"The Way It Is": Yuppie Rock Even A West Coast Gangsta Could Love

Though they certainly tried, when it came to '80s Guilt Rock, I don't know if Phil Collins, Bono, Don Henley et al. ever topped Bruce Hornsby & the Range's "The Way It Is."

In December of 1986, two weeks after Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" peaked at #1 on the US Billboard charts, and one week after Peter Cetera and Amy Grant hit the pole position with "The Next Time I Fall," Bruce Hornsby & the Range topped that very same chart with "The Way It Is." If I may, allow me to share with you the extremely fun, sexy, feel-good, party 'til you drop lyrics  of "The Way It Is":

Standing in line, marking time
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in a silk suit hurries by
And as he catches a poor old lady's eye
Just for fun he says
"Get a job"

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
Ah, but don't you believe them

Said hey little boy
You can't go where the others go
'Cuz you don't look like they do
Said hey old man
How can you stand to think that way
And did you really think about it
Before you made the rules
He said, son

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
Ah, but don't you believe them

Well they passed a law in '64
To give those who ain't got a little more
But it only goes so far
Because the law don't change another's mind
When all it sees at the hiring time
Is the line on the color bar

Geez. Can you say "buzzkill"? Somebody wasn't doing enough coke at the strip club that week.

I love cracking jokes about vapid hair metal and pre-packaged dance-pop as much as the next '80s music blogger, but every once in a while, you know, I've got to give the '80s listening public a little bit of credit. Because how did this song become a #1 hit? There's not a single deployment of the word "baby" in it, let alone "babe," "girl," or even "honey." Here's a word that should have automatically disqualified it from receiving significant radio play: "welfare." He says "welfare." On a hit single! The label should have, like, bleeped it out or something. Oh, and on top of that, he's sprinkling these absurdly jazzy piano solos all over the place. It's like if Bill Evans or Keith Jarrett decided to go electro-pop. I'll give Hornsby this much: if his goal was to scale the charts, he sure didn't make it easy on himself.

On the other hand, I can see why the song became a hit. It became a hit ... because good lord, it's catchy. Who gives a crap about all the depressing socio-political mumbo jumbo he's singing about? Listen to that piano riff! I was six years old when the song came out, and even though most of the subject matter undoubtedly flew right over my brilliant (for six) little head, you better believe I was singing along. Talk about a toe-tapping groove. And Hornsby's voice doesn't croak and wheeze like Dylan or Leonard Cohen or somebody who obviously only got a record deal on the strength of their lyricism. He sounds like yer average soft rock crooner. It's a death trap.



In fact, "The Way It Is" sounds for all the world like an '80s "comeback" hit from a former '60s superstar, not the second single from an artist's debut album. Granted, Hornsby was roughly 30 years old at the time, but he somehow managed to come across as if he'd already released fifteen records and was still recovering from the bad acid he'd dropped at Watkins Glen. It's a little unclear to me exactly who the "Range" were, as the instrumentation seems to consist of Hornsby's fluttering piano and eight brand new synthesizers. (Side note: who names their band "the Range"? People cannot be a "range." Range, as in open countryside, where the deer and the antelope play, right? And doesn't your band have to be plural? You can't be "Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker." Or maybe he meant the kitchen appliance. Maybe their original name was "Bruce Hornsby and the Hot Plate.")

Now I'm as sharp as they come, but I have to admit that the last verse has never made complete sense to me, and it seems like it was intended to be this powerful, emotionally affecting verse, so the fact that I've never understood it ... has always irked me. What, precisely, is a "color bar"? Aren't those the blocky graphics you see when your TV isn't working right? That's probably not what he's talking about. Maybe he's referring to a line on a job application where the applicant is asked to state his or her "color"? Now, I don't know what job applications looked like in the '80s, but I'm fairly certain this is illegal in 2018 (applications might ask for "ethnicity" but not "color" - if even that). I think his point is that bias still persists among employers even though the law has rendered "explicit" bias illegal, but if so, I'm not sure he made it terribly clear. AMG's William Ruhlmann describes the song as "a brave if somewhat clumsily written attack on the heartless right-wing politics of the mid-'80s ... The boldness of the statement and the lovely piano theme more than compensate for the awkward writing ..." OK, cool, so it's not just me then!

One line I think I do understand is the last line of the chorus. In the verses, Hornsby lists several socio-economic situations that sound bleak and hopeless, and then, in the chorus, at first he seems to suggest apathy, but it turns out that he's merely been parroting other people's apathy, because his own stance is, "Ah, but don't you believe them." That line really turns the whole song around. You know what? I'm with Hornsby on this one. Change is slow, change is stubborn, but that doesn't mean that "some things never change." In fact, a sure-fire way to guarantee that something unpleasant will never change is to declare that "it'll never change." Let me whip out a little MLK here: "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. Bee-otch."

He probably didn't say that last part.

But I know who probably thought he did. Before I explored rap in earnest, I would always come across writers who described Tupac as some sort of "socially conscious" gangsta rapper. When I eventually sat down and listened to Me Against the World and All Eyez On Me, well ... if I squinted and tilted my head, I could sorta kinda see two or three songs that seemed to address "social issues," but compared to, say, Public Enemy or Ice Cube, he seemed like weak tea to me. I guess Death Row was merely waiting 'til he croaked (the dead no longer needing to constantly maintain a "bad ass thug incapable of sensitive introspection" image) to release some of his more thoughtful work.



Wait a second, is that a sample of ...? Oh yeah. That's right. Tupac took Bruce Hornsby to the ghetto. Can I see the members of the Range put their hands in the air and wave 'em like they just don't care? One, two, three and to the f'oh, Bruce Hornsby & the Range is at the d'oh, ready to make an entrance so back on up, 'cause you know they 'bout to ... rip that piano up? Notice how, when a '90s rapper chose to sample a political song from the '80s, he didn't sample a track from some polemical indie band like the Minutemen or Minor Threat that rock critics were drooling over; he sampled Bruce Hornsby's "The Way It Is." Because hey, that was the kind of white "political" rock that actually made its way to his neighborhood! Black inner city kids probably weren't listening to SST Records.

One "change" I never quite understood about "Changes" is why Pac (or his posthumous production team) altered the chorus of "The Way It Is" from "Some things'll never change" to "Things'll never be the same." Isn't Tupac's whole point that, actually, so many things (the War on Drugs, black-on-black crime, the disproportionate amount of black men in prison) are still the same? What does Tupac's disembodied ghost have to say about this thematic inconsistency? Of course, there are those who claim he's been dead for 20 years. Ah, but don't you believe them.