Working Class Hero

"Working Class Hero" is a song from John Lennon's first post-Beatles solo album, 1970's John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

Theme

The song is a commentary/criticism on the difference between social classes. It tells the story of someone growing up in the working class. According to Lennon in an interview with Jann S. Wenner of Rolling Stone in December 1970, it is about working class individuals being processed into the middle classes, into the machine.

The refrain of the song is "A working class hero is something to be".

Sound

The song features only Lennon, singing and playing an acoustic guitar as his backing. The chord progression is very simple, and builds on A-minor and G-major, with a short detour to D-major in one of the lines in the chorus. Lennon's strumming technique includes a riff with a hammer-on pick of the E note on the D string and then an open A string. The tone and style of the song is similar to that of "Masters of War" and "North Country Blues" by Bob Dylan, a known influence of Lennon. Both are based on Jean Ritchie's arrangement of the traditional English folk song, "Nottamun Town." The recording is the composite of two different takes: the sound of the guitar and vocal changes at 1:24 prior to the verse "When they've tortured and scared you."

Working class

The working class (also labouring class and proletariat) are the people employed for wages, especially in manual-labour occupations and in skilled, industrial work. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, some white-collar jobs, and most service-work jobs. The working class only rely upon their earnings from wage labour, thereby, the category includes most of the working population of industrialized economies, of the urban areas (cities, towns, villages) of non-industrialized economies, and of the rural workforce.

In Marxist theory and in socialist literature, the term working class usually is synonymous and interchangeable with the term proletariat, and includes all workers who expend either physical labour or mental labour (salaried knowledge workers and white-collar workers) to produce economic value for the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie. Since working-class wages can be very low, and because the state of unemployment is defined as a lack of independent means of generating an income and a lack wage-labour employment, the term working class also includes the lumpenproletariat, unemployed people who are extremely poor.

Working Class (TV series)

Working Class is an American television sitcom created by Jill Cargerman, which premiered on CMT on January 28, 2011. The network ordered twelve episodes for the comedy, which is the first scripted series for the network.

On April 11, 2011, CMT cancelled Working Class after only one season due to low ratings.

Premise

The series follows Carli Mitchell (Melissa Peterman), a single mom from a rough and tumble background, trying to give her three kids a better life by moving them to an upscale suburb. She quickly finds that making the transition to “the good life” is harder than she thought. Patrick Fabian plays a grocery shop worker.

Cast

Episodes

References

External links