Work All Week

The third single put out by the Mekons is “Work All Week”, an anti-materialist anthem disguised as a love song.  Like “Where Were You”, it’s a song that reveals its true identity after repeated listens (you’ll have to get this song on your own as copyright does not allow me to post the original version, only the 2004 folk reggae version).  Though the song can, at first, seem to be a typical love and marriage tune, upon closer examination it bears that signature post punk cynicism and satire.  In most love songs the object of the speaker is to woo their potential partner, or to express their love/devotion/affection in some way, “Work All Week” shows that love and marriage seem to be impossible without killing yourself trying to make the money to buy the materials which signify happiness.  In a love song the object of the speaker’s affection is a person, in “Work All Week” the object of the speaker’s affection is the objects needed to barter for love.

The songs starts with a ‘70s-sounding “oriental” riff straight out of Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting”, then moves into a lilting chord progression that’s a bit out of time with the drums.  An excellent bass run fills in the simple chord progression and gives a good background to the misleading lyrics.  The refrain of “I work all week” is a constant reminder that most things that the speaker discusses are impossible without constant labour. 

The first lyric is straight forward enough: “I work all week to buy a ring / I work all week / Extra hours to get real gold / I’ll buy you anything / You know I’ll buy you anything / I work all week / Not put off by signs saying sold.”  Love is supplanted with a ring—there’s no mention of who he’s buying the ring for or what the ring symbolizes, the goal of working seems to be the acquisition of a ring made of real gold.  The song is boastful when the speaker says “You know I’ll buy you anything”, as if these possessions are enough, the cost of love is the value of his person.

In 1978 in Leeds, England there were three excellent post-punk groups emerging from a group of friends in an art program at the University of Leeds.  Of course the biggest was Gang of Four, then the catchy and dancey Delta 5, and then there was the Mekons.  As a post punk band they emerged and quickly faded away releasing a series of excellent singles and a couple of inconsistent albums from ’78 into the early ‘80s. Once they disbanded and reformed things were a lot different as they focused on trad folk and soon got into country music where they have stayed until this day. 

As a post punk band, the Mekons were never a success like their compatriots in Gang of Four or, even, Delta 5; they didn’t even put out the consistently good material like their friends, they never even released a decent album. But the singles! The singles were outstanding. Songs like “Where Were You” and “Work All Week” were like amazing ‘76/’77 styled punk with the self

Never Been In a Riot

awareness spawned by the post punk scene. Near enough to punk’s origins to sound exciting, raw and legitimate, but removed, allowing them to stray from spitting political rhetoric.

Their first three singles were an exciting progression from snotty and noisy to more focused and still sloppy punk rock. The first was “Never Been in a Riot”, an off tune, off time, slacker anthem with the memorable lyric: “I’ve never been in a riot / Never been in a fight / Never been in anything / That turns out right”.  As a direct response to the Clash’s suspect “White Riot”, it embodied post punk’s awareness, not to mention its conflict with punk’s original ideals.

The following two singles explored the vulnerability, uncertainty and defeatism first introduced here. Where punk groups were only able to show two emotions: anger and outrage, the Mekons and other post punkers were able to reveal emotions outside of that narrow scope, moving on to often complex and conflicting conditions. Beginning with “Where Were You” and moving onto “Work All Week”, we’ll go through a lyrical exploration of the Mekons’ early singles.

“Louisville is death you’ve got to get up and move, because the death do not improve” – Silver Jews “Tennessee” from the album Bright Flight

In a recent interview I conducted with David Berman, renaissance man of the Silver Jews, he was thinking of changing the aforementioned lyric for the upcoming tour. He also claimed he’s never been able to play it in Louisville, obviously. But this is a lyric that needs to be heard by the people of Louisville – and they need to be confronted with it directly. Mr. Berman beating around the bush is going to do no good as far as a songwriter goes – because during his near two decade career and many one-liners – this is one of the most prominent lines, one which struck home with a lot of people (including myself) in the town.

If you’ve never spent a decent amount of time within the city, than this line may just be another bundle of words that sound meaningful coming out of Berman’s growl. But let me let you in on a little secret – Louisville, as Berman claims, has had a “dark star” hanging over its head for quite some time now. Not quite as bad as it did back in the ‘90s, but it’s still dangling in sight. The town is full of a never-popping bubble of musicians that attract a wider audience for a local show than a national show – some may say this is a good thing, but by alienating themselves from the rest of the musical world, it only hurts a musical community. This mentality has kept a lot of musicians within the city from getting widespread acclaim. The one’s that have made it generally dispersed to outside cities such as Nashville and Chicago to get in with a different crowd of musicians, such as Tortoise and David Berman himself.

