Songs for the Modern Retail Laborer

First off, fuck the profit motive and all for-profit corporations.

I'm sitting in a starbucks right now, a place I hate to be-- a place I even hate to see. But I sucked it up and came in here anyway for a hot tea or whatever.

You see, I've had a starbucks giftcard that had been in my wallet for a couple years.

I don't know where it came from, or who gave it to me. Literally zero recollection as to its source. I might have found it on the ground for all I know.

But I do know every time I see it in my wallet, I think "Man I don't want to go to starbucks. Fuck starbucks. Starbucks can suck a fat turd." Or something along those lines.

There's like a dozen starbucks in my neighborhood. Once a woman I’d been chatting with said she wanted to meet at the starbucks on a specific street.

I ordered us our drinks and got us a table-- but 30 minutes later she hadn't shown up. I called her to see if we were still on and she said she was already there waiting for me. Turns out there were two starbucks on that specific road! Ridiculous.

So I hate starbucks for being every-goddamned-where. For insinuating themselves into bookstores, libraries, and other sacred spaces.

I also have a vague recollection that a friend I knew back in Long Island may have been a manager at a starbucks, and that he hadn't enjoyed it. He might even have described it as soul sucking….

So why the hell did I enter this building that stands in such a glaringly negative light?

Well, because somebody somewhere paid starbucks money just so starbucks could lock that money into a stupid little gift card.

A gift card is pretty much taking our national currency and converting it into corporations-specific currency. Doesn’t that seem bizarre?

This starbucks gift card cannot be put towards diapers, healthy groceries, art, or any other necessities. It can only be spent on the luxury of branded caffeine.

It's like saying "Hey! Loved one. You should totally visit this place that stampedes small businesses and takes advantage of low wage workers to generate unholy quantities of green! Here, get yourself 50 dollars worth of factory made product you might not even want— on me!”

BTW... when gift cards are lost or forgotten, and left unredeemed, that's just FREE MONEY for a bunch of putrid, festering, corporate douchebags.

I don’t like the idea funneling more money into a big, fat, corporate wallet!

Okay, that's enough of my anti-giftcard rant.

I think it's time to get into the playlist.

I briefly mentioned that I used to work retail. to give you a little more context: I've been a lead generator at home depot, a stockboy at marshalls, and a mate/ assistant manager at trader joe's. (You may have already noticed I haven't been capitalizing starbucks. Now you see I'm not capitalizing these other piece-of-shit profit machines either. Usually that’s on accident but in this case it’s deliberate, I’m actually undoing the autocorrect on my phone. I don't want to give these rotten motherfuckers the respect or honor of capital letters.)

When I worked retail I felt like such a sellout. I knew that my sweat, my labor, and even my health were all being bartered for pitifully low wages-- and that my efforts were enriching a select few corporate “leaders” far more than they were enriching my community, family, or self. I hated knowing that I was busting my ass to raise the bottom line.

To be clear I actually really admired most of the people I worked with. I felt unstated comradery with people working on the same projects and I felt unstated commiseration with people who knew deep down that the work we were doing was a bunch of pointless bullshit and that we were only there to make a desperate living, not to enjoy ourselves.

Paradoxically, being in proximity to other miserable laborers was always fun in its way. I have really great memories of my times with my coworkers-- but I will not ever thank these corporations for facilitating our shared experience. I will only ever thank my past coworkers for helping make the best of a remarkably shitty and philosophically agonizing work arrangement.

But as much as I had fun with the people I worked alongside, there were many, many times when I worked alone. Without coworkers to distract me from how much I hated our corporate overlords, the work threatened to become unbearable. But, I always strived to pull my own weight-- because I knew if I slacked off by myself the protest would not hurt the big boss, it would only make a harder shift for the next poor sucker who'd be assigned my slack.

So I tried to grit my teeth and haul ass, and usually I did just that.

And you wanna know a secret? Sometimes I was only able to work myself ragged because I was quite literally channeling all my hate and rage into the physical exertion of getting shit done.

Work as a distraction for how much work sucks. A retail laborer's paradox.

I would 100% ruminate on how much I hated, for example, trader joe's, as a corporation. My blood would boil and I'd try to get as goddamned much done as possible. But I still worked and strived, because I reasoned that because I was not up to leading a massive, unified revolution to usher in labor reforms, the best I could do was make the rest of my crew's work experience a little lighter and easier to suffer.

In that small, convoluted, and self-contradictory way I made the work tolerable for myself by making the work more tolerable for others. I justified my self-defeating efforts, by looking at the impact I could have on the people closest to me at the time: my friends in labor.

I hope I made their lives easier, and sometimes I think I might have succeeded.

But still I was always acutely aware that I was breaking my back for a bunch of greed-infested rat-bastards to enjoy larger bonuses and more opulence.

So I'd play angry as fuck music, to help me cope with all these feelings-- to help me power through with some of my soul intact.

