Ain’t Nobody’s Business – a List About Privacy and Popular Music

If Tiger Woods isn’t yet inspired to write his own tune about celebrity and privacy, he may at least want to kick back to the blues standard Ain’t Nobody’s Business. Or if that’s not enough to give Tiger some comfort in these trying times, he could also put on some Michael Jackson or Pink Floyd.

This post is about music with a link to privacy. I’ve compiled a list of ten songs and albums that offer some comment on privacy – from the standard lament for loss of privacy by celebrity pop stars, to deeper comments on privacy in society, to Pete Townshend’s radical 1971 social media project, Lifeforce.

There are many, many more. Have one you like? Please comment!

Ain’t Nobody’s Business, Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins

This song was written in the 1920s by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins and has since been recorded by a number of artists, including Billie Holiday, Eric Clapton and Willie Nelson. The lyrics have been adapted at times, but the theme of the song is personal privacy. Here’s the final verse of the version sung by Billie Holiday:

I swear I won’t call no copper
If I’m beat up by my papa
Ain’t nobody’s business if I do
Nobody’s business
Ain’t nobody’s business
Nobody’s business if I do

Peter McWilliams’ 1966 libertarian book Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Country contains an argument against the regulation of “victimless crimes” – its title inspired by the Grainger and Robbins song. Feminists have differed from McWilliams on the value of the privacy norm sung about in Ain’t Nobody’s Business at least since Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay The Personal is Political.

Lyrics here. Sources: Wikipedia 1 and 2, Squidoo.

Electric Eye, Judas Priest

This 1982 song by heavy metal band Judas Priest does a nice job of characterizing Orwellian-style government surveillance though its hyper-aggressive music and lyrics. The song opens:

Up here in space
I’m looking down on you.
My lasers trace
Everything you do.
You think you’ve private lives
Think nothing of the kind.
There is no escape
I’m watching all the time

Lyrics here. Source Wikipedia.

Every Breath You Take, Sting

Sting has said that this hit song from 1983 is about unrequited love – “ugly and sinister” rather than the love song some think it to be. When he wrote it in a single night, Sting says, “I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.”

Lyrics here. Sources: Wikipedia, Sting.com and BBC.

Lifehouse, Pete Townshend

Lifehouse is a Pete Townshend music and film project that was never produced in its originally conceived form, but has led to a legacy of works, including The Who’s Who’s Next album, Townshend’s own year 2000 6-CD set The Lifehouse Chronicles and a now-defunct internet site called The Lifehouse Method at which visitors could transform their personal data into original musical compositions.

The Lifehouse project, which was in works in the very early 1970s, was a product of Townshend’s remarkable vision. Not only did he develop a story line about a futuristic society connected by an internet-like grid, Townshend’s vision was to create music that was translated from audience personal information. The following is from the Wikipedia entry for Lifehouse as it exists today:

Pete went wild, working out a complex scenario whereby a personal profile of each concert-goer would be worked out, from the individual’s astrological chart to his hobbies, even physical appearance. All the characteristics would then be fed into a computer at the same moment, leading to one musical note culminating in mass nirvana that Townshend dubbed ‘a kind of celestial cacophony.’ This philosophy was based on the writings of Inayat Khan, a Sufi master musician who espoused the theory that matter produces heat, light, and sound in the form of unique vibrations. Taking the idea one step further, making music, which was composed of vibrations, was the pervading force of all life. Elevating its purpose to the highest level, music represented the path to restoration, the search for the one perfect universal note, which once sounded would bring harmony to the entire world.

Townshend’s project therefore foretold the very issues related to privacy, technology and social media that we are only beginning to grapple with today.

Sources: Ear Candy Mag, Wikipedia.

Mind Your Own Business, Hank Williams Sr.

I couldn’t find much online history about this 1949 song by singer songwriter Hank Williams Sr. Here’s the first verse:

If the wife and I are fussin’, brother that’s our right
Cause me and that sweet woman got a license to fight
Why don’t you mind your own business
(Mind your own business)
Cause if you mind your own business you won’t be minding mine

Obvious echos of Ain’t Nobody’s Business.

Lyrics here.

Privacy, Michael Jackson

This is the newest song in this list, released in 2001 on Michael Jackson’s Invincible album. He sings:

Ain’t the pictures enough, why do you go through so much
To get the story you need, so you can bury me
You’ve got the people confused, you tell the stories you choose
You try to get me to lose the man I really am
You keep on stalking me, invading my privacy
Won’t you just let me be
‘Cause your cameras can’t control, the minds of those who know
That you’ll even sell your soul just to get a story sold

Lyrics here. Source: Wikipedia.

Mrs. Robinson, Paul Simon

In 1999 Paul Simon wrote an op-ed in the New York Times called The Silent Superstar. He explains that the famous verse in Mrs. Robinson about Joe DiMaggio was a tribute to the dignity DiMaggio displayed as a celebrity. Simon explains:

It was said that [DiMaggio] still grieved for his former wife, Marilyn Monroe, and sent fresh flowers to her grave every week. Yet as a man who married one of America’s most famous and famously neurotic women, he never spoke of her in public or in print. He understood the power of silence.

And more:

Why do we do this even as we know the attribution of heroic characteristics is almost always a distortion? Deconstructed and scrutinized, the hero turns out to be as petty and ego-driven as you and I. We know, but still we anoint. We deify, though we know the deification often kills, as in the cases of Elvis Presley, Princess Diana and John Lennon. Even when the recipient’s life is spared, the fame and idolatry poison and injure. There is no doubt in my mind that DiMaggio suffered for being DiMaggio.

Simon’s famous song and his reflections on it are of current relevance given the currently unfolding Tiger Woods saga.

Lyrics here. Source Wikipedia, New York Times.

Twentieth Century Man, Ray Davies

This was written by Ray Davies and recorded by the Kinks in 1971. Davies bemoans the insanity and aggravation of modern living – technology, napalm, hydrogen bombs and biological warfare. He writes:

I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy, got no liberty
Cos the twentieth century people
Took it all away from me.

Lyrics here. Source, Wikipedia.

The Wall, Pink Floyd

The Wall is Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera. It’s about the life of “Pink,” who withdraws from society into self-imposed isolation behind “The Wall.” Bassist Roger Waters wrote most of the album, which reflects his own experiences and feelings about celebrity. A 1997 incident in which Waters spat on an member of a Pink Floyd audience at a Montreal concert led him to express a need for isolation from audience members, and eventually The Wall.

Source: Wikipedia.

2112, Neil Peart

2112 is Rush’s 1975 science fiction epic, written by drummer and lyricist Neil Peart. Peart, who was inspired by the writings of libertarian Ayn Rand, created a seven-part story that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world controlled by the “Priests of the Temples of Syrinx.” Here are a couple versus from the second part of the song – The Temples of Syrinx.

We’ve taken care of everything
The words you hear, the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes
It’s one for all and all for one
We work together, common sons
Never need to wonder how or why

We are the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx
Our great computers fill the hallowed halls
We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx
All the gifts of life are held within our walls

In parts three through six the song’s protagonist finds a guitar from the old world, presents it to the Priests who tell him “it doesn’t fit the plan,” goes home to dream of the old world before waking to reality and falling into a deep depression. The song ends with the protagonist committing suicide and the priests bellowing, “We have assumed control.” Pretty heavy stuff – addressed on more internet sites than you can count as well as in university courses.

Lyrics here. Source Wikipedia.