Depictions of the Working Class in Music

Today’s documentary taught us about the ways television depicts the working class. One depiction showed them as uneducated, lazy, and happy with their life as simpletons. Shows like Jeff Foxworthy’s “Blue Collar TV” and “King of the Hill” celebrate the life of a “redneck”. I realized that country music does the same thing. Gretchen Wilson’s song “Redneck Woman” proclaims how proud she is to be a redneck. The lyrics talk about drinking beer in the back of a pickup truck, her preference for wearing clothes from Wal-Mart, using the expression y’all, and toting a baby on her hip. They say that people may look down on her but she doesn’t care. She encourages her audience to chant “Hell yeah” to being rednecks like her.

This is another example of how the media portray working class citizens. In this song they even urge them to be proud of this kind of lifestyle. It almost seems like it’s a way of exploiting the working class by asking them to proclaim pride in their status as a “redneck” and also listen to music that makes them out to be this way. It is also interesting to me that Gretchen Wilson, who could have grown up working class, certainly does not live this kind of lifestyle now. She certainly has too much money to be claiming she shops at Wal-Mart! Yet she puts on this persona of an uneducated “redneck” in order to make money and makes her audience feel this way about themselves.