Word: collars
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...chronically scruffy auteur may play the game tonight and get all tuxed up. But he's still a blue-collar kid from Flint, Michigan - the car town that became a poor town when GM closed many of its plants. A classic entertainer and a professional mensch, he knows how to couch a daunting issue in human terms. In Sicko, as he said at a Cannes press conference today, the larger questions are: "Who are we? What has become of us? Where is our soul...
...love affair has never reached the creative level. We have office sitcoms, office novels and office movies, but where are the office pop songs? Rock music has never lacked for zillionaires to romanticize farmhands and factory workers. But what of the John Henrys plowing sweatily through PowerPoint presentations? White-collar employees, who make up 60% of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are largely absent from pop lyrics, except for novelty songs and minor works. (The Bangles' Manic Monday mainly proves that the songwriter Prince is more convincing on the subject of sex than commuting...
...here: he and co-scribe Chris Collingwood spent years as temps, doing legal transcription and computer programming, respectively. "Work is just what most people do," he says. "Including us." Members of FOW don't lionize work, but they don't condemn it either. Rock bands traditionally write about white-collar work as corrupt (the Beatles' Taxman) or for suckers (Bachman-Turner Overdrive's Takin' Care of Business). FOW write about it the way country and folk singers write about manual labor: as a fact of life. Besides, Schlesinger adds, the life of a nonsuperstar rock band is not that...
Maybe lashing out at the corporate world doesn't work as well in American pop culture because the corporate world co-opts rebellion so well. For businesses from FedEx to CareerBuilder.com there's no better way to reach white-collar workers than with ads that say white-collar workers are idiots. In the TV sitcom The Office, the lousy boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carell), is the one who walks around singing Todd Rundgren: "I don't want to work/ I want to bang on the drum...
...most rebellious thing of all may be to suggest that white-collar workers can be complex, sympathetic, even noble. If this idea hasn't broken through in mainstream pop, there's a market for it on the Internet, that brackish borderland between work and play. Jonathan Coulton went online to release Code Monkey, his Rick Springfield--esque single about a computer programmer who endures the taunts of a dim-witted manager because the programmer is in love with the receptionist. "It's about having an escape fantasy but being unable to act on it," Coulton, a programmer himself, says...