History Mixtapes
History Mixtapes explores how music and history intertwine. We will explore how the past can come alive by using music as a primary source, but also think about how listening to music and musical exploration can help us see the past through different lenses and lead us into new ways of connecting. We all tell stories with music: in playlists or mix tapes or other myriad mechanisms. And no one puts their story -- or the past's story -- to the same soundtrack.
History Mixtapes
HISTORY MIXTAPES - Poverty and Homelessness with Dave Hitchcock
In this episode, historian Dave Hitchcock, a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, discusses how his expertise in vagrancy and poverty in early modern England and British Atlantic world use of music, such as broadside ballads, set up his exploration of themes of poverty and homelessness across musical expression. He contextualizes songs reflecting modern urban poverty and illuminates underlying common themes that include individual versus structural explanations of poverty.
For the extended playlist on Spotify, visit https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0sSBtpIEob9cr99jzL1aiS?si=7a186db4bd3d4c7b.
The songs featured in this episode are available as a YouTube playlist.
I'll admit, doing these interviews with historians about how they incorporate music into their work has been eye opening for me. One of the reasons I started this podcast is because I am very interested in what the creative process looks like for historians, especially as I have lost touch with my own wellspring of creativity in recent months. I'm releasing this conversation with Dave Hitchcock as fifth in the series because it provides an excellent transition to my next two part interview with Austin McCoy, which really delves into the personal connections and worldview making role that music plays for us both as historians and as people. But this is actually one of the first interviews I conducted after setting the agenda with Kevin Kruse, which you can go back and listen to in episode one. Dave's exploration of themes of poverty and homelessness through music transcended his own area of expertise in the early modern period to show how using music can be instructive to tell other people's stories and to connect thematically with the past and the present. Through these interviews, I've been able to live a bit vicariously through my guests as they have had their own emotional encounters and rediscovery of long appreciated musical genres, as well as those that may be more forgotten. And in turn, those encounters can remind us of ways to humanistically engage with the people we write about. So my thanks to Dave for helping me to see what might be possible with this podcast. I might be a little starry eyed or incredulous throughout this series, and I've learned so much from these guests. In the show notes, find the link to Dave's extensive playlist that he generously made for this podcast and stay tuned for more History Mixtapes.
Dave Hitchcock:Hi, I'm Dave Hitchcock. I'm originally from Canada, and I currently work in the United Kingdom at a university in Kent, where I teach early modern history. I'm a specialist in the history of poverty, so most of what I work on is what might be described as history from below, of folks who don't often show up in the archive and tries to flesh it out as much as humanly possible.
Kate Jewell:How would you describe your relationship with music in general?
Dave Hitchcock:I've never been one of those people who delved so deeply into the back catalogue of a particular artist or a genre that, that I could be described as a fan of that thing. My musical preferences were really dictated by my mom, to be honest, who herself, she grew up in California in the 70s and then moved to Toronto in the 80s and 90s. So a lot of kind of psychedelic rock in there. My mom loves, and so do I, Motown an enormous amount of Motown in there. I really enjoyed 80s pop. I've gone through folk, I've gone through modern progressive rock, everybody has these phases, right? I definitely had a phase in the early 2000s during university where I just, I'm outing myself here acquired an enormous amount of music for free, so experimented enormously with music at that point. Got into punk for a while there, still a huge fan of bands like Bad Religion. So yeah, maybe a dabbler is the best way to put it.
Kate Jewell:As an early modernist, I'm guessing that there's not a lot of sources from the era that you study that would populate a playlist like this. So I'm curious how you went about interrogating the relationship between what you study in the early modern period with the musical expression that informs your pop culture world that you exist in now. How did you put those things together?
