It dawned on me recently listening to Herbie Hancock’s masterful remake of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’ (Pink, Legend, Jeff Beck et Tal etc..) that there is equilibrium – at least in the music market.
Allegedly, the great Mr Gabriel wrote the song as a response to the carnage which spread through Britain in the 1980′s as Prime Minister Thatcher tried to execute the free market dreams of crazy Chicago School economists including one Milton Friedman.
You can’t describe a song – listen to it and you’ll get the picture. Although this line below tells all:
“for every job – so many men…so many men no one needs.”
Need I say – it says it all as far as how you can desecrate a generation sitting deluded in an ivory tower with a bunch of books and a blackboard.
Sure – the free market and its equilibrium did look pretty on a university blackboard (the economist’s heroin). But it should never have been allowed to escape from its academic chains (just ask the Wall street quants).
So anyway, thanks to Herbie, the song is energized again for another generation to soak in its eerie, morbid beauty – shaking the memories of the horror it must have been to live in the British coal country in the 1980′s. Ironically, while this beautiful song lives its second coming, we can be thankful that the ideas of Thatcher and her cronies quietly fade as a blotted post mark on the history of the late 20th century.
Thanks Herbie.
