Supernatural and the Underclass- 3
Supernatural and the Underclass 3- Music
Part 1- Intro
Part 2- Dangers of Underclass
If I were to start by using one thing, I would point out the music. American rock oldies, you say. Yeah, okay, big deal. Yes, very American, so what's your point? The point belongs to that of a generational divide that, unless you are someone born in the 50s, or have parents from that time period, the significance of them would probably be easy to miss.
My parents were born 1951 and 1954. They grew up during the cusp of the start of American counter-culture, and by dint of that, I was raised hearing certain things, understanding certain views, and listening to certain music. During their teens and twenties, the Vietnam war was going down, and in their youth and shortly before their time, Kennedy was shot, and equal rights extended toward black people was only just starting.
This entire background bled into American music. The music you hear in Supernatural is as much a reminder of John and his time as it is an token of Americanism. To some extent, it is a way to understand the way Sam and Dean grew up: in a Chevy Impala, on American backroads, listening to the music of their father's time.
Rock music during his time was a mark of youth culture; being against The Man, fed up and tired of the bullshit you were expected to swallow from adults and institutions. Music was now about the darkness that was part and parcel of this new culture-- criminals, drugs, and change. Other songs reflected on the weariness borne from the cultural change. People like John's parents hated it; to their generation, this was not just immoral, but unAmerican to some degree. Nevertheless, the music became a symbol of things like the shooting at Kent state and the whole of the Vietnam war. When my father was in college (studying for two years as a mechanic), rock music was banned on campus. You couldn't listen to it in your dorm, and it wouldn't be played in the student union or anything, just to give you an idea about how adults viewed rock music.
Also, this rock music was more geared toward not just youth culture, but poor working class culture. One of the biggest things about middle class and upper class living was the emphasis on orderliness and neatness. About the goodness of life, and a good, clean living. This is a big hold over from our earliest days as a country, where poor people worked on farms and in factories, and while were admired for their perseverance and hard work, were often glossed over because of the sheer, brutal difficulty of living like that. Town living was different, and people were bankers or clerks, teachers, or scribes. It's a very long and rigid class divide, and unless you listened to folk songs, it wasn't likely you were going to hear the experiences of the poor. By the time music was being broadcast around the country through radios, American music was more focused on good life and simple living. But only for people who could afford it.
Rock music was none of this. Rock music was raw, and dirty, and brutally honest. It took a lot of influence from the previous blues movement, which in turn had emerged from old slave songs from the South. Rock culture was solidly based on the experiences of the people that, again, nobody wanted to talk about, concerning things that didn't happen to good, decent people. It talked about poverty, about war, about drug use, about murder, suicide. A lot of popular rock songs, like House of the Rising Sun, by the Animals, are actually based off of old folk songs. House of the Rising Sun has been kicking around since the late 1800s, and was originally about a young girl who was talking about being a prostitute in a brothel by that name. In that song, she talked about how her mother was a seamstress, her father a drunk, and she didn't have much choice to make money but by succumbing to the subterranean desires our society has. Rock changed it to a man singing the song, but it has an equivocal effect.
The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia is another. The song is talking about a guy named Andy who's lyin' cheatin' murderin' wife got him strung up for her own sins. This song has also been around for a while in more rural Southern states, but managed to make it to the radio. This is pretty incredible; the South has always suffered from the stigma of being stupider and therefore of less worth than the North because of its more heavily agrarian culture up until the Civil War. After it started industrializing, it still couldn't shake that label, so to have some of the songs that are generally known there become nation wide hits is huge.
These echoes in rock songs, and their influences from previous generational cultures, and the influences impacted on its own generation, are still there through John as a character. A veteran of the Vietnam war, you never really know if he was a draftee or a volunteer. Whatever the source of his service, he was one of the few who was proud of his service, if not of his country's actions, and he doesn't fling the title of Marine around so much as he wears it like any Marine lifer might. Vietnam was a place where you earned a sort of trial-by-fire adulthood while you were there, and returned to the status of a kid, albeit with too-dark eyes when you came back stateside. Vietnam was regarded as widely one of the biggest reasons why and how America lost its idealism and innocence.
