I woke up this morning with an old song in my head from The Threepenny Opera, which seems newly relevant these days. But there’s something about that play that seems very…resistant? Maybe the play is bad and the music is worse; but maybe there’s something about it we just can’t deal with, something that resists earnest, honest production. The Lincoln Center production that lent the play its iconography in the US was nearly fifty years ago, and a quick scan of musical performances on YT is a wasteland of bumbling pretension. If the best rendition of “What Keeps Mankind Alive” is by Tom Waits from the Hal Willner album Lost in the Stars, that in itself says a lot.
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching that's where it begins
You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn for once the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing morals follow on
So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive
What keeps mankind alive
The fact that millions
Are daily tortured stifled punished silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
For once you must try not to shirk the facts
Mankind is kept alive
By bestial acts