Better Things: There's a Starbucks Where the Starbucks Used to Be

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I like sarcasm more than most people. Cleverness, wordplay, irony, complicated metaphors - all of that stuff. I do have an English degree, and I got it for a reason.

I've never been as big a John Wesley Harding fan as I think I probably could have been, because he's always been a clever, thoughtful musician and songwriter. Maybe it was that he shut down the JWS career - going back to his real name, Wesley Stace, and shifting to being a novelist for a while - or maybe things just never lined up quite right.

But I did hear this song, from his 2011 record The Sound of His Own Voice, and - as I implied above -loved the tone and style and message: There's a Starbucks Where the Starbucks Used to Be.

There's a Walgreens where there was no wall, just greenery
There's a theme park in a palace in Tennessee
That tree there is a pylon
But some things you can rely on
There's a Starbucks where the Starbucks used to be

I posted this song once before on the blog, calling it the Big Yellow Taxi of the millennial era. It's not a new message: capitalism is rapacious and destructive, and will take over everything everywhere if you let it. But we all need to learn that message for the first time, and new generations are born every day. And Joni didn't foresee the landscape where you can see the next Starbucks from the one you're already in.

There's a chain store where mom and pop once prospered
They're divorced now and they live in penury
Kids grown up and moved away
I hear that happens anyway
There's a Starbucks where they live, I guarantee

I love "I hear that happens anyway." That's what makes this song clever and specific, not just a rant against corporatism. The world rolls on, things happen that we don't want, and we just keep going.

And the good and bad news of keeping going is: there'll be a Starbucks there, whether you want it or not.