Vietnam was a huge factor for all of that music that we now call classic rock. Now, it's a huge part of how we understand American culture, and it shows the kind of generational divide between John and his sons, and how a huge generation of people like Sam and Dean were raised by another huge generation of people, like John and Mary.
Vietnam is found in songs like War (What is it good for?). Songs like this were a HUGE surprise for mainstream American culture. Before the 60's and 70's, these kinds of songs were just not done. Disparaging the institution and the direction of the country through entertainment was appalling. However, the songs reflected the attitude of the people forced to experience what they're talking about; young, poor men got drafted for a war nobody could figure out that was right or wrong, and for the first time, more men of the middle class could understand what the underclasses had been experiencing. Middle class youth became aware of what the underclass was going through, and helped support the voices of the underclass, encouraging them to speak. Partly, this was why there was such an upsurge in popularity of this kind of music; for once, the youth of the middle class could share or at least try to understand what the hell the underclasses have been experiencing for a couple hundred years.
Of course there was a lot of social doctrine that helped college educated folk make parallels to their own underclass through things like Marx and the like, but music was one of the biggest unifying forces. All of a sudden, the underclass had a voice, and it was raw, hurt, and deafening.
When people like me, Sam, and Dean hear that kind of stuff, we think of our parents. One of the calling cards of the show is the reminders of their father and his battle through life, and our entire generation, especially kids who grew up with families from the underclass, is the same way to some extent. One of the biggest themes of the show is how much the boys follow in their father's footsteps; it isn't just the hunting, their quest to avenge their mother. It's shown in how they'll never get out of the underclass, how the songs of their fathers generation still define and permeate their existences. How very little changes between one generation and the next.
When John hears it, he is reminded of how everything has changed, both personally and culturally, and everything he's lost. From the innocence of his country's soul, to his own lost youth in that hellhole of a place in Vietnam, to his wife, to his life. For John, the music of his time is as much a vehicle for his own experience as it is a reminder of his own time.
I'm going to bring up one other song that has nothing to do with 70's rock, but still very much calls back to the recent traditional of reviving old folk songs that belonged to the rural underclass, and having them used in mainstream. 'O Death' in season 5 is a very interesting and savvy choice to be used when referring to Death tooling around one of the biggest cities in America, and calls back to a lot of very old and very American views.
First off, O Death is actually an old Appalachian folk song. The Appalachians are a mountain range that spawned its own cultural area in the eastern section of America that stretch from southern New York all the way down through parts of various states and into Alabama. Appalachia has always been a very rural, poor area of America, and its well known for its extremely devout religiousness and conservative views. It's made mostly of settlers from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the like, and most of its early culture was derived from being heavily religious members from these countries. O Death is actually a traditional Appalachian dirge from the southern section. In this, there is a quieter, more insidious echo: the underclasses have always been here. We've feared and believed the kinds of things that are a reality in the show, and which is partly the reason why all of the hunters you'll see are from the underclass. Their social and cultural heritages are from the kinds of folks whose families were raised hearing about such things, and get passed down. For Death to be in a major American city, with a modernized Appalachian folk song as accompaniment, we're invited to see the situation in a certain light.
For Death to "brush off" a middle-upper class man, counter-posed to the music, tells us something about social and cultural views. While the business guy was likely to have heard of Revelations and the Horsemen, he's not about to accept or believe it. The underclasses, even now, are more likely to understand and accept it.
It's not just a religious thing, although that's part of it. Belief in evil, and respect and fear for things like death has been an inextricable part of our culture, even in our music, especially when so much of it exists among us. The way we fight and kill, and mourn, and live in spite of it all, live in ways that the middle and upper classes would flinch to see, much less understand. All of those ways in which I've been talking about how being in the underclass is dangerous and hopeless-- perhaps the worst part is that we are so aware of it. And you know what?
