Word: pops
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...somehow this 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...
Except in the music of Fountains of Wayne, the New Jersey power-pop band, who are to accountants what Bruce Springsteen is to refinery workers. Their songs probe the hearts of a paper pusher stuck in traffic, a heartbreaker who works at Liberty Travel and a hungover salesman cramming for a presentation. They are very likely the only band ever to have rhymed "making the scene" with "copy machine." FOW's new album, Traffic and Weather, chronicles a flirtation with a DMV bureaucrat and a lonely-hearts tale involving a food-industry lawyer and a teen-magazine photo editor...
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...
...next song goes to Lindsay Lohan,” said Jason Hammel, Mates of State (MOS) drummer, and La Lohan uber-fan. Not a dedication one would expect from indie-pop royalty, but MOS is no conventional band...