This is the first song that has been the perfect fit for the Video of the Day (for obvious reasons), and the Morning Commute. Jessicka’s track, Penniless Fools, is the first song we’ve considered for cross-categorization, and it is a well deserved accolade.
Starting out with almost a minute of B-roll footage, Penniless Fools really gets started at around the :50 mark, but the shots beforehand are nice enough to keep your interest focused on the song. Once the song does get started, you’ll be instantly happy that you stuck around. Jessicka’s voice and the instrumentation is reminiscent of Florence + the Machine, but Jessicka has a style all her own. With a powerful voice and a beautiful arrangement to back her up, the singer-songwriter from Vancouver takes a very meta look at the roles we play in life. The tape she plays in the middle of the song at the 3:15 mark plays the role of the average human mind:
“It’s a measly manner of existence,
to get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer
to devote your whole life to keeping stock,
or making phone calls,
or selling,
or buying.
To suffer 50 weeks of the year
for a two week vacation
when all you really desire is to be outside with your shirt off,
but still,
that’s how you build a future.”
Penniless Fools gets into the dilemma of working to support yourself financially vs. doing the things that you love to support yourself mentally. A very small percentage of people get up and go to a job that they love, a larger percentage enjoy a lot of the aspects of their job, and a much larger percentage hate what they do much more frequently than they enjoy it. This song gets into that and makes you really question whether the financial stability is worth using your only shot at life to be completely miserable.
This is a song that really resonates with me and a situation I went through recently. I was making a lot of money in a position where I essentially had to sell my soul to the devil. I decided it would be best to leave that job without a backup plan in place because I couldn’t take one more day of the soul-crushing position I was in. I knew that we would take a substantial pay cut for a while and that I may not find something for quite a while, but the financial stability that job provided wasn’t worth the strain it put on me and my family. Fast forward 7 months, and I now have multiple streams of revenue, all coming from sources that I absolutely love (or at least love more than I dislike). I still don’t make the same kind of money I made previously, but that really doesn’t matter when I’m about to be buried.
“Living the dream, but not much sleep.”