Poet and Critic Cynthia Cruz on the Cost of Upward Mobility in the Arts
Cruz considers the melancholia of working-class artists like Jason Molina and Amy Winehouse who find a way into a middle-class world but lose their sense of self.
working class
Eddie Cochran’s Working Class “Summertime Blues” Asks, This Is Living?
Ever get the feeling that the struggle to get by makes it impossible to have the energy or the time to storm the barricades? That's what American capitalism has achieved in 2018: maximum depression. And that's why Cochran's 1958 song of angst plays on to this day.
Without a Net’s Memoirs of Poverty in America Will Haunt You. Let It.
These women are not simply simulating scenes of poverty for the reader; they experienced it and now they own it as one constant facet of their diverse identities.
Fantastic Negrito’s “Working Poor” Is the Soundtrack to Summer of 2016
America’s working poor exist in a shadow cast by the harsh light of prosperity. Fantastic Negrito’s “Working Poor” speaks from those shadows, creates light within that space, and insists on being heard.
‘A Town Called Malice’: What’s Happened to Working-Class Music?
Is it possible that the very idea of the working class doesn't exist in popular music today -- as if it's been erased?
Donkey Kong’s Tie, or the Domestication of the Villain
Donkey Kong's representation as a character and his success as a hero is important because it keys into what we want in an avatar, someone who is responsible, who puts on a tie in the morning, and does the selfless dirty work necessary to get by.