You can hear it all in our music.
Part 1- Intro
Part 2- Dangers of Underclass
If I were to start by using one thing, I would point out the music. American rock oldies, you say. Yeah, okay, big deal. Yes, very American, so what's your point? The point belongs to that of a generational divide that, unless you are someone born in the 50s, or have parents from that time period, the significance of them would probably be easy to miss.
My parents were born 1951 and 1954. They grew up during the cusp of the start of American counter-culture, and by dint of that, I was raised hearing certain things, understanding certain views, and listening to certain music. During their teens and twenties, the Vietnam war was going down, and in their youth and shortly before their time, Kennedy was shot, and equal rights extended toward black people was only just starting.
This entire background bled into American music. The music you hear in Supernatural is as much a reminder of John and his time as it is an token of Americanism. To some extent, it is a way to understand the way Sam and Dean grew up: in a Chevy Impala, on American backroads, listening to the music of their father's time.
Rock music during his time was a mark of youth culture; being against The Man, fed up and tired of the bullshit you were expected to swallow from adults and institutions. Music was now about the darkness that was part and parcel of this new culture-- criminals, drugs, and change. Other songs reflected on the weariness borne from the cultural change. People like John's parents hated it; to their generation, this was not just immoral, but unAmerican to some degree. Nevertheless, the music became a symbol of things like the shooting at Kent state and the whole of the Vietnam war. When my father was in college (studying for two years as a mechanic), rock music was banned on campus. You couldn't listen to it in your dorm, and it wouldn't be played in the student union or anything, just to give you an idea about how adults viewed rock music.
Also, this rock music was more geared toward not just youth culture, but poor working class culture. One of the biggest things about middle class and upper class living was the emphasis on orderliness and neatness. About the goodness of life, and a good, clean living. This is a big hold over from our earliest days as a country, where poor people worked on farms and in factories, and while were admired for their perseverance and hard work, were often glossed over because of the sheer, brutal difficulty of living like that. Town living was different, and people were bankers or clerks, teachers, or scribes. It's a very long and rigid class divide, and unless you listened to folk songs, it wasn't likely you were going to hear the experiences of the poor. By the time music was being broadcast around the country through radios, American music was more focused on good life and simple living. But only for people who could afford it.
Rock music was none of this. Rock music was raw, and dirty, and brutally honest. It took a lot of influence from the previous blues movement, which in turn had emerged from old slave songs from the South. Rock culture was solidly based on the experiences of the people that, again, nobody wanted to talk about, concerning things that didn't happen to good, decent people. It talked about poverty, about war, about drug use, about murder, suicide. A lot of popular rock songs, like House of the Rising Sun, by the Animals, are actually based off of old folk songs. House of the Rising Sun has been kicking around since the late 1800s, and was originally about a young girl who was talking about being a prostitute in a brothel by that name. In that song, she talked about how her mother was a seamstress, her father a drunk, and she didn't have much choice to make money but by succumbing to the subterranean desires our society has. Rock changed it to a man singing the song, but it has an equivocal effect.
The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia is another. The song is talking about a guy named Andy who's lyin' cheatin' murderin' wife got him strung up for her own sins. This song has also been around for a while in more rural Southern states, but managed to make it to the radio. This is pretty incredible; the South has always suffered from the stigma of being stupider and therefore of less worth than the North because of its more heavily agrarian culture up until the Civil War. After it started industrializing, it still couldn't shake that label, so to have some of the songs that are generally known there become nation wide hits is huge.
These echoes in rock songs, and their influences from previous generational cultures, and the influences impacted on its own generation, are still there through John as a character. A veteran of the Vietnam war, you never really know if he was a draftee or a volunteer. Whatever the source of his service, he was one of the few who was proud of his service, if not of his country's actions, and he doesn't fling the title of Marine around so much as he wears it like any Marine lifer might. Vietnam was a place where you earned a sort of trial-by-fire adulthood while you were there, and returned to the status of a kid, albeit with too-dark eyes when you came back stateside. Vietnam was regarded as widely one of the biggest reasons why and how America lost its idealism and innocence.