With this said, Louisville has somewhat detached of this clique mentality over the past several years, mostly because so many different genres are coming out of Louisville and bands find themselves not working on common ground. The town needs to take to heart Berman’s words and not fall inside the hole they once created.

“Come on Baby Say Bang”
by Jane Vain and the Dark Matter

All You Pretty Boys and Girls are all breaking my heart/ They all look so cool that I can hardly tell them apart/ They’re all looking for a little love, power, and control

Let’s stamp the night with vigor/ Whose guns are bigger?/ You can put yours right between my eyes honey/ If you promise to pull the trigger

There are so many admirable turns of phrase and mood in this song that it’s hard to pare them down to a just a few. The nihilistic confidence of the female narrator seethes with equal parts flirtation and crosshair curses. “Stamp the night with vigor” has to be one of my favorite ways of saying “let’s have a good time” because it’s so territorial and domineering as if to say we should cattle brand the evening so that every claim to joy has our signature at its root. Vigor also sounds like such an aristocratic adjective, reeking of equestrian competition and absinthe poured through a slotted spoon onto a sugar cube. As a curmudgeon, I love songs that manage to be blow out clouds of toxic disdain while keeping the rhythm hip-swiveling, finger popping, the very portrait of antiseptic coolness. I reminded of the Kills in the way that the song’s narrator undercuts each compliment with an insult, noting the beauty of the crowd, the homogeneous, robotic beauty. She also impugns any motives that they might have for being fans in the crowd in the first place, noting that the admiration we have for musicians is just as much love as it is a desire to see them fail for failing to fulfill us as passive participants in the performance. Top that off with some good old fashioned suicidal ideation, in the line begging for someone to show the depth of their bravado by putting a bullet hole between her eyes and you have a track that’s a tangle of seduction, snare and psychosis. For a song that sounds like a lilac strewn stroll through a Renaissance Fair, it is indeed a dark and disturbing world.

Madonna’s “Four Minutes to Save the World”

Madonna: Come on boy, I’ve been waiting for somebody to pick up my stroll.
Timberlake: Well don’t waste time, give me a sign, tell me how you wanna roll.
Madonna: I want somebody to speed it up for me then take it down slow. There’s enough room for both.
Timberlake: Girl, I can handle that, you just gotta show me where it’s at. Are you ready to go, Are you ready to go?

Wow. I mean, really, wow. It’s one thing to watch the insipid video, which has unnerving, tranny vampire visual of Madonna spread eagle on the hood of some luxury brand automobile while the world crumples into a void behind her. There, at least, the viewer is rewarded with a morsel of symbolic truth. When you actually see the lyrics of “Four Minutes” flatly stated, it’s lobotomizing how empty this song is. Even superficially, it’s difficult to press this song for content. Is it simply her Mrs. Robinson pop claptrap, initiating young Timberlake into the Q&A game that is getting her to orgasm? It certainly sounds like she’s the Goldilocks of cradle robbing:  not too fast, Justin, not too slow. That she would connect her sexual gratification to “saving the world” says much about the tired, engulfing narcissism of cobwebbed Mega-Stars. If pop music ever had the kind of urgency suggested by the chorus, Madonna has certainly done her fair share to lesson its cultural impact beyond the fading, cyclical variations of style. But, wait, there’s more:

Madonna: Sometimes I think, what I need is an intervention, yeah.
Timberlake: And you know I can tell that you like it. And that it’s good, by the way that you move, ooh, hey hey/
Madonna: The road to heaven, paved with good intentions, yeah.
Justin: But if I got a night, at least I can say I did what I wanted to do. Tell me, how bout you?

Is this a transcript of their text messages to each other?  Even as traded flirtation, this song sags. It’s actually representative of Madonna in interviews where clichés, or variations of clichés, are supposed to be read with metaphysical weight. “The road to heaven, paved with good intentions” makes absolutely no sense in or out of context in this song, but gives the listener the illusion of wit by inverting a common phrase with a new, but imprecise meaning. Does she mean that Justin’s sexual desire for her will help him achieve everlasting afterlife, even while this song has exactly zero shelf life?  Or does she mean that having good intentions is just as good as doing good works, which would be the first criticism that I would level at her entire contribution to the pop canon. Either way, if the song wanted to be dirty, it would do well to have us not debating heaven’s asphalt. Where is the dirt of this liaison that dallies in abstractions or sideshow references to interventions and theology for dummies?  This entire track seems like an implosion of Madonna’s insecurities about her persona. She wants to be pervasively sexual, but enlightened in a desexualized mother-figure way. She wants to continue to rake in the cash of her image, but wishes to recast herself in this sacralized savior role. In the end, we get a song that’s ostensibly about screwing some young upstart for a handful of seconds in order to save the planet from impending destruction. If only.