Be Thankful For What You Got. William DeVaughn. 1974. Roxbury.

 In the modern era, the fantasy of summer as idyllic utopia began with Gershwin, “when the living is easy.” Summertime’s mood is one of languor, a condition not so much of the moment as it is of the animal soul. It’s only a minor exaggeration to surmise that all of our mental crises, our fits of mania and insolence, can be traced to the shared delusion that we are capable of outpacing languor’s preferred tempo. As J.G. Ballard once noted,“All my own fiction could be regarded as an attempt to escape from time—or, more exactly, from linear time, as it seems to me . . . the most significant relationships and experiences of our lives are intelligible only in non-linear terms.” All art endeavors to represent our reality of non-linear time, and any artist forced into outsider status because of a culture too bigoted to properly market what has never before been marketed knows more than anybody else about that reality. The venture of pop music into radical expression of non-linear time could be often confusing because commercial success seemed to be the pop market’s unequivocal endgame, when all apparent evidence suggests that, with artists as varied as Hasil Adkins and the Shaggs, this limited perspective went frequently challenged. William DeVaughn, with backing by MFSB, advises those of us who live stripped of the luxury possessions that have come to be identified with commercial or economic success to live in a state of awareness and gratitude. Be Thankful For What You Got makes a popular summer song because of its sexy, relaxed tempo, which resonates for anyone with an antipathy for mandatory work and the demands of the corporate clock. In his later work, Ballard wrote, “If their work is satisfying people don't need leisure in the old-fashioned sense. No one ever asks what Newton or Darwin did to relax, or how Bach spent his weekends. At Eden-Olympia work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.” Which could also describe our life today on the nanosecond. 

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