever.

–

 

Edit to Add:  How in the fuck did I forget Agenda Suicide by The Faint?  Content Warning:  The Obvious, Generally Grim as Balls.

Crack That Whip

Mano’s new comment policy, hoo-boy!  Glad my own comment sections have been too tame to necessitate that kind of thing, if only because commenting is less frequent here.  Anyway, if you want to say “butts” in four separate comments here, for the moment, it’s allowed.  But I think that’s an interesting idea for moderation; might try a rule like that in the future if I get into a similar situation.

The rule I currently have that is germane to those situations is, “Try to be a little less aggro with each other than you might be on other FTBlogs.  If somebody is being a shit, I’ll probably get rid of them myself.”  Works well enough for the little leagues.

–

Step into the Cipher

Once upon a time, my brother beat me in a rap battle on my own blog, and I just ran out of sauce for it.  But this sucks.  How can I speak with any authority upon this throne of lies?  I have to beat him again.  It looks like a battle of words, but really it’s a battle of whose life has the most hectic crap in it draining our mental resources.

Round two!  And anybody who wants to snatch a crown can do so as well, in the comment section.  Throw down!

Draw down, said Wyatt  Earp
and skin that smokewagon
Little baby get burped
cuz u drank from my flagon
Biting my style just like ya mom’s titty
Now u get kicked out of Paradise City
And welcomed unto the Axl Rose Jungle
I’m Faith No More and you’re Mr. Bungle
Get a piece of these rhymes
For the price that I’m sellin’ ’em
Is kind of a crime
Zero dolla felon ‘n’
You too could be rich like me
If you can rhyme this tight
But can’t be a hot bitch like me
So I bid you good night

–

Creative Mush

Taking a day off work for reasons, might try to get some writing in on Centennial Hills.  Not sure how capable I’ll be; we’ll see.  I’m feeling odd.  Sometimes I feel inspired to create something, specific or in general, but the sauce to actually do that is a whole separate feeling that does not always coincide.  One of the last things I did before I fell asleep was randomly think of an element for a story, but didn’t write it down.  Let’s see if I can remember…

A video game where you can name your enemy, like in Pokemon, and the protagonist as a child accidentally uses their own name, playing the rest of the game opposing their own moves.  Later in life, this connects thematically to something that’s going on in the current story.

Yesterday in the morning I was having some very specific and detailed dream about machinery.  Back up, get out of the way of the guy operating the mechanical arm.  No not there, there.  Now in the back yard the red construction light got broken because the thing fell into it, and it’s your fault.  This morning I dreamed I walked into a part of my house I never use and there was a toilet spewing water like a fountain, and a few other pipe leaks, and have these been going on for months?  Calls to mind a time I dreamed the floor of my apartment was covered with moss and broken boards, and scorpions and eight-inch isopods were moving in and out of the heap at random.

The day before yesterday and the day before that I had slasher dreams.  A hillbilly family like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre was going to kill this trucker, but they were shining him on like, just a minute, gotta do this thing for your truck before we let you drive away.  Gotta chop everybody up and their trucks too.  Heaps of body parts, just another day.

Another recent dream there was some kind of deadly competition with a lady as emcee.  If we play the game right we all fight to the death, but if we defeat the emcee maybe we can leave.  Were we undead in the vein of soulsborne game protagonists?  There was a guy with dwarfism and a lot of guns, to improve his odds of defeating her I traded legs with him so he could get around faster.  Left me with short legs, waiting for somebody else to win.

The RPGs I wasted the most time with as a youth were Palladium books, which are much scorned by most of the TTRPG community these days.  Understandable, but their ads in Dragon magazine circa 1988 always worked so well on me.  I sometimes get curious what people were saying about them online and it ain’t much.  One time when I looked it up on tumblr, I found a person talking about their few meatspace RPG experiences were all with one of those games, either Rifts of the Palladium FRPG.  Whichever it was, they had memorized the rules for a “mystic” character class with a combination of psychic and magic powers.  Recently I thought of that, of the mystic character class, RPGs in general.  What is the appeal in making your own little guys in somebody else’s world?  Like a billion other dorks, I still have an embryonic fantasy RPG of my own laying in docs and on scraps of paper; maybe all of it is still chasing the weird thrill I got off of old Palladium ads.

Been listening to Maharaji’s Seward Park again.  My boyfriend said it’s a novelty song.  The casio dog bark effect?  Come on.  But I say no.  It’s incredibly dated and corny, but for its time, it was a very legit hip hop song.  So cool.  Rappin’ Duke by John Wayne was a novelty song.  Seward Park ain’t that.

