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Interpretations:Alienation's For The Rich

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Flans has occasionally jokingly attributed this song to his father Earl. Since Flans attended the Pratt Institute, he could be the son who's "gotta go to art school." I seriously doubt this song is ACTUALLY about Mr. Earl Flansburgh, who, by all accounts, is a successful architect, not a penniless drunk driver. The (unreliable?) narrator might be intended to be a largely fictionalized version of Flans's father, though.

I think it's just a country music spoof, but a funny one at that. A hard-drinking grizzled country singer whose son's gotta go to art school is pretty amusing.

"Alienation" was a crucial part of Karl Marx's theory about the experience of the proletariat. This feeling (which was supposed to result from the fact that workers were not in ownership of the 'means of production') was to lead to revolution toward communism. The joke in the song is that the idea is a favorite of rich (middle class) leftists, and is worthless to the working class louts themselves. --Nehushtan 20:55, 16 Feb 2006 (CST)

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