this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Music
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The video directly addresses this, commenting about why regardless of the singers prsonal views, the song is being championed by conservatives and criticized by leftists.
The video describes the rural/urban divide and dicusses how it was explained by Marx and Engels long ago. In doing so, the creator emphasizes the difference in material situations and interests. It explains false consciousness and why the reactionary focus on blaming the poor on welfare is counterproductive for actually solving the issues that the singer is describing. The creator does this not to say that his level of income makes him right, but to highlight the common reasons for this difference.
Where does it do this? I watched a few minutes of the video, and did a quick search over the transcript just now, and saw nothing of that. That would change my opinion of the video a bit; what's the timestamp where he talks about it?
That may be, but I couldn't get past the creator shitting on the rural side of the divide to be able to even make it to that place. The very beginning "a sort of folksy twangy right-wing blue collar government bad taxes bad being 5'3 bad type song" rubbed me the wrong way, since the creator is not at all ignorant about the distinction between right-wing talking points and genuine justified poor-working-white-person anger at the system.
There are a lot of songs that are sort of ignorant-modern-conservative in their message, and they're not popular like this one is. This video also says stuff like "I think the song's success has a lot to do with the vague white appeal of its messaging," which is a master-class in how to subtly bring an 100% implication of racism into the issue while having total plausible deniability on the idea that that's what he was saying. When he started singing the lyrics himself in a mocking tone of voice I completely tapped out.
Try flipping it around: Say that someone wrote a really hard-hitting song about how unjust it is that police in the US commit ready violence against black people, and that song got really popular. Then say that someone from the right made a Youtube video singing the lyrics in a mocking tone of voice and talking about how he thinks the real message of the video is that people should be able to shoplift and not get punished for it. Would you like that video or agree with its message?