Mish mash mush.  These are all things that could be converted into new art, written or visual or something else, a video game, a poem, a song.  Will it happen?  Maybe this post is the closest any of the creative slurry gets to achieving expression.  Almost certainly it will be.  But u kno, all we are is dust in the wind, and our daydreams even more so.  Take it easy.

Peace!

–

Kid Culture

Children have their own culture that, while it can be influenced by adults, runs in parallel to their authority, and is handed down verbally from who knows when.  What dirty rhymes and gross pranks were played at your school?  Thought I’d share one with you from my own childhood in Seattle in the 1980s.  Content warning for misogyny and dookie humor.

Ain’t yo mama pretty?
She got meatballs for her titty
She got scrambled eggs
Between her legs

I took her to a party
She turned around and farted
I asked her why she did it
She turned around and shitted

Ah, those halcyon days.  By all means, in honor of the tribe you left behind upon reaching maturity, dookie up my comments below.
–

Centennial Hills 20

Now that I’m out of material, these updates will slow considerably, but have the newest chonk now, if you please.

Content Warnings:  Vomiting Mention, Heartbreak, Inequitable Class System, Slavery, Dehumanization, Violations of Personal Space, Sci-fi Racism, Violence, Threats of Violence, Murder, Graphic Gore, Drug Abuse, Self-harm, Delusional Fandom Behavior, Abusive Relationships, Weapons.

[Read more…]

This Job I Have

I’ve been workin’ for The Man in social services, in a call center type environment.  That means I’m dealing with people navigating arcane bureaucracies to get the things they require, often in cases of greater need – people with disabilities or generational poverty, senior citizens, etc.  This job is the most intellectually and emotionally demanding work I’ve ever done.  At five years in, I’m better than average at it, but it’s depressing and stressing and just never ends.  Still, one abides.

But my pay rate has stalled.  The first raises you get are substantial, but when the job “maxes out,” the raises are only half that rate.  There are cost of living adjustments, but like the COLA for Social Security, I think it’s tied to the Consumer Price Index, which only includes the cost of groceries – not the biggest cost of living we’ve all been fucked by, the cost of shelter.  Utilities are going up too.

Getting a mortgage might turn out to have been a good idea, but I need to either refinance to a much lower payment, or start making big bucks so I can have a prayer of paying this shit down, and it ain’t looking too good right now.  I thought I’d catch a break on the endless increases in rent by getting a mortgage instead.  But what happened immediately?  The valuation of our property increased enough that the tax hike was almost as bad as the rent increases we’d been trying to dodge.  The other main income in my household is a senior citizen who ran out of steam for her original job and can’t make that kind of money anymore.  If I don’t increase my income dramatically, we’re one bad turn of events from hitting the skids.

But then, isn’t that everybody these days?  I don’t know.  Maybe just everybody I or my boyfriend are related to.

So there are paths to higher pay.  I have reasons why promotion at my current employer is undesirable, but to say more risks saying too much about where I work.  Let’s say those jobs are increasing your demonic rank, but you get even more exposure to what’s bad about Hell.  Best avoided.  I could try to slide to a different employer, but it’s hard to make the time to do that homework, and can I get as much telework as I have now, or will I have to throw away twenty uncompensated hours of my life per week on bus rides?  Also, will the most readily available jobs in my sector contribute in some measure to imperialism and genocide?  Insert ‘it’s more likely than you think’ meme here.

God I keep being tempted to say things that are overly revelatory about where I work.  Somebody stop me.  Anyway, I just gotta sell the screenplay for Gun Lemurs and make a bank fulla money.  Until that day…  Like I said, I’m avoiding doomposts at the moment.  I’m gonna win like Wario.  Just gotta keep making wild-ass leaps of faith, making hairpin turns, pushing harder and closer to the flames than I ever did in my youth.  I’ve always been lucky before, no reason that luck should run out now, right?  I rule.

–

Centennial Hills 19

Got nothing to say today.  I need to sleep like a sunuvabitch.  Zzzzzz.

Content Warnings:  Vomiting, Environmental Despair, Heartbreak, Inequitable Class System, Misogyny, Sci-fi Racism, Sex Work, Violence, Threat of Violence, Surveillance, Abduction, Drug Abuse, Self-harm, Slavery, Delusional Fandom Behavior, Abusive Relationship, Weapons, and Gun Threats.

[Read more…]