Dave Hitchcock:I'm lucky in the sense that while we would never find them on Spotify, we do have songs from my period. They're called broadside ballads, there's a big, very successful project called the Broadside Ballad Archive, where they've recreated all these songs from the 17th century, many of which make their way over the Atlantic Ocean to the Early Republic. They become the folk songs, many of them, of 19th century America. Many of them have long histories right into the later 19th century and the early 20th century to the point where Woody Guthrie is like channeling some of this stuff when he's singing. So for me, I've done work on those songs and what they say about homelessness and poverty in various ways. I took some of that and thought, well alright who sings meaningfully about those things now. They might be making fun, using stereotypes, misrepresenting what it's like to be poor for comic effect. Or they might be very serious, exploring the terrible conditions that people had to endure. And we see a similar dynamic still. And so I was trying to reach for that same dynamic when I was putting together a longer list, because I think there's something important about that, right? Poverty is a complicated subject. Representing it only one way is usually a mistake. And actually, once you go looking in music for multiple representations of poverty, you find them. Often it gets lumped in as like, social commentary music. It's just, it's like a separate sub genre of its own, music that's daring to make a social commentary. But I would flip that around and say actually, most music is by definition a social commentary. It's a choice, not to comment on things and to only write love ballads if that's what you're doing. And, we can read music that way too, completely from the other direction.
Kate Jewell:So I asked you to tell a story with three or four songs. What kind of story are you going to try to tell with the first part of your playlist?
Dave Hitchcock:The story I want to try and tell is about modern urban, poverty, particularly in the United States, but not exclusively, and how it connects to different moments in our lives, whether youth, childhood, adulthood, and even parenthood, and possibly old age, aging out of gainful employment and into more risky situations. I wanted to tell that story using a couple of forms of music that have been historically prominent sites of social commentary in the United States. Folk music, blue collar rock, country music, and hip hop. That's the story I wanted to tell. It's one of many that we could tell using music. We could do something very different and think about rural poverty. That'd be a very different playlist. But the reason I wanted to focus on the city and on the life cycle is because particularly in my view in the 20th century, two things have become synonymous with how people understand poverty. They understand cities as repositories of the poor, as engines of poverty that produce it in various ways, and they understand poverty as it is experienced at particularly acute moments in their lives. Poor black or queer youth on the street, and we understand that they're disproportionately vulnerable to homelessness, or poverty in old age, and literally why we have a social security system is to avoid that. And so these are all questions of the life cycle. So yeah, poverty in the city, I think, if we're being very succinct is the story that I'm trying to tell here.
Kate Jewell:So where do you start us off in this story? What song do you begin with and what does it tell us?
Dave Hitchcock:People could very easily choose to start a lot earlier than this, but I've chosen to start with"Rag Doll" by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. And this is a doo wop song from a very famous white band that is borrowing a whole range of musical techniques from African American music. It's a song about a poor young girl who is homeless and who is a representative of an actual encounter that a band member had in Hell's Kitchen on his way to a recording for their album of the time, and he gives this young girl, she's trying to wipe his windows of his car, and he reaches into his wallet, because he takes pity on her, and he hands her I think a tenner, which is a decent chunk of change and then goes to the studio. And says, I've just had this happen, maybe we should write a song about it. It's quite a powerful tune in a whole bunch of ways, despite being doo wop, which makes it intrinsically quite, fun like, yeah, let's, you know, let's, let's snap our fingers to children being homeless. The band made a deliberate choice to do that, and to make a doo wop song about a homeless poor girl. And so it felt like a subversive thing for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons to do. The 60s is also a moment where, at least so far as I know, in the United States, you're starting to see conversations around urban poverty become far more prominent as part of public discourse. You have Lyndon Johnson's campaigns against poverty. And you have I believe it's in 1968, the Poor People's March on Washington as well, which is in the immediate aftermath of assassinations and all sorts of other political turbulence in the United States. But there's this kind of somewhat forgotten Poor People's Campaign at the end of the decade. And so poverty has really clearly become a kind of shared issue of political discourse in the 60s. And this song, I don't think Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are trying to go there. I think they're just singing about a poor kid that they encountered. But it felt like a good place to start.
Kate Jewell:Where are we going next?
