What Would Beyonce Do?
“They work me so damn hard,” Beyoncé sings on the track. “They work my nerves / That’s why I cannot sleep at night.” The song also includes lines such as “release ya job, release the time,” which are originally from “Explode,” a 2014 song by Big Freedia.
For some reason, the willfully po-faced analysis of pop music lyrics never fails to make me laugh. Simon Singh’s scientific dismemberment of Katie Melua’s Nine Million Bicycles springs to mind, as does Richard Herring’s egalitarian dissection of Avril Lavigne’s Sk8ter Boi.
Thanks go then to Reader V for putting us onto the Wall Street Journal’s journalistic button-holing of economists for their views of Beyoncé’s recent anti-work anthem in which she describes quitting a job:
On one hand, there are bullish economists such as Brad DeLong who argue that Beyoncé’s advice is essentially sound. “Yes, if you are going to jump, now is definitely the time to jump,” says the University of California, Berkeley economics professor, who was deputy assistant Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration. “And now is the time to make sure your boss knows that you could and might jump.”
But on the other hand:
“I’d say this is not a good time to quit your job without a plan,” says Jennifer Doleac, associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University. “In an economic downturn, most employers will stop hiring employees before they start firing existing employees, so going into a recession without a job is extremely risky,” she says. “Simply quitting without finding a new source of income is not an option for most people who are not Beyoncé.”
So act of your own free will, oh listener to pop music, but, let’s face it, “WWBD” is always a relatively useful touchstone.
