Music for the weekend: Jen Chapin’s video “Feed Your Baby”

I was sent a press release this week: “Thought this evocative and provocative song/video “Feed Your Baby” about our broken food system by Jen Chapin (daughter of the late great Harry Chapin) might interest you.”

It did.

I thought the drawings were gorgeous.  But I couldn’t understand the words.

When I complained, they sent them and promised to get the words posted on YouTube.

“Feed Your Baby” (words & music by Jen Chapin)

city shut down the B84
was our only good ride to the grocery store
paycheck goes to the glucose strip
patience goes to the 95 minute bus trip
30 hour week — I wish they’d give me more
and I wonder what it’s all for
when I can’t feed my baby no more

worry worry work and cry
full warm breast goes limp and dry
wilted leaves still priced too high
red raw fingers fill the sack
raid the trailers send them back
silos rotting still I lack
enough to feed my baby
its tough to feed my baby

Granma grew her yams in the yard
in the Carib sun chile it’s not so hard
but she traded that sun for the cold and the cash
strong hands picking up office trash
you never dig dirt with a new green card
but her fingers still ache for the yard
now that feeding her baby’s so hard

worry worry work and cry
full warm breast goes limp and dry
wilted leaves still priced too high
red raw fingers fill the sack
raid the trailers send them back
silos rotting still I lack
enough to feed my baby
its tough to feed my baby

junk food minefield on the tv
dinnertime battle him against me
change the channel try not to see
starvation
still starvation
in the 21st century

worry worry work and cry
full warm breast goes limp and dry
wilted leaves still priced too high
red raw fingers fill the sack
raid the trailers send them back
silos rotting still I lack
enough to feed my baby
its tough to feed my baby

Here’s what the press release says this is about:

Chapin says, “I’ve been thinking about food justice issues for as long as I can remember, but it was only when I became a mother (and a mother of an exhaustingly picky eater in my 2nd son Van, at that) that my ideas coalesced into a song.

Being responsible for the nourishment of small children really brings it all into stark and harrowing detail and you experience the joys and heartbreaks of our industrial food system in a new way — the good and the bad, the plentiful and the scarce, the gorgeously natural and the mindlessly over-processed.

Maria Eugênia (with animation assistance by Nick Matias) brought all these contrasts, and really, a lot of the heartbreak, to their powerful video.