We Can’t Make It Here
We revered the musicians because they spoke the truth when nobody else would. In an election cycle where candidates feel lies will fly, live on on the Web for the biased and uninformed to pick up on and spread, where is the picker telling the truth, for us to rally around?
Nowhere to be found.
You’ve got to sell out, you’ve got to be a whore to make it in music today. It’s a business controlled by fat cats. Get up in the a.m. to call the station, get the hair and makeup charged to your royalty account, that’s the only way to do it. But it’s not.
"We Can’t Make It Here" was written for the 2004 election cycle. But it’s just as relevant today. It’s the third most played track in my iTunes Library. It would be number one if I hadn’t switched computers in the 2006 election cycle and sacrificed my play counts from my old machine.
And when I’ve got more questions than answers, I dial up the built-in playlist and shuffle my 100 most played iTunes tracks. And, in the other room, reading the newspaper, I started hearing a familiar track. Mr. McMurtry’s "We Can’t Make It Here". It felt so right I was motivated to come to the computer and write. I put it on endless repeat. I’ve listened to it a dozen times already.
And then, when I’m referencing Bristol Palin, I hear these immortal words:
High school girl with a bourgeois dream
Just like the pictures in the magazine
She found on the floor of the laundromat
A woman with kids can forget all that
If she comes up pregnant what’ll she do
Forget the career, forget about school
Can she live on faith? Live on hope?
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it’s way too late to just say no
You can’t make it here anymore
Bristol Palin’s mother might become VP. But what about the seventeen year old who makes a mistake and gets pregnant in a land where you can get no abortion. Or, even if she chooses to have her baby. Shouldn’t she have been exposed to birth control advice? Free condoms? Or are she and her baby going to be a drag on society forever? Jesus might help your attitude, but he’s not going to pay your bills. We live in an uneducated country losing steps to India and the rest of Asia as we debate moral issues. Or, are we supposed to believe the Rapture is imminent and it’s all irrelevant?
The billionaires get to pay less tax
The working poor get to fall through the cracks
Hedge funders get their guaranteed income taxed at capital gains rates, even though there’s only risk on the upside. They’ve just got a better lobby than the poor. Bear Stearns collapses, but the rich don’t suffer, they’ve already got their millions. You’re working for a salary, schlepping boxes, and men who dreamed up derivatives backed on sub-prime mortgages, who were in denial of their firms’ financial condition, are being rescued by the government, which won’t give you a handout. You’ve got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. While you go to an inferior school and the scions of Wall Street go to prep schools with every advantage. Taxes must be lowered on the rich just in case you might become so, even though upward mobility is better in Europe than it is in the U.S. The American Dream? A PIPE DREAM!
Some have maxed out all their credit cards
Some are working two jobs and living in cars
Minimum wage won’t pay for a roof, won’t pay for a drink
If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO
See how far $5.15 an hour will go
Take a part time job at one of your stores
Bet you can’t make it here anymore
The record business is not immune. The CEO makes millions, his coterie lives high on the hog and the worker bee gets laid off. We end up with a brain drain in the music industry as a result. Fault the consumer? Fault the CEOs driving this business towards a cliff. But the fundamentals are sound? Tell that to someone paying $4.00 a gallon for gas, paying fees to credit card companies they couldn’t foresee and can barely comprehend. Our country has got problems but neither candidate will speak English. McCain is living in an alternative universe and Obama is speaking in platitudes, waiting for the country to wake up and see the fallacy of his opponent.
It takes just one surgical strike. Just one hit record to make all the difference.
We’ve got a radio industry that only knows how to say no. TV too. Cowered by the candidates, they’re afraid to speak English, afraid to play "We Can’t Make It Here", as relevant today, as fresh today as the day it was cut.
Country radio plays platitudes about home and church, but no amount of praying is going to solve the credit crisis. That’s our country, focus on the irrelevant as the robber barons rip us off behind the curtain.
It may be four years old, but it’s time for radio stations to play James McMurtry’s "We Can’t Make It Here". It’s today’s "Eve Of Destruction".
