Screaming into a Void

It's no wonder so many people are profoundly lonely and disconnected from their communities when maintaining a social life in what little free time we have is incredibly difficult. If you have kids, a second job, a very long commute, or other responsibilities, it's nearly impossible.

Most of these are actually ballads, not true shanties, but still:

The Senate - Space Shanty

Kristoph Klover - Fire in the Sky

Duane Elms - Dawson’s Christian

Catherine Faber - Providence Skies

Julia Ecklar - Ballad of a Spaceman

Leslie Fish & Ann Prather - Hanrahan’s Bar

Julia Ecklar & Ann Prather - Pushin’ the Speed of Light

Leslie Fish - Ship of Stone

Leslie Fish - Guardians

Leslie Fish - Sam Jones

Vic Tyler - Space Hero

Vic Tyler & Duane Elms - Spacer’s Home

Some of my favorite songs include:

Matty Groves, now with electric violin, about a lute that controls the dead.

Pump Me Boys, now a shanty about keeping the life support systems running on a dying ship.

Gently Johnny, now about sirens in a neo-noir sci-fi city lulling people into complacency.

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.

do stuff while waiting for other stuff

like that sounds intuitive and vague but so much of the day is spent in a period of wait and if you struggle to motivate yourself to do things then this is the best time

waiting for your water to boil? bag up your garbage. waiting for your coffee to drip? wipe down your counters. roommate taking up the bathroom? scoop the cat box. waiting for your food to cook in the microwave? do however many dishes you can while it’s in there. 

“How many chores can I do while the water is boiling for my tea?”

“Can I put away the dishes and wipe the counters before my lunch finishes reheating?”

“Can I sweep the floor AND change the laundry while the dogs are out back?”

Keep up, old man!

Companies are spending millions of dollars to keep themselves from having to cover benefits for their employees instead of spending that money on, for instance, employee benefits.

And they’re doing this at a time when the job these workers do has become the most dangerous for drivers and in the highest demand for deliverers.

Their attempt is so transparently heinous that they had to dispute a neutral description of the proposal.

And their add campaigns are exactly the bullshit Amazon tries to pull, where they have people of color talk about how important their job is or how much “freedom” they need in their work life. If you’ve ever lived in a community with an Amazon warehouse/distribution center, you’d know they regularly chew up and spit out workers in poor and often minority communities desperate for work.

VOTE NO ON PROP 22 in CA

It’s the gig economy corporations fighting hard to have the right to exploit workers and deny them the basic benefits of employment. 

Like, you know, the right to be paid for all the time you spend on the job, not the time you spend doing specific tasks. Like the right to overtime payments. The right to have your employer pay for necessary equipment. (In this case, being paid for gas, car maintenance, insurance, and so on.) 

OR - if this really were “independent contractors just using an app to find clients” - the right to negotiate directly with those clients. The right to set their own rates. The right to discuss the terms of the work - like, agreeing to a delay on one side or the other. The right to build  up a regular clientele. The right to refuse clients without penalty. The right to know the details of a job before agreeing to it. (Did you know that Uber and Lyft drivers don’t know the destination before they accept a job?) 

We can't get rid of child labor, the economy will collapse!

We can't have 8 hour work days, the economy will collapse.

me: okay

friend: i need you to trust m-okay?

Objective just means the claim pertains to facts and knowledge and not to emotions or perception. The claim is about objective reality, even if it’s completely inaccurate.

“This thing is beautiful.” is a subjective assessment. Its “accuracy” is completely up to interpretation and cannot be disproven.