As I’ve done for the last several years, I’ll be posting once a day throughout the month of June for the #30DaySongChallenge. (Here is the link to the “anchor” page for this year’s iteration of the Challenge where you can keep up with my daily picks.) There is a prompt for each day, and today’s prompt is “Your Favorite Song.”
I’ll begin with a caveat: I don’t have a Favorite Song of All Time anymore. It used to be the case that when someone asked me what my “favorite” song was, I could say with relative confidence that it was The Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden”— and that definitely remains among my favorites– but I no longer think of it as having a singularly privileged status among my many other favorites. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to think of the “favorite” song designation a little like the “best” friend designation. Songs, like friends, have situation-specific virtues.
My pick for today, my favorite song right now, is Dolly Parton‘s “9 to 5” (written and recorded in 1980 for the side-splittingly funny and not-so-subversively feminist film of the same name). Dolly Parton has always been a idol of mine, partly for her gifted-by-God voice and incredible songwriting ability, but more so for her perfection of a uniquely Tennessean flavor of sass. Dolly says “bless your heart,” and you understand full well that what she means is “eat sh*t and die,” but you just can’t help but be besotted anyway.
First, I want to note that the tapping-and-dinging typewriter effect at the beginning of this song is absolutely brilliant and whichever sound engineer thought it up deserves a Grammy for that alone. (“9 to 5” did earn Parton an Academy Award nomination and two Grammy awards.) But the real brilliance of this song, and the reason it’s come to occupy a privileged place in my estimation of late, is its unapologetic accounting of women’s unappreciated, underpaid, exploited and expropriated work.
It’s a rich man’s game, no matter what you call it.
It can be downright infuriating to think how little has changed for working women in the United States since 1980, but as I’ve approached– okay, now fully arrived at— middle age, I often find myself more exasperated than angry. I don’t want to be exasperated. I don’t want to be resigned to the default reality, so true for women in academia, that “they let you dream just to watch them shatter.” Even less do I want to just sit in the boat with a lot of my friends, like Dolly sings, sharing some pink-hued pipe-dream that “the tide’s gonna turn and it’s all gonna go our way.”
I want to stay angry.
But it is soooooo exhausting– for a thousand meaningful reasons and an infinite number of mundane ones– to stay vigilant, to stay angry, to keep objecting, to keep refusing, to push back or “lean in,” to maintain the pressure of resistance,. Thankfully, “9 to 5” is a kind of Old School feminist war-song that has slowly crept back into my life and back into my regular music rotation of late, and I am no doubt the better for it.
Because one thing that Dolly gets dead-right is that being a working women in this world is enough to drive you crazy if you let it.
Click here to return to the “anchor page” for #30DaySongChallenge2016 with the full list of this year’s picks