Abuse of the American Working Class Depicted in Contemporary Folk Music
The Crane Wives are a Michigan-based band. Their music is defined by a folk tang and cunning lyrics. Over the past two years, they have had an insane increase in popularity, with their most popular song, “Curses”, getting over 25 million streams on Spotify.
As an avid listener, I find that their music can be split into one of two storylines: escaping soul-sucking, unhealthy relationships or defending the American working class. In the latter, the band often tries to point out the abuse of honest workers by conniving, snake-ish higher-ups.
In some of these such songs, the band analyzes the expendability of American workers, especially minimum or low wage laborers. The song “Down the River” references America's shameful past and connects it to the current relationship between employee and employer.
The phrase “down the river” is a symbol of profound betrayal, as it references selling a slave further south, to crueler plantations and increasingly fatal working conditions that made slaves more expendable. The song doesn’t shy away from the history, leaving the main lyric “you can [sail/sell] us down the river” unclear between sail and sell. The band compares an abusive boss’s mistreatment of their workers to slaving away for a master who would condemn them to a worse plight for their own profit.
The song itself is a question to the boss, about what they'll do in the aftermath of their abuse. The band speaks as a group, signifying a worker-base under this one higher-up, by defining a singular “you” and a collective “us”. The band highlights the habits of their figurative employer, claiming they’ll skip town, “high-tail it”, burn bridges, and save themselves. They’ll move on, “forget about the things [they]’ve done” and hide their “skeletons” while the narrators are left to deal with the damage. The song notes that the person in power will continue the pattern of abuse on the next “unsuspecting fool” like a cruel machine, treating workers like expendable pawns and leaving a trail of broken lives with no remorse. The powerful only serve to advantage themselves by dehumanizing their employees, by taking their lives as a sunk cost to benefit a business, customer, or employer.
In other songs, the Crane Wives employ analogies that show the divide between the wealthy and the working man. Notably, in “The Hand That Feeds”, they employ a hand as a synecdoche for ‘the man’. The hand acts cruelly towards the “good men” that are “chained” to their work “like hounds”. They invoke the “great American ruse” and accuse ‘bootstrapping’ narratives of turning the free man into the rich man’s dog. The singer tells of her father, “a howling man”, who warns young folks not to work their whole lives, not to waste their dreams, and instead appreciate the freedom from “the rich man”. The narrator of the song has become disillusioned by the American dream after seeing the generational effect it has on the world around her; a world where one must slave away for the man rather than feel alive. The song itself is a testament to resistance against the average job, where the band has the freedom and control over their careers as musicians that their working class parents didn’t have.
One might say that the “American ruse” is worthwhile because the band is now able to express themselves creatively after their parents built a life for them. They might think that wealth and opportunity is accrued gradually, generation by generation until our next generation can truly enjoy the thralls of life.
I disagree. The sacrifice of the present generation, of the present moment, is much more important than the uncertain future. It is more important to be free and harbor no regrets than to grind through the work day and pray for the elusive concept of retirement to relieve you in 20 years. We cannot live vicariously through projected happiness. This version of preparing for the future serves to entice workers to work harder for no personal benefit and instead, for the companies who place no value on the individual.