Pete Seeger - Little Boxes

Run time: 02:43 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN3rN59GlWw   Posted on YouTube: December 19, 2007 By YouTube Member: peglegsam Views on YouTube: 449509   Posted on DU: July 18, 2010 By DU Member: Joanne98 Views on DU: 580

 

BUT things HAVE changed.... Now we can all dress in wildly different clothing, sold to us by the owners of the boxes! YAY Progress.

My mother used to sing this one all the time. No wonder I am the way I am, heh heh.

What an earworm!

I lived in Northern Va at the time and the song along with a video made a huge impression on me.
I was in maybe 3rd or 4th grade.

I wonder if they would show something like that these days in grade school?

And now the middle class is almost gone, and the ideological offspring of snobbish lefties like Pete Seeger are aghast.

"Don't know what you've got till it's gone."

...your use of that phrase is very telling. Please do tell how Pete Seeger is a "snobbish lefty"? What, based on this one song (which, by the way, was written by his friend Malvina Reynolds)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes

"The song is a political satire about the development of suburbia and associated conformist middle-class attitudes. It refers to suburban tract housing as "little boxes" of different colors "all made out of ticky-tacky", and which "all look just the same.""

If you have ever driven past Daly City, the place that inspired the song, you can see the hillsides covered with these houses that all look alike and are painted various pastel hues. It was not a snobbish lefty mentality that created the song, it was an esthetic and political sensibility that rightly saw the conformity of thought as a problem. The song was written in 1963, there was plenty of turmoil going on at the time and the middle class did have a conformist mind set that, in general, hated the left.

I hardly think you can blame the song, or Pete Seeger or Malvina Reynolds, or their "ideological offspring" for the demise of the middle class.

As the son of parents who never went to college, I was looking up not down at the middle class. And I remember how much the overpriveleged elitists I encountgered liked this song.

...but I can see how that would affect how you see it.