For Crass Fans Only
This single is a cover of Crass's original punk song of the same title. Lewis turns the punk music into weirdo folk and calms the brashness down into a hypnotic musical piece, but it's still a social statement about the badness of soulless capitalism. Crass fans should like this song, or, rather, fans of Crass should like this song.
I've never bought the idea that there is a right or wrong way to live one's life, and work is work to me, so Crass and Jeffrey Lewis's social critique is essentially lost on my ears. The tune of the music is a repetitive hypnofolk-guitar line that happens over and over again until the song is ... over, the point being that modern life is repetitive (assembly line lives). The more you think about it, the smarter it gets, but it still cannot possibly capture my heart, only my brainmachine.
The vocals are charmingly bad, and the lyrics are a social statement about modern capitalist culture being soulless, so the piece is actually quite consistent thematically: you wouldn't want to buy this music, but it's a song so individual, unpolished, and uniquely cliquey that it is important and necessary for it to exist. It is not pop and doesn't try to be. Even the poetry of the lyrics is really really bad, but only in the way Crass's lyrics are bad (ie. really good).
So, I'm glad Jeffrey Lewis makes music, even though I don't like listening to it. If he didn't make it, the capitalists would win. He makes comic books, too, which you can check out on his website (www.thejeffreylewissite.com).