Perhaps I am blinded by that small spark of goodness that years of bad living and willful cynicism have failed to kill -- what newspapers like to call “liberal bias” but what is more properly seen as “one’s own humanity” -- but are these not the best political lyrics anybody’s written in years? Can anybody point me in the direction of any other song that makes it point so forcefully without being preachy for even a second? What’s novel about it, and what makes it work, is that the force of the idea is all tied up in the images from which it forms its argument: the people who have to pull up roots and go away when somebody buys an entire city block; the sad feeling of displacement and alienation that comes from being moved around as though one were a table or chair; the keen choice of the word “neighborhood” to describe the thing that will be destroyed when “growth” sets its sights on a part of the living city. |
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