What, no songs about office life? Yes, this would appear to be true, for as the FT has it – reporting on last week’s Guardian list of the 1,000 best pop songs ever written – there was virtually nothing on the joys of sitting behind a desk, talking on the phone, attending board meetings, going to conferences and commuting back and forth with hundreds of thousands of fellow sufferers.
Why is this, we wonder? Is it because pop singers have negligible experience of office life, and so cannot translate its highs and lows into song? Or, if we agree that songs are akin to poetry (at their best, anyway), is it because there isn’t a huge amount of poetry in office life?
Perhaps Herman Melville’s immortal office clerk, Bartleby, embodies the unfortunate lack of inspiration to be found in an office. Connoiseurs of American literature will recall that Bartleby the Scrivener is hired by a lawyer to help with general office duties, not least proofreading. However, to this, and every task he is asked to perform, he merely says: “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby prefers not to do anything, even to relocate when the lawyer, exasperated by his seeming inability to do other than stare forlornly at the brick wall outside his window, moves offices. Instead, he remains in his employer’s former dwelling, haunting its hallways, preferring not to leave. Eventually he is forcibly removed and imprisoned, but the lawyer, somewhat atypically in literary fiction, is a kindly man. He bribes the prison guards to ensure that Bartleby is well fed, only to find, when he visits the prison a few days later, that Bartleby is dead. Why? Because, when given his sumptuous food, he said: “I would prefer not to.”
Pop singers, it would seem, prefer not to write songs about office life. However, it’s not all bad, and Bartleby was not only an extreme creation but he was, at the end of the day, a work of fiction. In the real world, that dread four-letter word – work – needs some positive PR. Perhaps, given the story’s lawyerly backdrop, this is one for legal PRs?
Image courtesy of Cornell University Library.
