The song 'Peaches' is a brilliant Marxist allegory. NO, WAIT, COME BACK!!!

NO REALLY!!! I HAVE SOMETHING INTERESTING TO SAY ABOUT THIS!!! PROBABLY!!!

So it has come to this. A topic dumb enough for one of those stupid YouTube video essays where a chin-stroking illiterate NEET with patchy facial hair pontificates about what he learned by skimming Wikipedia. As soon as this topic occurred to me I tried to bury it, tried to keep it down, tried to forget I ever thought about it. But it just. kept. coming. up. And now I’ve got a tight schedule because of law school finals and I had to write something to hit my blogging quota, and I’m sorry I let you all down, but I really do mean this: I think “Peaches” by the Presidents of the United States of America is a pretty powerful Marxist allegory. For a pop song, anyways. May God have mercy on my soul.

I know a total of two songs by the Presidents of the United States of America. One of them is “Lump,” which I hate, and the other one is “Peaches,” which I love. Beyond that all I know about them is something someone told me once about how their guitarist plays with bass strings and their bassist plays with guitar strings, I don’t know if that’s true and I’ve never looked it up. But about a year ago I was listening to “Peaches” and I started to realize that… it was… maybe (intentionally or not) grasping at some nuanced Marxist thought? WAIT! PLEASE DON’T LEAVE!!!!!!!!!

Memorably, Marx describes in the Manifesto the desire to obtain the “fruit of one’s labour,” to “work hard” until one can acquire private property for oneself, a persistent delusion under capitalism that few actually achieve (and which obscures the means by which the real “fruit” of one’s labour is extracted by the capitalists via surplus value). A peach is a literal fruit (please punch me in the fucking face if you see me in public), and the speaker in the song desperately fantasizes about peaches as he envisions “movin’ to the country” where he will “eat a lot of peaches”; to own property, a farm. There is a Jamesonian “nostalgia for the present” to be seen wherein a pastoral vision of country life from a nonspecific cliché of “the past” is longed for as framed through a romanticizing lens of pop culture. The actual hard work that goes into growing and picking peaches, for instance, or the labour which might be employed to do so (via either personal or exploitative hired labour) is absent from the fantasy, or at least made abstract—the fantasy involves:

PHASE 1: moving to the country.
PHASE 2: ????
PHASE 3: having a lot of peaches.

What is central to the mantra-like repetition of this “plan” is a sense of alienation from the product of one’s labour and modern capitalistic life, a deep pain that is repressed with the popular pharmakon of envisioning oneself one day owning land and a farm and sustaining oneself outside of the demoralizing “grind” of modern culture. The eating of peaches, a literalized direct connection with the product of one’s own labour—alienation is often placated with the fruits of commodity fetishism, identification with commodities, both the ownership of these items and the pursuit of them—while remaining ignorant of “nature” so-conceived under capitalism as just another means of production.

Peaches, a natural product, are transformed into a commodity under capitalism, and the labour which under-girds this process is obscured. The first chorus of the song rejects the initial idealization by pointing this out: “peaches come from a can / they were put there by a man / in a factory downtown.” The desire to see peaches as “natural” and “from the country” is defeated by the realization that under capitalism “peaches” are just as emblematic of industrialization and urban capitalist life as any other product. These commodified peaches, meanwhile, are transformed through a nearly psychosexual process (exemplified by the song’s speaker daydreaming while erotically fingering the peach in his hand) into capital—not merely peaches for oneself but the “millions of peaches” of the song’s outro, all of them belonging to the capitalist who dispenses them while living large. As we are presented this image in the coda a voice shouts at us a warning: “look out,” and the riff underneath it feels really menacing and threatening. The imbalance of power created via the unequal distribution of wealth (exemplified by the capitalist with his “millions of peaches”) becomes a threat to all of us. The capitalist class must accumulate, and it dooms us to potential apocalypse (whether annihilation via means of the nuclear, environmental, openly genocidal, general scarcity, what have you)—capitalism’s natural limit, the exhaustion of its own resources, could very easily turn deadly.

Okay. There. That’s out of my fucking system. If I ever sound like some BreadTube pseud cuck again be sure to send me to the Funny Farm.

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