Merry Go 'Round by Kacey Musgraves

Lyrics

Why This Song:

Many Americans are nostalgic about small town life, and music sociologists like the late Richard Peterson make compelling arguments that the Nashville country music industry maintains and reinforces this nostalgia by selling poor, rural, white Americans an overly-idealized façade of itself. However, country music is just one of many cultural (and also political) forces achieving nostalgia by celebrating small towns as “safe spaces” or the remnants of a bygone era; tight knit communities whose morality and traditions provide security against the increasingly ugly and rapidly changing world around them. Thus, Kacey Musgraves’ “Merry Go ‘Round” is a unique pop country music song because it highlights many of the problems small towns face now that 30 years of de-industrialization turned many rural communities into depots of rural poverty. Bucking country music tradition, Musgraves sings of pressures to marry young and go to church not because of belief or faith, but because not doing either would be unthinkable. She also sings of the ways others “distract” themselves with drugs, booze, sexual promiscuity, and even cosmetics that metaphorically cover-up the ugliness. However, the main metaphor of the song is a “Merry Go ‘Round,” highlighting how because of the nostalgia covering up the challenges many small towns face in our post-industrial world, many young individuals hop on the ride without fully realizing where it goes, and what it entails.

By:

Jason T. Eastman

What it’s Like by Everlast

Lyrics

Why This Song:

A core premise behind Mead’s theory of the self is how other people and their perspectives are important to socialization and identity. As children, we learn to take on the role of others in order to anticipate people’s actions during interactions; then in later life, we often try to see the world from others’ vantage point because their perspective helps us better understand our own selves via self-assessment. Of course, not all “roles” are equal, as there are certain “roles” we would rather not fill like being homeless, a pregnant teen, or addicted to drugs. This means we often feel no reason take on the roles of undesirable others because we avoid interaction with stigmatized folks (e.g. we don’t need to anticipate their actions), nor do we particularly care what the downtrodden and disposed think of us. In this song Everlast describes this resistance to taking on the roles of the shunned, revealing how the people who are most in need of compassion and understanding are the least likely to get it because few are willing to try and understand What It’s Like to be them.

Submitted By: Anonymous

American Pie by Don McLean

Lyrics

Why This Song:

Generations are loosely defined by grouping people a particular age range. Yet, more important than actual birth dates is the sharing of significant generational events that transform the entire world. The “Greatest Generation” is defined by their overcoming of “The Great Depression” and victory in the “The Great War.” Media communications mean subsequent generations are largely defined by single events; most “Baby Boomers” remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated, “Generation Xers” can usually tell you where they were when the Challenger space shuttle exploded and “Millennials” will always share vivid memories of the 9-11 attacks.

Written in 1971, Don McLean’s American Pie is about the transformative events the Baby Boomers experienced towards the end of the 1960s. Teri Hobbs wrote this song “shows a glimpse of how American culture was shocked and then changed by the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King (referred to in the song as the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost). It also speaks to how media began to shape our culture via television bringing everything happening around the world right into our living rooms. We witnessed the Vietnam War up close and personal, the assassinations of the three men mentioned above, the race riots, and much more.”

Yet, the ambiguity of the lyrics is also why this song has been the top of every prom playlist since being recorded; the song is vague enough to speak to every generation, many of which can point to the single moment “when the[ir] music died.”

Submitted By: Teri Hobbs

Don’t Take Your Guns to Town by Steve Earle

Why This Song:

Johnny Cash originally wrote this country-western song about a young boy who tried to become a man by carrying a gun into town as a rite of passage, only to end up in a situation where his very possession of a firearm resulted in his death. Thus, in addition to providing a cautionary tale about how firearms inevitably make any social interaction more dangerous (especially when egos and alcohol are involved), this song also echoes a mass of sociological research that finds many men use their weapons as a way to embody hegemonic masculine ideals—or to feel empowered via a very false sense of security ( Stroud 2012). However, this particular version “Don’t Bring Your Guns to Town” by Steve Earle is especially insightful because an added verse at the end of the song puts this ballad into a modern context by declaring that despite hundreds of years of progress, too many young boys still do not understand that a “gun don’t make a boy a man.”

By:

Jason T. Eastman

We are the World by Michael Jackson

Lyrics

Why This Song:

Georg Lukács wrote about “The Irrational Chasm between Subject and Object” to describe how we often feel powerless to change the world that seems to turn us from acting subjects to oppressed objects. Sociology instructors are reminded of this reification every time a student remarks, “society does this or that.” These statements are so common because it is so easy to forget that We Are the World or that our reality is what we make of it. The diverse voices in the song emphasize how we could alleviate suffering and save lives, but the first step in making those changes is recognizing we have that choice; or realizing that we have the collective power to make a better world.

While this song was originally recorded in 1985 in response the famine in Africa, another version was recorded twenty-five years later after the devastating earthquake in Hati.

Submitted By: Brook Kremer