Every week, the Milwaukee Music Premiere presented by The Cooperage connects the city’s artists with our listening audience. If you’re an artist with a track you’d like us to debut exclusively on Radio Milwaukee, head over to our Music Submission page to learn how.
The heart of New Beliefs’ track we’re helping debut today is a deeply frustrated message about living in a capitalist society. But, first, an explainer about its curious title.
“Aspidistra” isn’t a word you hear in common conversation, although it is a fairly common houseplant. More to the point and as explained by the always-knowledgeable Floral Greens Farmers of Florida, its popularity in late Victorian Britain led to it becoming a “symbol of dull middle-class respectability.”
The great George Orwell latched onto it as a metaphor for his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which laid out the futility of resisting capitalism and — almost nine decades after it was first published — is the seed from which New Beliefs’ “Aspidistra” sprouted.
The six-piece folk-rock outfit tilt toward the “folk” portion of that duality with this piece of social commentary, lamenting the pointlessness of “trying to fight the system from within and … living morally in a capitalist society when you’ve been dealt a crappy hand.” You don’t exactly get hopeless vibes from the downright jaunty keyboard and guitar that take you into the song, but the lyrics (and Dylan-indebted vocals) explain things in short order:
It’s not like I had a choice
Came into the world a bootshine boy
And a child of the system who grew into the unemployed
So judge me not by the state of my shoes
I still got a lot to lose
And I’ve been told I was bad news since the day I was born
Thankfully, New Beliefs have some good news coming this Friday, when new EP Wheels in Motion gets its release and a celebratory live show at Linneman’s. For now, you can enjoy “Aspidistra” via the player on this page and 88Nine’s airwaves throughout today (7:30 and 11:30 a.m.; 3:30, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m.).
