By The Landlord
“Always be smarter than the people who hire you.” – Lena Horne
“A job is never truly finished. It just reaches a stage where it can be left on its own for a while.” – Neil Young
“Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.” – Kathy Skaggs
“I thought of all my rotten jobs and how glad I was to have them. For a while. Then it was a matter of quitting or getting fired. Both felt good.” – Charles Bukowski
Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, ratchet maker, wine taster, watchmaker, rogue crop picker, chicken sexer, game tester, paper towel sniffer, Lego checker, rolled oats technician, elephant physician, wine gum biter, fortune cookie writer, model village maker, snake milker, armpit sniffer, goalkeeper, spaceship cleaner, music plugger, blacksmith, cooper, luthier..... What is a different job? That's a deliberately ambiguous term here, meaning various or contrasting, but it could also mean unusual. But then again what's a normal, habitual job? That very much depends on who is doing it, and how. And this week it particularly turns on how it is portrayed in song, a genre that can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Habitual to unusual, the professional or the manual, the skilled or the basic, gig economy to obscure and hidden, this week we look at the job titles evoked through song. Unusual and different especially, or ordinary presented in an original way.
One parameter is that songs suggested by readers must give the job in question a name, and hopefully description what that entails, and of course how it affects the person doing it, rather songs generically mentioning or being about 'work'.
Here is an opening, well-known example, previously picked for another topic, written by Jimmy Webb in 1968, in a version best known by Glen Campbell and arranged by Al De Lory in which the telegraph wire repairman's mundane tasks and heartbroken loneliness is exquisitely evoked through the voices and whistling sounds "singing on the wire", the perspective of his position, and that Morse code sound and rhythm evoked by violins.
How then are different jobs communicated from the past and now, in song? Have they changed? Several years ago, the phrase gig economy might have meant something only in reference to the music industry and the overall profession, paid or otherwise, of performance. If only that were true today. Career based on the idea of jobs for life more leans towards the other meaning of careering.
Now however, gig economy covers a wider scope, the transformation of the modern job market from employer responsibility to a relinquishing of such accountability, into outsourcing. It goes towards the illusion of being, for many, in a position of self-employment and and where workers, from carers to delivery drivers, office personnel to day-hire builders and labourers, are re-labelled as consultants or service providers, and must there pay their own equipment, work-related travel, sick pay and other overheads, while otherwise being in every other way, under the cosh of supervision by a boss, monitored by tracking device or algorithm, as employees, even down to going toilet trips. It is a pernicious trend, that people are managed to such an inhuman degree that some even take to pissing into a bottle from their seat to keep up with their tightly planned schedule, whether that is in a driver's van, and in some cases even at a desk. All of this is passionately and painfully evoked in the latest Ken Loach film, the ironically titled Sorry I Missed You.
That's the political and economic part of the intro delivered, but now let us turn to further creativity. Even the most mundane jobs can be different when portrayed through the eyes and ears of a song. Boredom and repetition can conjure imagination and escape and extraordinary originality when captured by a skilled songwriter. Consider this, as a personal nomination, the fabulous Fulfilment Centre by the Richard Dawson, from his very recent album, 2020, from the point of view of a factory worker packing online orders.
So then, boring jobs can be turned into great art, but often only when the artist has been through the mill themselves. Could Charles Bukowski have written his poems without his rough-road of work and poverty first. Who is privileged enough to bypass that road? As Pablo Picasso said: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
Yet the Turkish writer Mehmet Murat ildan also adds: “If you don't do what you love, you die slowly and sometimes even you die fast.”
But most people don’t get the job they plan for, if indeed they plan at all. It just happens to them by a mixture of chance and design. Mainly chance. And compromise. Michelle Obama has also popped into the Bar to remark: “It’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child... 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' As if growing up is finite. As if, at some point, you become something and that's the end.”
Jobs can be stimulating, or debilitating, or indeed both. “If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do.” said Frederick Herzberg. And Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, the New York literary critic put it that:
“I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid.”
People get hung up on job titles, and many workplaces are riven with what’s known as status anxiety. But job titles are often an illusion as the work to which they are attached. My own experience of jobs and working in anything but the smallest organisation is that many jobs aren’t so much about doing much work per se, but putting all the effort in maintaining the existence of their job by engaging in various social games to underline their own importance.
“There seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it,” says David Graeber, the American anthropologist
“Yes.” says author Ken Poirot. “A job is the ultimate pyramid scheme.”
The writer Mokokoma Mokhonoana puts it that: “If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.”
What is a job worth, and who is a job’s worth? The wry wit of Terry Pratchett also emerges here to tell us: “Lots of people in history have only done their jobs and look at the trouble they caused.”
The American writer Studs Terkel is also here, quoting from his book Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do: “I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly-line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”
Some people do indeed find their calling. And 15 years ago there were job titles that never existed today. Not all of these are a dream, they are a random reality. I have an actor friend who stumbled into the job of search engine optimisation executive. It might be his greatest ever role, assuming he’s still getting away with it playing it.
And who would have thought that one might today become an ‘influencer’ - paid to like products on social media, or indeed a ‘chief listening officer’, listening in on online conversations about goods and services. Or a professional queuer?
Or maybe it’s better to just go back to making things. How about a guitar luthier?
The beautiful art of the guitar luthier
If such things like advertising watch, make you feel like giving it all up to run a cheese shop, being a luthier, or rowing a ferry boat in Norway, then perhaps consider some of these other offbeat jobs, such as panda nanny in China, though while cute and adorable, would surely become exhausting. Or a hotel bed checker – simply paid by a luxury hotel to sleep in a different room each night to report on comfort level?
Talking of laying down to rest, you might not think that gravedigging as a dream career, but David Homer, from Measham, Leicestershire, who was awarded the coveted Gravedigger of the Year Award a couple of years, says he finds it comforting.
‘Comforting’. Gravedigger of the Year David Homer, from Measham, Leicestershire.
Too macabre. How about being an ash artist? Creating beautiful artefacts from loved ones’ powdery remains into paintings, drawings or jewellery?
Ash remains jewellery by American artist Merry Coor
If you prefer living material, but like to work on the body, you might however turn your nose up at the chance to be an odour judge, also known as armpit sniffer, employed to test deodorants.
Taking on the hopefully less pungent, but far more stimulating dream job of being this week’s guru, I’m delighted to announce that he taking this hallowed role is the superlatively wise ShivSidecar! Place your job song nominations in comments below, and all qualifications will be considered by deadline at 11pm on Monday UK time, for successful candidates to be revealed in playlists on Wednesday. Good job!
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