Dave Hitchcock:Next we're going to, this is very much a me choice. We're going to Motown. We're going to Barrett Strong and"Money." That's what I want. Which is of course famously adapted by the Beatles. And this one isn't explicitly about poverty per se. It is a man singing very simply about what he thinks he needs to enjoy his life, to get ahead in the world. Cash. It's a very catchy tune. It's a very simple tune. The guy's only major hit single. Everybody knows this song. If the opening the opening bars, everybody knows it. It's also one of Motown's first Billboard hits. To me, this represents the grind. One of the big commonalities of experiences of poor people, not just in the period I study, but really quite broadly across a huge range of time periods and geographies, is just trying to do enough to make enough to live. So you can call that whatever you want. The economy of makeshifts in my period, the grind today, there are any number of catchphrases for it, but just this necessity of putting enough pieces of work together, enough tasks together, making enough money at a few side jobs, to keep body and soul together. That is all in pursuit, quite obviously, of money and today we measure poverty globally using money, which is understandable, and so I wanted that to be really clear. I specialize in my own work on homelessness. And with homelessness, again, very simply, it comes back to housing. in a very straightforward way. So this is a very simple song, very straightforward, but it just felt like a good way to make that point
Kate Jewell:Yeah, I think it's really interesting how the song coming out at the height of the affluent society could be seen as a kind of celebration of materialism, when in actuality, it is talking about how that the material reality that so many people face is around the pursuit of this thing, rather than the attainment of it.
Dave Hitchcock:Yeah, that's a very good way. Yeah, that's exactly, what we should do with it, I think. And because of course the follow up is, it's not money that's what I have, it's money that's what I want. So he's being very explicit, I think, all the way through the story that it's, as you say, it's about pursuit, about trying to get it, and not necessarily always succeeding.
Kate Jewell:So speaking of the grind of this industrial capitalist economy, where are we going to next?
Dave Hitchcock:So we're definitely switching genres now and headed into Allentown in the 1980s with Billy Joel. When I first heard the song, I didn't like it. At all. It felt, to young me, like a very boring song, because I wasn't listening to the lyrics, which tell this really complicated story about a town trying to come together to survive de industrialization, preserve itself, this sort of tough guy aesthetic, but generalized. Joel and Springsteen and others, these blue collar rockers, are known for being tough guys, or representing tough guys in music. Tough guys who manage to have feelings and then sing about them. But here it's become collectivized to the point where Allentown invites him, they give him like the keys to the town and they invite him to almost be like the town musical mascot and to participate in culturally reviving the town. So this one is here to mark one of the big stories of urban poverty in Canada and the United States in the 1980s, which is deindustrialization. Even the Google AI knows that's what it is. If you ask, the the large language models, what caused poverty in the 1980s, the answer is almost always deindustrialization, the movement of jobs overseas, which is one of the dominant economic and political issues of the last 30 or 40 years. And this song captures it beautifully. So does Born in the USA. So does Springsteen's back catalogue. A lot of the songs that these guys are singing about are about that loss of of identity, that working class occupational identity. You go to the factory, you put in a hard day's labor, you make your money, you support your family. And,the minute that job is gone, you're listless you're rudderless, you don't know what to do. Your self worth craters, obviously your economic standing is cratering too. And that descent is where a lot of these singers tend to locate social problems originating. Abuse, whether it's psychological or physical. Alcohol abuse. All sorts of things. And you see this in other genres of music as well. Country music is full of it. But I wanted to show, using at least one kind of blue collar rock song, and this one just, resonated really well. It was regarded at the time as this working class anthem, and I felt, it felt important to represent that.
Kate Jewell:So going back to Michigan and Detroit and the auto industry I've noticed here that you have selected an Eminem song. So how do we work in Eminem and hip hop and the 90s into this story?