This playlist includes some of the music I used to blast on a bluetooth speaker in the back room while I was breaking down deliveries and wiping sweat from my eyes. This is the stuff I used to raise my own morale and help me keep the pace.

But it also includes a couple songs that I never played because they were too on the nose! These were the songs I had playing in my head when I was out on the sales floor-- the songs that lyrically touched on the inner, futile protest I felt inside.

Here goes:

First off... Fuck Work! by Fuzzrod

I know those guys by the way! They're a local band and the bassist is a friend of mine. Seen them live a handful of times, and they kick serious ass!

Many of their songs absolutely capture the anticapitalist vibe-- but this one specifically also has a deliciously sarcastic line in there, or atleast I take it as sarcasm. To me it sounds like an unveiled criticism of our broader consumer based economy! When the vocalists on this track, yell "I've got stuff to buy!" that strikes me as a razor sharp, self-deprecating slap in capitalism's fat, drooling face.

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Here's another that gets at the meat of work being exploitation:

Five to One, by The Doors:

This song is the one I had stuck in my head most often-- one which I sang under my breath, almost never loud enough for anyone else to hear. The lyrics, to me, perfectly encapsulate the reality many laborers face: "trade in your hours for a handful of dimes". The lyrics and tone convey a desperate yearning for revolution butted up against a despairing sense of futility.

To me, this song condemns a reality which many of us face.

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The next song on my list is one which carried the angry overtones I needed to not walk out of my shifts. It also has a scrap of lyrics that kind of fit the work at trader joes in a way that made me chuckle, like a bad pun, titled Man in the Box by Alice in Chains.

anyway, have a listen:

At trader joes, we referred to the walk in cooler behind the dairy case as "the box". I'm not sure where the lingo came from originally, but to the modern crew, that's 100% slang for vagina. Most of us on the management team would internally chuckle any time we had to assign anyone to "work the box". Anytime the box was in rough shape, we would assign a couple people to get over there and slam it together, just double team the box... We had a couple departments like that, meat, nuts, the box... We called tidying up a shelf "facing" and would often tell people to go over and face the nuts. Or to get work filling holes. Or working the meat. If the shelves were especially bare we might tell people to just go around fill holes, as fast and hard as they can.

And working the box was always my favorite innuendo assignment, in part because of the song Man in the Box, by Alice In Chains. I'd laugh about the phrase, and then I'd use what I gathered to be the more authentic meaning of the song to channel my anger into getting the box worked good and hard and fast, haha.

But seriously, I always thought the song referred to the way we get boxed into a claustrophic position, where our choices are made for us-- where we want or need saving but feel trapped by circumstance. I also took the lyrics "feed my eyes/ Can you sew them shut" to refer to our modern mode of rampant consumerism, were we hyper digest media that makes us increasingly materialistic-- we feed our eyes so much they get blinded.

And the main line, "man in the box" always made me think of being trapped in a coffin-- and if that image doesn't fit the dead-inside feeling of working retail, then nothing does.

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This next song is one I once heard a friend belt out on the sales floor after close-- I was running the shift at the time, and it felt so utterly relatable and kinda like a hilariously astute observation of the dystopia we were living.

We Gotta Get Outta this Place, by The Animals:

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Also, if I'm allowed to be totally upfront: when I worked retail, nothing made me more broken and furious than working the morning shift. Getting up before the sun to stock shelves for some fucking soccer moms to get their gimmicky knickknacks?

Please, for the love of God, never again!

This song played in my head any time I had to drag myself to the defeated sort of hell that is clocking in when I should have still been asleep.

Morning Show, by Iggy Pop

He sounds the way I felt, like I was sacrificing my body, my mind, my self on the altar of Trader Joe's weekly sales reports.

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This next song helped get my blood pumping, and really conveyed the same message I picked up from Man in the Box, that being said... The message here is way more overt-- The writers really don't want anyone misinterpreting so they made sure to blare it right in your eardrums.

No Shelter, by Rage Against the Machine:

You might not be surprised to know that there was plenty of RATM on the actual closing playlist I used at work. But I'm only gonna include that one Rage song on this write up.

The fact that Rage performed this song for the Godzilla films while dropping the line "Godzilla, pure motherfuckin filler" and decrying the vapid emptiness of modern media kinda felt like a similar concept, in spirit, to what I was doing any time I worked hard for my coworkers whom I loved while also working hard for a corporation which I hated. When I was a mate at trader joes we were told we couldn't play anything with profanity. So, unfortunately I had to use the clean version. Not so, in this case!

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Here's one I never actually listened to at work, but the lyrics would sometimes play in my head sometimes when I happened to be working without music, and sometimes if I was working far enough from other ears I’d even sing a bit. I won't torture you with my rendition-- instead, enjoy the voice of legendary Paul Robeson!

Joe Hill by Paul Robeson

The lyrics are powerful, solemn but uplifting. This song was my introduction to the history of musician and labor activist, Joe Hill. He was executed in after an inconclusive trial. Here's his wiki link.

