Pop culture captured Reaganomics corroding intimacy before protest music did

Evidence

This super-domination came out in the mordant yet playful “realism” of Gwen Guthrie’s 1986 R&B hit, “Ain’t Nothing Goin’ On But The Rent”, one of the first popular musical signs of the emergence of the new hardened subject that Silva analyses so well. At a time of rising unemployment, Guthrie sang, “You’ve got to have a j.o.b. if you want be with me/no romance without finance”. The subjectivity performed in Guthrie’s song is in many ways the female counterpart to the gangster rap persona that was emerging when the single was released. Both reject intimacy and tenderness. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1387

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader capitalist-realism thesis: pop sentimentality and its corrosion tracking Fisher’s earlier chapters on depression and the deflated subject. — connects to: Post-punk treated Reagan’s rise as Ballard’s fiction coming true — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1015
• SEED: An angle on how commercial pop songs function as sharper political documents than contemporary protest songs.