Vietnam was a huge factor for all of that music that we now call classic rock. Now, it's a huge part of how we understand American culture, and it shows the kind of generational divide between John and his sons, and how a huge generation of people like Sam and Dean were raised by another huge generation of people, like John and Mary.
Vietnam is found in songs like War (What is it good for?). Songs like this were a HUGE surprise for mainstream American culture. Before the 60's and 70's, these kinds of songs were just not done. Disparaging the institution and the direction of the country through entertainment was appalling. However, the songs reflected the attitude of the people forced to experience what they're talking about; young, poor men got drafted for a war nobody could figure out that was right or wrong, and for the first time, more men of the middle class could understand what the underclasses had been experiencing. Middle class youth became aware of what the underclass was going through, and helped support the voices of the underclass, encouraging them to speak. Partly, this was why there was such an upsurge in popularity of this kind of music; for once, the youth of the middle class could share or at least try to understand what the hell the underclasses have been experiencing for a couple hundred years.
Of course there was a lot of social doctrine that helped college educated folk make parallels to their own underclass through things like Marx and the like, but music was one of the biggest unifying forces. All of a sudden, the underclass had a voice, and it was raw, hurt, and deafening.
When people like me, Sam, and Dean hear that kind of stuff, we think of our parents. One of the calling cards of the show is the reminders of their father and his battle through life, and our entire generation, especially kids who grew up with families from the underclass, is the same way to some extent. One of the biggest themes of the show is how much the boys follow in their father's footsteps; it isn't just the hunting, their quest to avenge their mother. It's shown in how they'll never get out of the underclass, how the songs of their fathers generation still define and permeate their existences. How very little changes between one generation and the next.
When John hears it, he is reminded of how everything has changed, both personally and culturally, and everything he's lost. From the innocence of his country's soul, to his own lost youth in that hellhole of a place in Vietnam, to his wife, to his life. For John, the music of his time is as much a vehicle for his own experience as it is a reminder of his own time.
I'm going to bring up one other song that has nothing to do with 70's rock, but still very much calls back to the recent traditional of reviving old folk songs that belonged to the rural underclass, and having them used in mainstream. 'O Death' in season 5 is a very interesting and savvy choice to be used when referring to Death tooling around one of the biggest cities in America, and calls back to a lot of very old and very American views.
First off, O Death is actually an old Appalachian folk song. The Appalachians are a mountain range that spawned its own cultural area in the eastern section of America that stretch from southern New York all the way down through parts of various states and into Alabama. Appalachia has always been a very rural, poor area of America, and its well known for its extremely devout religiousness and conservative views. It's made mostly of settlers from England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the like, and most of its early culture was derived from being heavily religious members from these countries. O Death is actually a traditional Appalachian dirge from the southern section. In this, there is a quieter, more insidious echo: the underclasses have always been here. We've feared and believed the kinds of things that are a reality in the show, and which is partly the reason why all of the hunters you'll see are from the underclass. Their social and cultural heritages are from the kinds of folks whose families were raised hearing about such things, and get passed down. For Death to be in a major American city, with a modernized Appalachian folk song as accompaniment, we're invited to see the situation in a certain light.
For Death to "brush off" a middle-upper class man, counter-posed to the music, tells us something about social and cultural views. While the business guy was likely to have heard of Revelations and the Horsemen, he's not about to accept or believe it. The underclasses, even now, are more likely to understand and accept it.
It's not just a religious thing, although that's part of it. Belief in evil, and respect and fear for things like death has been an inextricable part of our culture, even in our music, especially when so much of it exists among us. The way we fight and kill, and mourn, and live in spite of it all, live in ways that the middle and upper classes would flinch to see, much less understand. All of those ways in which I've been talking about how being in the underclass is dangerous and hopeless-- perhaps the worst part is that we are so aware of it. And you know what?
You can hear it all in our music.