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The next two songs really speak for themselves, both fiercely condemn our system of rampant capitalism, albeit from different angles. Pay attention to the scathingly hopeless lyrics and tones of the first video-- as the singer elaborates on the struggling pain of the working class. Then pay mind to the sarcastic tone and the fiery critique of greed and of money itself in the second video. I'm including them side by side because they feel like alternate faces of the same coin.

Working Class Hero by John Lennon

Money by Pink Floyd

This next song is another that really speaks for itself-- hell, it practically screams! Where John Lennon bemoaned the conditions the working class faced, and where David Gilmour condemned our global fixation on the accumulation of wealth, this next song takes careful, precise aim at some of the greatest sinners in our modern world: the rich!

Animals by Muse

What I especially love about this song is the mournful tone of the guitar, alongside what I can only describe as a disappointed tone in Matt Bellamy's voice. It's like there's tons to be angry and livid about, but there's also a sort of protracted sadness to the reality of our human systems-- we're animals and gluttons, letting our greed savage and exploit those in need of protection.

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This next song gets philosophical, at least for me. It ditches some of the righteous anger, or despair, that many of the other songs on my list seem to deliver. But it's not without it's emotional weight.

Lost in the Supermarket by the Clash

To me, this song 100% sounds like an absurdist slant on an existential crisis. "Lost in the supermarket" sung with a sense of pep and fun and energy, with an uplifting beat? Yeah, bro I am fucking lost in the supermarket. Not just overwhelmed by the product flashing out on every shelf, but overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of our weirdness. We're literally apes-- in terms of taxonomy. But we've grown such a strange web of infrastructure that we no longer forage for our meals-- we just traipse into a grocery store and load up our carts with foods imported from every corner of the globe-- shipped at great expense to our environment and packaged in nearly eternal plastics.

How fucking weird!

Yeah, I shop for food, like most of society. I buy into this shit-- but having worked in a grocery store, any time I step foot through the doors of another I am overwhelmed by a sense of philosophical mourning.

This is our world? I'm lost in the reality we've constructed here.

This next song that I feel is criminally short. It's just an interlude off the "Born Sinner" album, by J Cole. But GODDAMN, it's so much more. I wish this song were full length-- because the sound is flawless. But more importantly, the lyrics are perfectly astute. I want this to go on, I want J Cole to keep spitting, for 5 minutes straight. But all we've got is this:

Mo Money

The second to last line makes is powerfully clear, that the very pursuit of money puts us all into the vice grip of manipulation and control-- we're playing into the hands of the people at the top, bending, jumping, and dancing for the greed infested class of rich white billionaires.

Still, of all my criticisms of capitalism and of modern corporate greed, my biggest, least personal, and most valid complaint is that capitalism is irrevocably tied up in racial oppression. I don't only mean that the profit motive is tainted by the legacy of slavery, I mean that shit is ongoing.

I think it is absolutely crucial to acknowledge that capitalism and racism are intricately intertwined-- and I think this song calls this out in clear terms.

Have a listen to Panther Power by 2Pac:

This song doesn't have the greatest recording quality, but the lyrics are spot on. Also, lots from 2Pac's discography has strong anti-capitalist sentiments, but I went with this one specifically because it's one of the earliest things he recorded-- I think he was 17! I think it's really telling that a 17 year old kid could speak with this much eloquence honesty and clarity on a convoluted system which countless old dudes are clumsily fighting to defend.

This track pulls no punches, and airs so many frustrations with clarity of purpose. Tupac helps frame capitalism as it is: a system of oppression, where the poor get poorer to help the rich get richer-- and where black communities bear an unequal brunt of this injustice.

Tupac never flinched, when it came to social critique-- this song is only one example.

Our modern systems don't merely have their roots in colonization, racial violence, and in outright slavery.

Our modern corporations still make use of actual slave labor, sourced "legally" from for-profit prisons, which rent out convicts for all kinds of labor.

And this slave-labor force is disproportionally filled by black people, as a result of pervasive and well documented disparities within our deeply flawed "justice" system.

Stealing free labor from convicts is literal modern slavery, but it's somehow considered "just" because it's applied as punishment for a crime? This obviously constitutes cruel and unusual punishment! This is especially vile in cases where the people forced to labor for these profit-driven corporations were only ever convicted of drug offenses, especially weed offenses-- being that marijuana distribution is now legal for recreational use in 24 states. So while regular people had their years and their autonomy stolen, rich, trust fund kids can now kick back and make legal money off the very same shit?

Well, that's my retail laborer's playlist. I guess since I no longer work retail, today it's more accurate to simply say this is my anticapitalist playlist.

If you have about an hour and a half of free time, please check out this nextflix documentary, on the topic of modern slavery.

13th.... You can watch it for free, here:

I thought I was done, but there's one more anticapitalist song that I can't not share.

Treat it as a bonus :)

Rich Man's World by Immortal Technique