Dave Hitchcock:This is one of the genres of music from America, which is explicitly concerned, most often, with issues of poverty and inequality often singers will sing about the projects, about where they come from, which is usually not good. The origin stories of a lot of iconic hip hop singers and rap groups are, they come from poverty. And that is true of Eminem, who I think has to be up there as one of the best hip hop artists ever? I mean, you know, I don't know, I'm not I am not qualified to speak on this matter, but he seems pretty good to me. And this is from his breakthrough album, the Slim Shady LP. Um, which, everybody remembers the title track, great song. And this song is about a real experience from Eminem's history where he, it took him a while to make it big, quite a long time actually in the 90s. His first attempt completely flopped he was didn't think he'd ever make it. He had a young daughter, and needed to support them. If you've ever seen the movie 8 Mile, that's very fictionalized, but there's definitely a real backstory that they're drawing on there. and He sings about being worried about having enough money to buy diapers for his kid. I mean, it's Eminem, so there are these iconic rhymes, but, I wanted that in there because it loops us back to where we started, with children who are poor. Which is one of the iconic ways that people arguing why poverty ought to be ameliorated, that's usually where they start. They say, how can we allow children to be in poverty, right? Whether it's here, whether it's globally, that is one of the big ethical questions. Like, how could we allow this in this modern developed world that we live in? How is this permissible? To me, it's almost weirdly about the diapers. People currently who are experiencing poverty are getting into trouble for going into supermarkets and stealing expensive items for the household, like diapers. And then they're getting dinged on the way out. I'm not gonna advise anyone, you know, to do or not to do crimes, but the point I'm trying to make here is that like, what is tacitly allowed and what is not is something that music might render visible much easier than political discourse. I just think that honesty and that introspection is an important part of what music can add to the conversation about poverty as well. It's a tough song, Rock Bottom, it's a really difficult song to listen to, but it was a split for me between ending it in a hopeful way, which is what I want to do with the bonus track, or ending it in a kind of real way, and this song is quite real.
Kate Jewell:I think in your bonus track another interesting way to play or to think about the role that gender plays in the construction of this narrative. Because in your playlist, we have a really interesting dualism between the toiling man, father figure, the person who is out in public earning or trying to earn with the the little girl figure. I think of that image of the little match girl and, the way that kind of the pulling at the heart strings or of particularly, young girls having to toil and then, that's where we start. And in the end, we have, this other young girl who's another kind of object, to define the males task of toiling, so how does your bonus track maybe take us in some new directions and thinking about the role of gender, but also new images of poverty.
Dave Hitchcock:These are the songs that came to my mind, and a lot of them are very male songs, right? There's no doubt. But it had to be Tracy Chapman"Fast Car" for the bonus track. It's an incredible piece of music, stand alone, with an aching guitar track, which just haunts you after you've heard it for days on end. I wanted this here because, to me, this song has everything, the topic of poverty that I wanted to get across. It's much more about personal choice, about opportunity, about freedom and also about trying to make a life with someone you love in very difficult circumstances. And of course there's a whole story here where they're working dead end jobs, they want to get out, they love each other, he's got a fast car, right? She's got the will to go with and, and to do whatever it takes at the other end, trying for any job, living anywhere they need to live, even at one point in the song, being homeless together. I very clearly remember when I first encountered this song, it was in a car in the 90s, when my mom was driving. And she was explaining to me, very young me, why she loved the song so much. My mom grew up in a household with a single mother. And mom said to me that she often felt like it'd be nice to have a fast car and, and, and leave.
Kate Jewell:I'm wondering what kind of references to homelessness and the way that experience is rendered in this song resonate with you as a historian who's interested in that topic? What commonalities do you see with this song that maybe transcend across historical eras or maybe even break out of maybe the urban frame?
