The Rust Belt Raconteur

Heartland Rock in the Age of Reagan: John Mellencamp, Part One

John Mellencamp (image subject to copyright)

John Mellencamp is gearing up for a greatest hits tour this summer. Rock and roll’s favorite curmudgeon has finally decided that maybe the old songs and hits aren’t quite so bad. It somehow seems fitting at this particular moment that the socially conscious Mellencamp is hitting the road to play the hits from his most successful, and arguably his most political, period.

That said, I thought I would revisit a post that I wrote five years ago over on Medium. It’s designed to be an examination of Mellencamp’s most fertile political period, whereby I examine one album per post, beginning with 1983’s Uh-Huh and going through to 1989’s Big Daddy.

But some background for the uninitiated.

John Mellencamp’s commercial peak coincided with the two terms of the Ronald Reagan administration. While it was his third album, 1982’s American Fool, that broke him to a larger audience, it’s with 1983’s Uh-Huh that Mellencamp began to explore more socially conscious songs. He produced four jaw-dropping albums using his songs as a clarion call to the fallacy of “Reaganomics.”

The relationship between music and social consciousness has a long history. In Western culture, socially conscious music is traced back to “The Cutty Wren,” a coded anthem against feudal oppression dating back to the English peasants’ revolt of 1381.

Not surprisingly, America’s first musical social commentary songs have their beginnings with slavery. Songs like “Go Down Moses” were derived from hymns about freedom.

From the songs of Woody Guthrie to “Strange Fruit” to “For What It’s Worth” to “Sweet Home Alabama” to “Fuck the Police” to “Killing In The Name Of,” socially conscious music is interwoven into America’s DNA.

But in the 1980s, one artist stood out for challenging the political environment. He was far from the only one, but as the decade progressed, John Mellencamp would become one of the most popular performers and certainly one of the most popular with a very specific point of view. His critical and incisive songs topped the charts, largely because his brand of populist rock and roll was de rigueur.

More importantly, Mellencamp served as both witness and documentarian of the impact of the Reagan era on middle America.

Having sold over sixty million albums, Mellencamp has made his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the only way one does… with songs. And in the 80s, many of these songs documented the slow march towards the dystopian economic landscape many Americans, especially in the Midwest, find themselves in today.

John Mellencamp, then John Cougar (after an initial period of Johnny Cougar) ascended to rock stardom just as the Reagan administration’s economic theory of “trickle-down economics” was beginning to get a foothold. Known mostly by the colloquial “Reaganomics,” it is closely linked to Supply-Side Economics, as both use the Laffer Curve to emphasize their theory.

Without going into the weeds, and perhaps to oversimplify, “Reaganomics” is:

“The implementation of lessened taxes on high earners to incentivize business expansion and investment, with the idea that this growth will trickle down to lower earners in the form of financial and occupational benefits.” Or in the more popular vernacular the idea that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

Forty-plus years later, this economic theory, this “idea,” remains popular with many politicians because of its perceived success. The fact is that the policy then, as it does now, does two things. One, it never seems to trickle down as promoted or promised, and two, it serves to make the rich richer.

Combined with other factors, this three-card monte-like monetary policy has made the national debt skyrocket.

• The national debt in 1981 was 1 trillion dollars, and by the time Reagan left office in 1989, the debt had almost tripled to about 3 trillion dollars.

• The current national debt is now 38 trillion dollars…and counting - a ten trillion increase from when I first wrote this piece in 2021.

According to the Pew Research Center: “The 1980s marked the beginning of a long and steady rise in income inequality.”

From 1981 to 1990, during John Mellencamp’s commercial peak, this “trickle-down” policy eviscerated a large swath of the Midwest's economic foundation.

Our current administration has all but stopped bloviating about the “rising tide” and just started handing out tax breaks to the wealthy.

But alas, this article isn’t about the failed economic policies, well, not directly anyway — it’s about rock and roll.

Break on Through

As Bruce Springsteen is to the East Coast, John Mellencamp is to the Midwest. After a few years of modest success, in 1982, his album American Fool broke through as he found his voice. With the addition of drummer Kenny Aronoff, producer Don Gehman, and co-writing some of his hits with friend George M. Green, Mellencamp carved out a distinctive sound. A sound that would capture and come to define the region throughout the 80s. “Heartland Rock” went mainstream.

His self-reflective hits like “Hurts So Good” and “Jack & Diane” helped make American Fool a huge hit, peaking at #1 on Billboard’s album charts. The record would go on to sell five million copies in the US alone.

But the self-reflective songs of American Fool would soon give way to some of the most astute societal observations in pop music.

Write What You Know

What separated John Mellencamp from his contemporaries was his focus on the Midwest. Throughout his career, he never strayed, creatively or physically, from his “small town” of Seymour, Indiana. The heart and soul of the region are part of his biological and creative DNA.

