Ponytail Picks #28 - Dirt

We’ve been digging like mad these past two weeks and our fingernails are filthy. Here are the picks we unearthed.

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LISTEN

Songs that dig up the dirt

Writing, creating, and sharing music always requires bravery, but these songs add another level of courage—by unmasking injustice.

You can listen to them individually below or as a playlist here.

Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”

Let’s start things off with some scorched-earth criticism from the High Priestess of Soul herself. You got to go with the live version. I always leave the song feeling convicted and cheering with the (I’m guessing mostly white) 1964 audience.

Bob Dylan, “Hurricane”

Being white didn’t stop Dylan from calling bullshit when it came to Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s wrongful incarceration. It may have taken another ten years, but the attention the song brought to Carter’s situation may have helped bring about his eventual release. So music can help.

Tracy Chapman “Behind the Wall”

Tracy Chapman doesn’t shy away from tough topics. Race, class, sex—they all get their time in the sun of her songwriting skills. This one shines light on a horror often kept in the dark: domestic violence. The story will have you calling a spade a spade—that “domestic” violence is violence, and needs to be addressed with the same seriousness we offord other types of violence. Anything else is sexist, patriarchal propoganda.

Rage Against the Machine, “Maria”

Rage Against the Machine lived up to their name with every release, but this harrowing story of an undocument immigrant making her way from one oppressive environment into another gets to the heart of their message by explaining the band’s rage through story. If you’re able to deny the injustice the song describes after listening to it, where’s your soul at?

Phoebe Bridgers, “Motion Sickness”

This one requires a little more backstory than the others, but it also offers a personal kind of dirt that bears representation here.

Before becoming one of the reigning queens of indie, Phoebe Bridgers found herself in an abusive relationship with a much older and more established artist, Ryan Adams. After getting out from under his thumb, Bridgers wrote this song and had the bravery to speak publicly about what it referred to.

Sometimes, I wonder if she’s tired of being identified with this part of her life, but that feeling never takes away from her power or the song’s. I hope she doesn’t mind me bringing it up again here.

-AK

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WATCH

A documentary about actual dirt

Agriculture. It isn’t sexy. It’s hard work. And the people who do it are up against some inconceivably large forces—weather and climate change, corporate greed, outdated government regulation—basically all the Big Bad Wolves of our time. For decades, desperate farmers have been pushed toward techniques that make these problems worse, but a growing movement within the food production industry—regenerative farming—plans to change that trajectory.

With the help of Netflix, Kiss the Ground introduced the idea of regenerative farming to mainstream audiences in 2020. The film might oversimplify things a little, but the general concept—that traditional, “no-till,” biodiverse farming practices can turn food production from a climate-change problem into part of the solution—still holds. It’s well worth the hour-and-a-half running-time.

-AK

In the mood for more earthy entertainment?

Check out these previous editions of Ponytail Picks

READ

A novel that digs up the dirt by digging up dirt

Not exactly a hidden gem sort of pick, at least in my part of the world, but I couldn’t resist plugging this classic novel by the versatile Louis Sachar (see a tribute I did to another one of his works in Ponytail Picks #14 - Class).

The dirt in Holes, unsurprisingly, is being dug up, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Stanley Yelnats and the other boys at the youth detention camp at Camp Green Lake have to dig one big hole every day as a cruel punishment for the misdemeanors of their past. It’s backbreaking work and with bloody, blistered hands Stanley remarks to himself in the midst of his first hole that it “felt like he was digging his own grave” (38). 

But is punishment the only reason for their digging? The life stuff that makes up our earth holds remnants of many past lives gone by, so what secrets lie beneath the sun-hardened surface at Camp Green Lake? “One thing was certain” for Stanley, after a found object in the dirt prompted their superiors to organize a concentrated digging effort at the spot of the discovery, “They weren’t just digging to ‘build character.’ They were definitely looking for something” (71).

Sachar smoothly shifts between past and present stories as he slowly unearths the truth of what happened at the lake one hundred and ten years ago and Stanley discovers what signs of those times were left behind in the dirt. 

-JB

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The soil has been tilled. We’ll see you in a couple weeks as we harvest another crop of picks, this time on the theme of

hair.*

*Thanks to devoted readers Adriel Brandt and Amran Gowani for suggesting this theme!