Dave Hitchcock:Yeah, several. I mean, first and foremost, it's a song about a couple and that dynamic and the ins and outs of that and the struggles they go through, that's distinct. Modern homelessness is often a profoundly alienating condition where people are alone in actuality and then seek out others because we want to be with others more often than not and sitting alone a street or sidewalk begging for help is a profoundly isolating experience. Most people don't don't see you, or act, don't act like they see you, and that is psychologically very damaging. So I like that this song doesn't do that to the couple necessarily. They are at one point in a shelter together, I think, but it doesn't dwell on it, it pushes the, the narrative on. The other thing that resonated and does resonate across all the material I've ever looked at is this understanding that things can fall apart, but you still have to try anyway. So the song is very hopeful. It's very plaintive. These two get knocked back constantly. It never works out for them. But It remains very hopeful, and that too is something we need to remember when we're doing the history of poverty. It isn't just misery and despair and isolation and and enduring the unendurable. People make something of it, they do find ways, not just out or through, right? But but they find ways to seek and experience joy in poverty, while poor. It's not off limits as a condition, as an experience. And that too is important to recover. We need to do the whole thing when we're writing histories of topics like this. And this song does that remarkably well. It also moves us, it moves us from rural context to urban context, which is another big commonality. They'll move to survive. And we see that all the way through history. Certainly in my period, it's a dominant force in poverty that I work on. Something like one in seven people alive in the 17th century will have lived in London at some point in the UK. They're all going in search of work, and connections, and kin, and and they are then leaving. There's a very clear dynamic there, which is worth exploring. And then the third thing is this. This is a ballad song to me, and I work on ballads as part of what I do. And I didn't make that connection really until just now. There's a romantic relationship at the heart of it about seeking freedom together, using the car, getting out, making a go of it together, in the big city, and that sense of the balladry of it, it takes me back to my period as well, to hundreds and hundreds of songs in the early modern period, which have a similar register, which are about couples, or families, or people trying to make it.
Kate Jewell:That's really fascinating and as somebody whose ancestors came here as an indentured servants in the 17th century, I am a product, of that quest and probably went through London at some point.
Dave Hitchcock:We could do a Who Do You Think You Are with, with that, right? We can go and find them if we, if we want, and see where they landed and that kind of thing. That's very interesting.
Kate Jewell:In"Fast Car," there are these glances at two issues that I think so often come up when we think about people who are unhoused or have this kind of marginal existence and brought up rather problematically, I think is safe to say, which is mental health and addiction. And so how do those themes pop up? How are they rendered in this song, and how do you compare them as maybe these kind of political footballs that arise in thinking about these issues from a public policy perspective?
Dave Hitchcock:With"Fast Car," it starts with the parents, doesn't it? It's the father that is first identified as struggling, I think it's with alcohol, and then that stalks the couple to their next context, because then the partner stays out drinking, later in the song. I've always explained this to my students is I've said, put yourself in the shoes of someone who's homeless, if you had alcohol available, would you drink it? Right? Honest answer. Would you? Right? And, And why? Like, you know, there are multiple possibilities here. It doesn't just have to be to escape your circumstances. But just think about it, right? What one might need to do, not just to survive, but to integrate, to get by, to be part of a community, to make a bit of money on the side. These are all possibilities that might involve controlled substances, drugs, alcohol, substance abuse, selling it, consuming it. It might not be just to escape awful circumstances that these things are used. Mental health is a complex part of the story as well. One of the, commonly referred to touch points for 1980s homelessness is basically the mass closure of asylums. So the narrative goes well, folks are being taken care of through the 60s and 70s, taken care of, broadly speaking, in asylums with trained professionals, safe within four walls. These are then closed as part of a move away from what's seen as a sort of overly state determined set of solutions to mental health, and these folks are, in effect, just evicted. Which is true. That's very difficult if you've spent the last 20 years of your life living a particular way in a particular place. I would say that's true of anyone, mental health or not. Like, I think if you did that to anyone, of any persuasion, they would struggle. And so to flip it around with my students and I say, are we, is this about mental health or is that just not helping, right? Those things can make, your life more hard, more demanding. But also, folks who live with different challenges in their life also tend to be good at handling those challenges because they don't have a choice. I try and de center the substance or the question of mental health not because they're not important, but because, to me, they might efface the individual that you're talking about. So again, a classic case of this is homeless military veterans, right? The narrative there is so unbelievably straightforward. It's very problematic sometimes. You go off, you do what you're supposed to do, you fight in a war. You come back, you're wounded, you're hurt, you have PTSD um, Veterans Affairs is a slow bureaucracy that doesn't even see you, right? Things don't go well at home, one thing leads to another, and here we are, and we find you on a park bench. It is a massive trope in American cultural output. I think it's actually good that it's there, right? It makes that form of homelessness visible. And visibility is a big problem when it comes to homelessness. But the story is too straightforward. It's always the same touchpoints which explain quietly how the homeless veteran got to be where he, that's almost always a he, is. And, and to me that's too simple. It doesn't necessarily capture everything that's going on. I'm not a historian of modern military homelessness, so I can't tell you statistically whether that's the most common route. It may well be. But the social historian approach here is no, we do as much evidence gathering as possible so that we have a very robust understanding of what actually causes homelessness among military veterans, then we start to talk about whether or not it's substance abuse, or PTSD, or a mental health challenge, or whatever. We do that after. We don't do it before. If we assume that it's caused by alcohol, or caused by mental health, we are giving those things too much agency, I would argue. It could just be caused by the fact that housing is bloody well expensive, The person doesn't have health insurance, and can't get help.
