Grandma, What Big Lyrics You Have
Malvina Reynolds was probably the only singer/songwriter/protestor/grandmother of the ‘60s. She was most popular for “Little Boxes,” a digging satire of suburban living and entrapment.
You might expect a woman in her 60s (born in 1900, she aged perfectly with the century), standing up for left-wing values, to have mellowed into a Buddhist mindset. Ha! Leave that to youngsters like Timothy Leary.
Malvina came on like a musical freight train, with slamming commentary that spared no targets. Not only are her little boxes “all made out of ticky tacky
and they all look just the same,” but
“… the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.”
The daughter of a Jewish socialist tailor and wife of a labor organizer, she had been putting together protest and children’s songs for a couple of decades before she dug into the hardcore politicization of the '60s. If you look into her composing output (http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/MALVINA/songmenu.htm has tons of her lyrics), her range, depth and sheer volume can remind you of Woody Guthrie.
I don’t know her children’s songs, so I’m talking about her protest work. Her voice wasn’t strong but it was deliberate, dedicated and tough. Her lyrics weren’t catchy in the pop sense—they charged ahead and often ran around the corner before you could catch up. They held your attention by being unlikely, loopily funny and often based on a weirdly sprung meter.
Today, many of them might seem puzzling because they were fixed so firmly to the subject that inspired them. “The Judge Said,” one of her most powerful blasts, is based on a specific case in Wisconsin where a judge blamed a rape victim for being part of a permissive generation. Malvina was attaching her song to a (successful!) petition to recall the judge. It’s excellent but hard to expand into a general statement.
On the other hand, “Boraxo,” extolling a cleaning agent that can obliterate the worst of social crimes, though based on a comment by Ronald Reagan when he was California governor, still resonates as an overall response to police brutality:
“Tho you’ve had your hands in blood up to the elbow;
You can always wash them clean with Boraxo.”
In one of my personal favorites, “The Faucets Are Dripping,” the waste from leaking plumbing becomes a metaphor for both urban squalor and environmental disgrace:
“The reservoir’s drying because it’s supplying
The faucets that drip in New York.”
Have the various “Occupy” groups picked up on Malvina? They should. “The Little Mouse” celebrates a rodent in Buenos Aires who chewed through a computer wire and brought down a whole banking system. As she sang with great élan in concert:
“Hooray for the little mouse
That fucked up the clearing house.”
(Definitely not what my grandmother ever sang.)
And “Dialectic” compares the lives of the stinking rich with those of the (differently) stinking poor.
Either of these songs could and should be sung loudly in Wall Street.
Malvina churned out so many songs that it would be impossible to run through even the top rank. For a good selection, try Ear to the Ground, 23 of her songs on Smithsonian Folkways. Some are light and positive, many are dark and biting. All of them reflect a woman who saw the world with a caring vitality that few can match in these “me first” days.
A closing aside on Jewish intellectuals: Brought up a Catholic in Catholic schools, I went on to the University of Pennsylvania where I met and befriended mostly Jews. It was a revelation—for the first time I was among people I wholly liked and understood. Later, in the kind of purposeless, post-graduate drifting that was possible in the '60s, I was the only nominal Christian in a houseful of Jews, the brightest people I’ve ever known.
One thing to remember about Malvina is that she was a Jewish intellectual (I wish I knew the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation in English lit). Her songs reflect her interest in, well, just about everything. She listened to every kind of music, read about and knew everything that was happening in the world.
Why did the Nazis hate the Jews with such virulence? It wasn’t just about money or social leanings, it was as much a revulsion against their knowledge and brilliance. I think there’s much the same animus in the violent rightest reactions to Obama. If he was as dumb as the modern electorate, they could at least tolerate him. But a black man who’s brighter than they can ever hope to be? That, sir, is insupportable.
by Derek Davis