Everybody Knows

Everybody knows,

so we can all agree that Leonard Cohen was a careful student of modern song, as Bruce Springsteen is. When you sing a popular song, you want everybody to know it.

What does everyone know? Cohen tells us in detail, but so have earlier African-American songwriters such as Nat King Cole in one of the finest Christmas Songs—“Everybody knows” the standard elements of a white Christmas. He tells us, “Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe, Help to make the season bright.” And then he hones in on the real excuse for consumer Christmas, the kids, “They know that Santa's on his way
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh”

Indeed the line “everybody knows” is an acknowledgement of the specific features of mainstream culture, we all know, both children and parents with their knowing nod, even those who live outside Middle American, those who serve and entertain but do not belong wholly. Nat King Cole’s gentle acknowledgement of cliché and convention, a relatively quiet tip off that he is singing for an audience that has very specific expectations, a collection of listeners who want to hear standard references in their Christmas songs, we all know what they we are supposed to hear.

This acquiescence to tradition and hegemony is then given a more critical version in Nina Simone’s “Misssissippi Goddamn” where “everybody knows” refers to the universal understood news that this particularly retrograde state does unspeakably horrible things to black folks, which everybody knows, but which cannot possibly be stated in song directly. Common knowledge here is not about the comforts of a Christian holiday but the brutality of racism, The phrase always also means that we don’t need to express these things because they are already known, whether its Nat King Cole’s Christmas or the violence of deep Southern racism.  Simone sings, “And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam” to tell us that we have all read the newspaper and that both black and white people know what goes on, but the line implies also that there are distinctly different forms of knowing. Everybody knows what they know which means they surely disagree. Nina Simone elaborates, then in case not everyone in the audience knows what she does:

 Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Leonard Cohen expands on Nina Simone’s knowledge by listing off all the unacknowledged things that we know: that the dice were loaded, that the fight was fixed—for anyone who first heard the song, the list goes on to include more than civil rights politics to include our own personal, subjective delusions about ourselves.  When I first heard the song, I was thrilled that someone had finally spelled out –not just the fact that the world was crooked, but that we all knew it, despite whatever official optimism we Americans are required to project.

So when Bruce Springsteen sings the lines in “The Ghost of Tom Joad”:

Well the highway is alive tonight
Where it's headed everybody knows

He is turning against his own mythology of the promised land, even as he is echoing the lyrics of earlier songs. Springsteen borrows but only in order to acknowledge that his own hope of escape was false—a statement that may have surprised his fans but which he tells them they should have known of course.  In the end, they prefer the myth and not what everyone knows. Springsteen’s working class has abandoned his political viewpoint, and he is left with the cultured, academic crowd that studies the history of American song lyrics. Everybody knows now has been turned into a nasty revival of the violence coupled with political apathy—everybody always knew so what can we do? Thus, the phrase today has turned from a cynical critique of the system to a passive acceptance by working class voters who empower the wrong kind of boss because "everybody rolls with their fingers crossed."