Kate Jewell:My grandmother grew up in extreme rural poverty in the panhandle of Florida. And, speaking of these institutions, her father had been institutionalized because of a traumatic brain injury, now is what we would call it that created an epileptic condition. So he was disabled and they were already trapped in a cycle of poverty because of where they lived and, inability to escape that that world and, you can see it in the census even, and just from her very early memories and he died very young. But just the role that the failure of these institutions played that, it wasn't his disability or his brain injury. It was the fact of there being no structures that could help a family deal with those conditions.
Dave Hitchcock:Yeah, I mean one of the most difficult to believe commonalities between the period I study and today, right this instant, is that the language that we use to describe poverty basically hasn't changed. At all. Um, and deservingness and undeservingness, who deserves help, who doesn't, all the sort of traditional objects of pity is what they're called so the poor widow, right, the poor orphan child, unambiguously deserve help, but then the young, able bodied, laboring man doesn't. Because, well, he can work. So how is it that he's poor? He dependent on alcohol? Is he a criminal? What is it? Right? So that hasn't changed. At all! And that's terrifying, right? That suggests something structural not just in the states that we live in, you know, and the governments that represent us, but in the societies that have developed over the last five, six hundred years, if not more. There's something structural there if you're looking at that kind of commonality. And it's also sort of a cultural touchstone. So do we need this explanation of poverty to persist in this way for particular cultural reasons? Would it be too difficult to face up to the continued persistence of poverty in advanced, rich, industrialized nations like the ones we live in, if that explanation wasn't there so convenient uh, in its understanding of why people are poor in the first place. And this is why politicians like Reagan were so successful when they individualized, and Thatcher did the same thing, when they individualized poverty, and they made it about the failings of these theoretical, never named individuals, right? And you still see that. The notion that somehow the fault is in the person, rather than in the structures that that person has to interact with. I don't want to remove individual choice and individual agency from the story. But, it's too simple of an explanation. And historians are, as a, as an occupation, very resistant, I think, in a productive way, to simple explanations.
Kate Jewell:So to get us deeper into some of the contrasts that are at work here in narratives about poverty, I asked you to put together two songs to help us think about the contrasting narratives that we could identify in music about this theme. So what's your pairing and why did you pick these two songs?
