"There's a good life
right across the green fields.
And each generation
stares at it from afar.
But we keep no check
On our appetites.
So the green fields turn to brown
Like paper in fire."

Some day we'll know what those lines really mean.

I love the melodies in this song, the harmonies, the electric guitar tone, the fiddle cue, the roots chord progressions reimagined and aggressive. But this song is not getting off the ground without the drumming of Kenny Aronoff, who has the sense to stay pretty much out of the verses other than a shoestring of a rim shot line over a humming 4-beat kick. Then his full entrance in the chorus is explosive, full of accents, fills, and voicings of such personality.

I feel the pure indignation of this song, and of small-town Indiana John Mellencamp in general in this period, his most relevantly righteous, right there in the midst of Reagan's '80s and the American farming decline.

The song is probably not for everyone, probably insultingly moral to some on both wings, but I see it as the work of a poet who worked with both sounds and sense, an FM radio Hesiod.