So I’m married to a person who grew up in Canada’s folk scene, and we often talk about folk music as a genre. I was cranky about the way that people tend to slap an “alt-folk” label on folk because they assume true folk is a dead genre, and I got thinking and went: what is a dead genre, anyway?
T chirped “sea shanties!” and then added “not that you can’t compose a new one, but it’s not in conversation with other songs that are being published at the same time, it’s only in conversation with other songs that have been written long before.” It’s important to know, in this conversation, that Tay grew up around Stan Rogers’ family and therefore knows damn well that you can write a song in the modern era that everyone assumes is a hoary old traditional: Rogers wrote “Barrett’s Privateers” in 1976 because he wanted to sing lead in a sea shanty and there weren’t any in existence that had a baritone singing lead.
No, seriously. And now there are lots and lots of people, less than fifty years later, who think that Barrett’s Privateers is a couple hundred years old and has Always Been Here.
So I started thinking about dead genres, and it occurs to me to ask: why is the sea shanty largely dead? Or rather, actually, why is the work song, which is the larger category of music that sea shanties are a subset of, largely dead? Why don’t we sing work songs anymore when we’re working? Stan Rogers wrote the “White Collar Holler,” of course, and the premise of that song is indeed the notion of making a work song for office work, but I can’t imagine anyone actually signing it at the office as they go about their work. For one thing, I code quite a bit at my day job, and the speed at which I code doesn’t depend at all on what the people around me are doing; indeed, trying to match my speed to theirs would probably make us all less efficient.
Tay’s theory is that industrialization killed the work song in the West (they pointed out to me very explicitly that the idea isn’t actually dead world-wide), especially as work became more cognitive for many people and less reliant on keeping time with the people you’re working alongside. After all, work songs are most popular when the most efficient way to work is to keep pace with everyone at the same time, so you’re neither too fast nor too slow, and you’re all working at parts of the same tasks that rely on other people’s tasks to keep going without building up too much of a deadlock at any one part of the process. So much of work for so many people today is more like piecework than making things on an assembly line, and like piecework, it’s so much easier for our employers to encourage us to take the work home and keep making as many pieces as we can before we fall over and collapse… or else it’s service work, and you can’t be singing at service work, you won’t be free to quickly respond to clients and adjust your tasks to their needs.
I suspect that’s not entirely it, though, because assembly line manufacturing work isn’t actually dead in the West, not even close, and the work song is still gone from our halls. Tay pointed out that OSHA and hearing protection make it more difficult in many of those jobs to be connected to other workers and keep time on the song, and I think there’s definitely an element of truth to that, too.
But I think the death of the work songs go even deeper than that. See, work songs didn’t completely vanish as work became less dependent on keeping time together. They just turned into songs about the condition of working, and from there they turned into songs about unionization, workers’ rights songs, like the ones the Wobblies used to great effect in the 20s. And that happened in response to managers and bosses who see singing and talking and responded by trying to control workers and make that shit stop. Some of that is about controlling unionization but some of it is about control, full stop: pretending to oneself that workers only really exist while you pay them as cogs that produce labor, and anything else they do is a distraction from the labor you pay for.
Why is it that we don’t have modern work songs for Amazon workers? There are enough of them, after all, their very boring and physically demanding jobs depend on keeping time together, and everyone’s working together in a relatively quiet environment. I’ll tell you: it’s because Amazon views interactions among its workers as a threat and bans workers from talking to one another or listening to music while they execute their shifts.
We lost the work song, I think, because we gained bosses that see the work song as a threat instead of an intrinsic part of keeping the work force from getting bored and stale and tired and making mistakes. In a real way, killing the work song is a decision you make if you don’t understand the value of the work song to the workers themselves: it makes the work less boring, so you stall out less, and it reminds you you’re all doing this together, and it keeps you all in time. The action of singing is valuable. But if you’ve never sung while you worked collectively on a project, you might not know that, and if you think in terms of zero-sum losses, the song becomes a waste of good breath you’re paying for at best and a threat of insurrection at worst.
And it’s very interesting thinking about the labor conditions on a spaceship that might bring such songs back again as useful aids to coordinating the labor of monitoring and running the ship. Or even, for that matter, coordinating the labor of other tasks in a spacefaring economy. Warframe’s “We All Lift Together” is one of these, of course. Surely there have to be others?
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