Dave Hitchcock:So this one's a bit unconventional, this pairing, because it doesn't really fit naturally. So the first song is, is"Ain't Got No I Got Life" by Nina Simone and the second song is"Evenflow" by Pearl Jam, so very different cut of everything here. Very different musical influences, audiences, you know, civil rights, black jazz singer, right? Iconic in all sorts of ways, but lives a very difficult life, has a complex history of her own, comes from a poor family. And this song is a mash up from two pieces of music from a musical. I think it's Hair. She's repurposing these two songs to, it's almost like a gospel call and response. So the first bit of the song is despairing. It's just, I've got nothing. No purse, no makeup, no shoes, no life, no nothing, right? Just lists all the things that, that the singer doesn't have. And it's a really, it's a hammer blow of a song, like you're sitting listening to it and you're like, this hurts. And then it flips, right? And it's meant to be this kind of Baptist revelation like, no, I do have things. I have my health, I have myself, I have my mind, I have, you know, family, I I have intelligence, I have these other things. And it's meant to be a song of gratitude. I think it says something important experiences of poverty. No one is completely deprived, utterly, without anything, right? I mean, a few people are, but the most part, there's a more complex story to tell, which I think this song does some work to highlight. And it individualizes it. Pearl Jam, Evenflow, is actually singing about someone else. It's seeing homelessness and seeing poverty. So I wanted that distinction to be in the pairing. And the Pearl Jam song is, is really interesting. If we go down the rabbit hole of how they came up with it. There's this, I think he's a veteran, actually, and known to the band, and he, he experiences homelessness, and he dies around the time that
their
Dave Hitchcock:record is being put together. Are just like, we need to write a song about this guy. And they do! And they immediately realize, they do like seven takes, and they immediately realize this is one of the best songs they've ever written. It becomes one of the most famous rock songs of the 90s,"Evenflow." I bet you, if you go back and you ask, most people wouldn't realize it's going into the mind of a homeless person in some detail, right? Most people wouldn't know that's what the song is about, unless they mechanically read the lyrics and realized that he's struggling with mental health issues, he doesn't know what's real or what's fake. And the only way the band would have known that is if they'd talked about it with this guy. So the song is him. The song is them putting him into their hit album, which they must know by then it's gonna be a hit. And I love that, the fact that, actual, genuine homeless people, can enter into the musical record in ways you don't expect. You don't know that they're there. You don't realize how much of a force they might have had. And again, that was what happened at the very beginning of our conversation when we talked about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, with this actual encounter with this homeless young girl. And you wouldn't know listening to"Ragdoll" unless a historian music told you that that's how that song got started, you wouldn't know. I went in on a limb with this pairing, but this one is trying to personalize the struggles that come with being very poor and being unhoused and homeless. And those words, I'll use either. I think there's, there's utility in both, to be honest. I just wanted just to highlight that Nina Simone had her own struggles with mental health and addiction. She'd made it, and that was a real rocky road for her, to my understanding. It never was secure, I think. It never felt like she actually had won out, having trouble with her personal life, her kid, her husband, her record label, moving from Barbados to Liberia to France to whatever. And Pearl Jam, perhaps the opposite, they were an iconic rock band in the 90s. It felt like the sun was never going to set on them, and I suppose in some ways it never has. But, here they are singing about a really personal loss. And there are other examples of that on the larger playlist as well. I think music does that in a way that other mediums don't, right? The novel can do it, right? Fiction can do it really brilliantly, stick you in the head of someone and ask you to feel what they feel. Um, but I think music can do it too, and I think these songs do it really well.
Kate Jewell:Music gives us a kind of emotional terrain to explore through an experience that maybe can't always be expressed through words, and the way that it plays with those dissonant feelings. It can create a really different understanding in the mind of a listener who is maybe experiencing something or viewing or encountering experiences they that they themselves have not.
Dave Hitchcock:Yeah, and one of the other songs, it's Kendrick Lamar. He had a song on To Pimp a Butterfly called How Much a Dollar Cost. And that's a really interesting song about the singer encountering a homeless person and choosing at that time not to give them charity and then kind of rationalizing that thinking about that, why did I do that? Well, I earned this dollar, I worked hard for it. But then the song flips that around and the homeless guy is God. That's New Testament through and through, right? That is absolutely what the core message of Jesus was, right? Like, you see all these poor people? They're me, right? Says it pretty straight up. And that song does a really interesting job with that inspiration and that message, and plus it's just a killer tune. I hope people find this interesting. I got a chance to listen again to some of my favorite songs. I mean, I went down an absolute rabbit hole with this one. I listened to the entire back catalog of Marvin Gaye to decide what to include. My Spotify annual is going to be good this year solely because of this. So I think my final thought is just this, that it's okay if your professional interests or your historical interests overlap with your musical interests. I wouldn't recommend listening songs about nothing other than poverty, that's going to get very depressing very quickly. But it's going to show up, and maybe this helps people pay a bit more mind to it. And to where it shows up, and to which genres it shows up in, and why.
Kate Jewell:Dave Hitchcock, thank you so much for joining us and I really enjoyed your playlist.
Dave Hitchcock:Kate, thanks for having me. This has been a real pleasure.
