Monthly Archives: July 2008

chicagotribune.com
The wealth of hard times
Economic slump spurs riches in the arts
By Sid Smith Tribune critic
July 27, 2008

Job insecurity, high gas prices, intimations of scarcity in the American land of plenty.

So it went in 1976 when then young chanteuse Bette Midler released her third album, cheekily titled “Songs for the New Depression.” In place of her trademark Andrews Sisters and 1950s revivals, there was the gloomy “Mr. Rockefeller,” about a down-and-outer desperately trying to reach the emblematic rich man to ask for a handout, using her last dime for the call.

It’s no surprise pop singers, artists and storytellers chronicle economic downturns. Happy feet only carry you so far even in boom years—trouble is interesting, goes an old fiction-writing saw.

But there’s more to it than lucre. Artists and entertainers are sensitive souls who absorb, intuit and reflect what goes on around them. Deprivation, loss, social dislocation and poverty all inform great art and have so since time immemorial. Even those animal drawings on caves tell of a timeless need: food.

Like Midler’s collection, which also includes a bluesy ode to the alcoholic palliative, “Drinking Again,” various artists through the years, right up to recent days, have left a record of hard times, through various decades, plaintive cries for empathy and paeans to strength and forbearance.

Our problems are nothing new; they just seem new right now. We read in Job, one of the oldest and still most resonant treatments of human suffering, “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me.” And the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yeah, right.

Here’s a subjective sample of works worth checking out or revisiting.