The Hidden Meaning of Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun"
Rachel's reflection
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The Hidden Meaning of "Soak Up the Sun," and other unlearned lessons from the new millennium
by Rachel
I first heard the irresistible nine note twang when I was twelve.
Doo doo dodooo doo dodoo doodooo
Like a medieval bugle, announcing the arrival of some great beneficence, the notes signaled that the next four minutes would be good. Immediately, I would ask whoever was driving to crank up the volume. It was 2002, the US was about to invade Iraq, and all I wanted to do was listen to Sheryl Crow.
I’m going to soak up the sun
Gonna tell everyone to brighten up
The song was all about the chorus. Singing along made it feel like life really was about bopping up and down and reveling in my tweendom. I mostly ignored the other lyrics, letting the sunny wah-wah and thumping drums of the track wash over me.
Two decades after the song came out I became obsessed with it again, listening to it nonstop this past summer. That opening had the same effect, instantly lulling me to a simpler, flatter time. But now more of the words caught my ear.
I don't have digital
I don't have diddly squat
It's not having what you want
It's wanting what you've got
How had I missed it? Was the song actually a critique of consumerism, but buried so deeply in infectious pop that you’d find yourself singing along before you knew what it meant?
The song continues:
I've got a crummy job
It don't pay near enough
To buy the things it takes
To win me some of your love
The next verse is an even more explicit critique of capitalism, framing work as a never-ending rat race, promising us the power to buy what should be free all along.
Crow’s words echo British Marxist John Berger, who wrote in Ways of Seeing about the ways consumerism preys on our desires to be loved.
All publicity works upon anxiety.…According to the legends of publicity, those who lack the power to spend money become literally faceless. Those who have the power become lovable.
Written during the Vietnam War, Berger went on to make a troubling link between a consumerist culture and the erosion of democracy.
The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it….Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice.
And in this world, where consumption occupies the space of our collective imagination, we find ourselves “dissolving into a recurrent day-dream,” or an ongoing state of dissociation.
In other words, dissociation is at odds with dissent.
And there it was, all of it, in Sheryl.
*
Let’s go back to “Soak Up the Sun”’s opening words, which I’d never noticed until this year, and that Sheryl perhaps intentionally buried right at the beginning, knowing the volume wouldn’t yet be turned up.
My friend, the communist
Holds meetings in his RV
I can't afford his gas
So I'm stuck here watching TV
Wait, was country pop star Sheryl Crow…a communist? Or at least, trying to go to a communist meetup? From which she is held back, no less, because she couldn’t afford the dues (also because of her “crummy job” aka capitalism)?
However exactly you interpret the opening, the verse provides a clue into song’s most biting refrain:
I'm gonna soak up the sun
While it's still free
I'm gonna soak up the sun
Before it goes down on me
This line goes by fast, especially if you’re watching the music video and mesmerized by a perfectly tanned Sheryl Crow on a boogie board. But I know not to gloss over the surface of the song anymore.
*
If I’m being honest about how I interpreted the song when I was twelve, I had it exactly backwards. To me, “Soak Up the Sun” was a celebration of wanting what I wanted and getting it. 2002 was the year of Levi’s, of lip gloss, of jewel-cased CDs, expensive orthodontia, shiny posters, and unmitigated desire.
2002 was also the year in which I learned to dissociate.
It’s when I learned that bad things happen over there. That we can go on living our lives while people die in the name of “our freedom and safety,” and that others die even more namelessly. And that always, there will be a pane of glass between me and the dead and traumatized; our realities will never meet, though they are intertwined. Their suffering, I am told, is why I can and must enjoy my life.
*
Last month, Joe Biden delivered an address to the nation that made me think, for a split second, that I was twelve again, listening to George W. Bush’s pinched face:
You know, history has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction. They keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the world keep rising.
American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.
That’s why tomorrow I’m going to send to Congress an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine. It’s a smart investment that’s going to pay dividends for American security for generations, help us keep American troops out of harm’s way, help us build a world that is safer, more peaceful and more prosperous for our children and grandchildren.
The night after Biden’s speech, I had a dream that the US was bombed. As we were going up in flames, I thought in my dream, sure, makes sense, we deserve it.
*
Unlike Sheryl Crow, whose message to a post-9/11 America was woven subtly into bouncy, bright pop, Susan Sontag critiqued a nation at the brink of war more directly. “‘Our country is strong,’ we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling,” she wrote. “Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.”
In another echo of 9/11, Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi defended Israel’s attacks on Gaza as a necessary demonstration of Israel’s “deterrence.” Proving Israel’s military power, he told Ezra Klein, was more urgent to the Israeli psyche than even routing out Hamas, which he also acknowledged may not even be possible. “If we stop believing that this country can fulfill its historic role of being a safe refuge for the Jewish people, many Israelis will leave.” His unspoken question seemed to be, and then what will be left of the nation?
I wondered that question too. What will be left of that nation and of ours, which props it up, with the great psychic burden of having killed thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands?
How long can our nations survive on dissociation?
Now, a month into this war, I’m returning to what I missed from Sheryl the first time.
I don’t want to dissociate.
It should not feel normal to go to class. It should not feel normal to teach. It should not feel normal to eat a meal. It should not feel normal that people are being killed from artillery and bombs made with the dollars we’ve earned and that should instead go towards housing and green jobs and schools and the community theaters that might someday teach us how to collectively redefine what strength really means.
I am told that I am naive, that I am crazy, that I don’t understand what it means to feel unsafe, that this is about safety, that killing all those people is about anti-semitism, that it’s xs fault not y’s fault, that I can’t understand it, that I can’t say anything about it, that I could offend a student, that I could lose my job, that I’m not informed enough to have an opinion or a feeling.
Every time I turn around
I'm looking up, you're looking down
For her words about 9/11, Susan Sontag was called a national traitor. Last week, the organization Jewish Voice for Peace was banned from Columbia’s campus and labeled as anti-Semitic by the ADL.
Maybe something's wrong with you
That makes you act the way you do
Maybe I am crazy too
Maybe being misunderstood is part of the fog of the moment. Or maybe there is always a cost to speaking your mind.
So here it is, and it seems so simple.
I want what we’ve got. I want everyone who is alive right now to keep living.