And even good jobs are not evenly replaced in the same communities that lost the jobs to begin with. For urban communities, especially, our urban centers, etc. this is a reality. It doesn’t matter if Dow builds a brand new plant 50 miles away if you can’t get there. Those urban centers are disproportionally black and latino, you know, the core audience for hip-hop? Therefore in the context of the song, it’s completely valid to talk about job losses.

Ah, Slug. Naw, I haven’t listened to the new Atmosphere album. Slug tends to fall under my “mad at the world/break up” playlists so I tend to leave him alone unless I’m feeling moody. I’ll check out the latest though.

@Angela –

Run a search on my site for those terms. We discuss them often. Most rappers don’t cover the WTO and other large factions of world trade because they are complex issues. Sixteen bars doesn’t really do it justice, and it won’t be accessible to the average listener. A couple folks on the fringes can do it, but it won’t get mainstream airplay like homegrown problems will.

And WTO/IMF/World bank and other organizations (and the trade agreements these orgs gave rise to) are not where most of the troubles lie in America. It is one part of a larger multinational problem, and Americans feel the effects, but we wreak more havoc through those methods than anyone else.

Look em up. You’ll find out that’s where most of this country’s troubles lie. Of course this gave rise to another bad policy called CAFTA.

Could NOT agree more.

It’s definitely not an unmined topic in hip hop, but I haven’t seen anything along these lines in awhile.

But then, I don’t listen to a vast amount of the genre.

Equitist – You seem to be being pedantic as to the meaning of “Losing jobs”, indeed I would suggest that your criticism strays into the realms of ultra-pedantry. Especially due to your reliance upon the official unemployment statistics, which I have little evidence to suggest the reliability of.

Furthermore if you can find someone offering a swifter withdrawal plan then Obama please inform me of their names and schemes. A military retreat is a tricky and risky thing to execute, with armies rather making themselves targets in the process.

i didn’t take the “i heard him say” to be directly referencing obama. in fact, mary continues to sing “but it’s not that way etc etc” – that the ‘american dream’ is far from the american reality.

Two small factual errors in the song though:

We’re not “losing jobs every day.” The total number of jobs is up since 2000. However, the number that matters is actually the unemployment rate (since the raw number of jobs only matters in relation to the size of the population). Unemployment is presently 5.7%, which isn’t particularly high since the all time average is 5.6%. In December of 2007 unemployment was well below the average, at 5.0%. You can still argue that the US is doing poorly in the global economy, but the issues are things like the devaluation of the dollar and the price of oil (which th song mentions). But for job loss, we’re doing okay.

As for “I heard him say that they would bring our soldiers home in one piece today,” it’s a pretty big stretch from Obama’s withdrawal plan. Obama’s campaign site says that he would conduct a phased withdrawal from Iraq which would, best case scenerio, be complete in the summer of 2010. Some troops would remain, just like we have in Germany, Japan, and every other country with an embassy. Obama’s plan does not call for the removal of troops from Afghanistan.