Prior to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the Midwest was at its economic peak, and the middle class was thriving. You can hear Mellencamp’s admiration in the song “The Great Midwest,” from his self-titled 1979 album, John Cougar:

Everything is slower here, everybody’s got a union card
They get up on Sunday and go to church of their choice
Come back home cookout in the backyard

And they call this the Great Midwest
Where the cornfields row and flow
They’re all 5 years ahead of their time
Or 25 behind, I just don’t know

Those people Mellencamp sings about in “The Great Midwest” would soon find themselves at the ass-end of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. In the Midwest, the working middle class was not “lifted up” by the rising tides promised by “Reaganomics.” Quite the contrary.

Through this reckless economic policy, the region imploded as manufacturers shuttered or cut production, and family farms were auctioned off. By 1985, the Midwest had officially begun its decades-long economic descent, reaching its current nadir.

As income inequality grew, largely as a result of “Reaganomics,” John Mellencamp was taking notes and getting angry (he didn’t gain the nickname “Little Bastard” for his cheerful disposition).

Beginning with 1983’s Uh-Huh, Mellencamp produced four albums that capture the impact of “Reaganomics” and its influence on the widening social and economic chasms in America:

• 1983’s Uh-huh

• 1985’s Scarecrow

• 1986’s The Lonesome Jubilee

• 1989’s Big Daddy

Album 1 of 4 — Uh-huh

Despite the album’s blase’ title, Uh-Huh saw Mellencamp beginning to try his hand at more socially conscious songs. After having fought long and hard to achieve the success of American Fool, he was smart and savvy enough to hold his socially conscious ideas close to his chest.

It would be the first two songs on Uh-huh where Mellencamp tipped his hand just a little — “Crumblin’ Down” and “Pink Houses.”

What could initially be heard as a snarky flex (or rebuke) of rock stardom in “Crumblin’ Down,” the first verse ultimately sets Mellencamp’s lyrical agenda for the next six years:

Some people ain’t no damn good
You can’t trust ’em, you can’t love em
No good deed goes unpunished
And I don’t mind being their whipping boy
I’ve had that pleasure for years and years
No, no I never was a sinner-tell me what else can I do
Second best is what you get-till you learn to bend the rules
Time respects no person-what you lift up must fall
They’re waiting outside to claim my crumblin’ walls

In 2016, Mellencamp acknowledged that “Crumbin’ Down” is indeed a very political song:

“Reagan was president — he was deregulating everything and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.”

Where “Crumblin’ Down” may have been a veiled introduction to his political leanings, with Uh-Huh’s second single “Pink Houses,” Mellencamp goes all in. Immediately beginning with racial inequality and the subtle acknowledgment of eminent domain and its impact on the less privileged:

Well, there’s a black man with a black cat
Livin’ in a black neighborhood
He’s got an interstate runnin’ through his front yard
You know he thinks he’s got it so good

By the next verse, he addresses the ambivalence and hopelessness that would soon come to define Generation X:

Well, there’s a young man in a T-shirt
Listenin’ to a rock ’n’ roll station
He’s got greasy hair, greasy smile
He says: “Lord, this must be my destination.”

“Crumblin’ Down” and “Pink Houses” are not only the first two singles from the record, but they’re also the first two songs on Uh-Huh. They are about as politically charged as he chose to get at that time. But that would change by 1985’s Scarecrow.

The rest of Uh-Huh finds Mellencamp in familiar lyrical territory. The songs reflect all the things that defined him before the success of American Fool and have come to define him over the years:

• Pugnacious — “Authority Song”

• Reflective — “Warmer Place to Sleep”

• Snark— “Jackie O”

• Playfulness — “Play Guitar”

• Rebellion — “Serious Business”

• Goofy — “Loving Mother For Ya”

• Sensitive — “Golden Gates”

  Uh-Huh, was a solid successor to American Fool, earning solid reviews, peaking at number 9 on Billboard’s album charts and selling over three million copies in the US.

While he may have only dipped his toe in the social commentary water with “Crumblin Down” and “Pink Houses.” The world would soon recognize that John Mellencamp was taking excellent notes as his family, friends, and neighbors in Seymour, Indiana, began to feel the full weight of “Reaganomics.”

Over the years, there have been many jokes made at Mellencamp’s name changes — Johnny Cougar to John Cougar to John Cougar Mellencamp to his actual name, John Mellencamp. Uh-Huh stands out for the reasons above, but it’s also the first album where he publicly acknowledges his given surname — Mellencamp.

And whatever, call him what you will, Uh-Huh is the beginning of John Mellencamp trying his hand at more politically charged music.

By 1989’s Big Daddy, Mellencamp had proven himself not just a hitmaker, but the most credible musical chronicler of the Midwest’s unraveling.

Coincidentally, or fittingly, 1989 is the same year that Ronald Reagan left office.

Where Uh-Huh hinted at collapse, Scarecrow stared directly at the wreckage. In Part Two, I’ll look at Farm Aid and how Scarecrow turned rural dispossession into chart-topping protest music—and why it remains his most uncompromising statement.