Is there anything better than having an artist who is only marginally in your peripheral awareness get pushed all the way under your nose, only to have you freak out about how much you’ve been missing?
It’s good to know people like Nyle Bayer (former CMO of Future Proof, current CEO of Up Capital) who can do this for you. Same with Joseph Moore who can match your excitement. I just didn’t know this particular song - from 12 years ago - was even out there, let alone this friggin’ good.
I’ll give you the conversation about it first, but then I have some follow-up notes below. If you haven’t heard it yet, start with Joseph and I breaking down Nyle’s pitch for our “Songs that describe American Life” playlist:
I love a song, as Nyle puts it, that’s a protest of protest songs. Joseph’s exploration of the history of the 3-bedroom home, not to mention him asking when optimism became the counterculture, sets this all up so well. Good and bad turn out to be a matter of framing, and this song folds each into the other.
As I mentioned in the episode, the place my brain immediately jumped to was the Murs song, “Got Damned?” from 2003. In the post 9/11 period, there was a lot of posturing and positioning across the political spectrum, especially with the (traditionally more liberal) arts world. Oh, and note the question mark. It’s very on purpose.
But here comes Murs, not even a NYC rapper, with a line like this. It’s forever burned into my head because it was a moment of everyman honesty. Not unlike what I hear Sandman doing in his song.
Murs says,
Look; I'm not your average rapper talkin shit about the government
Its not that I'm lovin it; it's where I live
They tried to bomb the place where I wanna raise my kids
I dont know what everybody seems to think this is
It ain't a game, there is no reign, they want America crushed
If you don't like Bush, you still dyin with us
That is the most centrist-aware messaging I’d heard in a song in a minute, at that point in life. To reject the extremes, where most of the art normally lives for a statement about the middle, especially in the wake of a terrorist attack, felt jarring.
And then comes this song, which is written after that, after the GFC, but also way before COVID, and the centrist-aware message, again, hits so hard:
This is a crazed, unsafe globe, case closed
Complaining oh so much
Where else do people even think they're owed so much?
We are the 99% locally
We are the 1% globally
Take a trip where women fertilize their ovaries and diagnosis is "hopefully"
It's sobering
Cut the "woe is me"
It's a work in progress and it may always be
But even overseas opportunity is known to be in
There’s no rage-bait in this song, and that’s part of why songs like it don’t spread, or go viral, or get a billion views on YouTube. Joseph put it best in the episode: what gets rewarded gets repeated, and there are no clicks for journalists, no votes for politicians, and usually no bestselling records for an artist saying “ain’t America grand?” We should talk about these songs more.
This is the bulk of the average American’s life in a nutshell. We’re grateful and annoyed at the same time, but that means we’re doing the best we can in a world and system we both expect and accept as imperfect. We want people who are willing to bring the ruckus to try and make it better. We want them to not screw it up OR make it somehow worse, but we also know we don’t want to be those people (re: politicians) because they’re not like us.
It’s a land of tradeoffs with an unusually positive current outcome. We shouldn’t take it for granted. We should take reminders, in songs, in words, in stories, when we can of just how amazing this little democratic experiment has been. I sure hope it doesn’t end in my lifetime.
A+ submission of a song.
ps. Celebrate those indie labels as curators. I owe Stones Throw so much. Like I said (mostly correctly, but let me write it out) Peanut Butter Wolf started the label in part to honor his friend and collaborator Charizma, after Charizma was killed, with no plans to become a giant label, and it grew into the center of a West Coast underground scene that stitched the country together one release at a time.
For an avid underground fan and collector in the 90s and early 2000s, they were incredible. Lootpack and Madlib came out of it. So did Jaylib (the Madlib + Dilla collaboration). So did Sandman’s Hallways, where this song lives. There really was a period of life where I’d buy anything they, or Def Jux, or Rhymesayers would put on just because they put it out and that too is a special, special thing.
Looking back from here, that actually might be the closest tie to the song. Stones Throw respected the system it was part of and built something inside it without trying to topple it over, which is more or less what Sandman does with the country here. Incredible artistry. They know what love is.
