UB40 - Signing Off (1980)

This post is dedicated to the person of the year 2012. So, after the Time magazine here's the choice of the musictraveler. It's the person under the name Unemployed Anonymous. While I don't have a picture of his/ hers to show to you, we all know him/ her very well; he's/she's one of us, he's/she's us. It's him/ her that suddenly lost the ground beneath his/ her feat. It's him/ her that is now experiencing an extremely toxic work market where nobody is hiring people so he/she knows that the unemployment status will keep him/her company for a very long time. It's him/ her that faces many difficulties to find a daily meal for him/her and his/her family. It's him/ her that is depressed, shocked, ashamed, frustrated, low self-respected. It's him/ her that has lost his/ her hope that his/ her dreams have become a nightmare. It's him/ her that is only a number in the neo-liberal statistics (which number is growing rapidly and hits historic highs). 

The relevant upload is an album the covers of which are replicas of the UK's Unemployment Benefit (Form 40) attendance card. I chose this one, containing a heavy political agenda (and far away from the covers-of-famous-songs-using-polished-reggae style they followed some years later), although it competed very hard with the band's second album that contains the track One In Ten, a reference to the number of unemployed in the UK at that time; the song for my country should go something like "I am the 2.7 in ten..."

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