Uncle Tupelo, "Graveyard Shift" (Track of the Week)

Due to a new writing project I have been taking a deep dive back into Uncle Tupelo. There is no other band that encapsulates the experience of being a misfit with lefty politics living in a small Midwestern town in the early 90s. I didn't discover them until their last album Anodyne, right as I was about to graduate from high school in the year of '94. That album filled me with the joy of recognition; I hadn't heard any music before that spoke so directly to my specific circumstances. 

Later on, I dug deeper into their catalog, and it still amazes me how hard they went right out of the gate. No Depression, their first album, became the name of a whole new music scene and a magazine devoted to it. "Graveyard Shift" is the first track off of that album. It sounds like The Clash if they were from Iowa. 

The first lines, "Home town same town blues/ Same walls closing in" just sums it all up. It's about the experience of working a factory job in a small Midwestern town where you grew up and feeling completely trapped by it. I spent my college summers working in local factories, including one summer on the graveyard shift. Granted, I was a college boy, so I could the light at the end of the tunnel. It also became clear to me that a lot of people work really hard for too little money. And yet, "The powers that be/ might take it all away."

The guitars and drums crunch and crash with wild abandon. It's the sound of wanting to jump out of your body trying not to look at the clock while being chained to a machine for eight hours. "There's much you've missed working on that graveyard shift." Yeah, no kidding. On the graveyard shift you literally lose the sunlight because you've got to go to bed in a morning light harsh in ways you never though possible. 

Being a lefty in the early 90s included a deep feeling of futility. You raged against the obvious shittiness of the system but did so with no expectation that anything could change. After a decade of Reagan, there was No Alternative. So you found rebellion where you could, including blasting the music of some fellow small-town Midwestern misfits. Thirty years later it still feels liberating.