These are just some of the answers to the simple yet groundbreaking question these poor people ask in cities and villages around the globe: "Why are we poor?" In the tradition of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 'The Poor People Band' struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and its quiet resignation...all while slapping it in the face with sweet telecaster action. Poor People allows the poor to speak for themselves, explaining the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. This whole discussion is lubricated by loading doses of lonestar and getting your Austin soul jam on this Sunday.
There is the alcoholic mother in Buddhist Thailand, sure that her poverty is punishment for transgressions in a former life, and her ten-year-old daughter, whose faith in her own innocence gives her hope that her sin in the last life was simply being rich. There is the Siberian-born beggar who pins her woes on a tick bite and a Gypsy curse more than a half century ago, and the homeless, widowed Afghan women who have been relegated to a "respected" but damning invisibility. There are Big and Little Mountain, two Japanese salarymen who lost their jobs suddenly and now live in a blue-tarp hut under a Kyoto bridge. And, most haunting of all, there is the faded, starving beggar-girl, staring empty-eyed on the back steps of Austins Central Bus Station, whose only response to Poor Peoples query is simply, "I think I am rich."
The result of Poor Peoples fearless journey is a look at poverty and rock unlike any other. Complete with more than 10 powerfully affecting songs—taken of the interviewees by the band itself—this series of vignettes and searing insights represents a tremendous step toward an understanding of this age-old social ill. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye and ear, Poor People invite their fans to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience and the extreme force that good old fashioned rock and roll can have on every one of us.
Come out to the Mohawk this Sunday and help out some Poor People, all while getting your rock on...
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