Separate Realities: The Dream and the Iceberg - Scarecrow Press

70 Chapter 2
to those reported in a 1999 national survey, which found 55 percent of respondents
expected children would be better off as adults than their parents. 137
Perhaps consistent with many American workers’ pessimistic views regarding
their prospects for achieving the American Dream, marriage rates and traditional
family lifestyles have declined. In 1970, married couples with a child
(or children under age eighteen) accounted for 50 percent of all U.S. families
and 40 percent of all U.S. households. But in 2004, the proportion of traditional
families (married couples with children under eighteen) had declined
to 34 percent of all families and to 23 percent of all households. During the
same period, nonfamily households as a share of all households increased
from 19 percent in 1970 to 32 percent in 2004. 138 While shifts in the age structure
of the U.S. population may partially explain these trends, they may also
be due, at least in part, to many workers’ shrinking income and benefit levels.
For many, it is increasingly apparent that the financial security central to the
American Dream and the economic resources necessary to support traditional
family lifestyles are drifting out of reach today.
“The world is a vampire—set to drain [you],” sang Smashing Pumpkins, a
popular alternative rock band more than a decade ago. In the mid-2000s, the
singer Pink asked on her I’m Not Dead album how the president could sleep
“while the rest of us cry?” Despite being a decade apart, these two grim takes
on the life chances of youth were not isolated musical messages. In fact,
themes of pessimism and cynicism were, and are, often woven into the lyrics
of U.S. popular music. The content of many songs makes it clear that the
bands—and their youthful audiences—know they’re being used, and they
don’t like it. In the mid-2000s, some youthful audiences began to show their
objection to their generally gloomy life chances (and to the Iraq war) by supporting
(with their dollars) sales of “new protest” music aimed largely at the
Bush administration. Musicians from divergent genres, including Pink, Pearl
Jam, Merle Haggard, Neil Young, Eminem, Green Day, Bruce Springsteen, and
Madonna, produced anti-Bush songs in the mid-2000s. 139 While popular support
for a new wave of political protest songs is an interesting development,
attacking—or even defeating—Bush the political leader doesn’t address or
even begin to change the privileged-class-based policies that have produced
and perpetuate the conditions that concern some youthful audiences. The reality
is that few contemporary and popular, youth-oriented songwriters/bands
offer emancipatory visions or alternatives to youthful working-class audiences
regarding how they can counter, in meaningful ways, the sense that their future
life chances are compromised by an increasingly unequal social order they
neither control nor understand.
With some exceptions, much contemporary popular music conjures up for
today’s youth a bleak, iron-cage imagery of their world. Many young people
appear to feel trapped in a predictable, downsized, dead-end society composed
of institutions that ensnare rather than liberate them, including school,
work, the pop culture industry (which rationalizes and markets “cool” to kids