One of my favorite Led Zeppelin songs is “The Immigrant Song”, that telling the tale of the ancient Norseman’s brave oceanic migration to the “western shore”, presumably of North America. I’ve come to see another powerful but less-remembered rock song as an immigrant song for our times, however . . .

It was a Monday
A day like any other day
I left a small town
For the apple in decay
It was my destiny
It’s what we needed to do
They were telling me
I’m telling you
I was inside looking outside
The millions of faces
But still I’m alone
Waiting, hours of waiting
Paying a penance
I was longing for home
I’m looking out for the two of us
I hope we’ll be here
When they’re through with us . . . (for complete lyrics click here . . . )

Sometimes the lyrics of a song and the power of a song itself can give you a different perspective, really put you in someone else’s shoes. One of these songs somehow got in my head today and I remembered what a great and seldom-heard-today rock song it is. I’m talking everything: it’s hard rock, menacing guitar riffs and rhythm and a rocking horn section that is a perfect fit for its epic, metropolitan struggle of one against all, all crafted around a brilliant vocal setting the perfect tone for its lyrics. Then it hit me somehow that these are lyrics that are playing themselves out in real life out all over our own country and in many part of the so-called First World and will only increasingly do so in the coming decades. The human phenomenon I speak of is immigration, mainly undocumented, much of it not, and the forgotten hit song, as many of you quickly recognized, is “A Long, Long Way From Home”, recorded by the aptly-named (but surely inadvertently so) Anglo-American rock group Foreigner. The song was written by lead guitarist Mick Jones, vocalist Lou Graham, and saxophonist/keyboardist Ian McDonald, according to Wikipedia.

The lyrics of this song are probably not intended to be about international immigration, as the protagonist leaves his wife, significant other, and all he has known in his “small town for the Apple in decay”, a clear allusion to our biggest city.  Although not specifically expressed, this indeed seems to be move of economic desperation, income, as it “was our destiny, it’s what we needed to do, they were telling me, I’m telling you”. As moving and dramatic and tragic as this song is, the meaning and aptness of the lyrics is even more so when seen though the mind of a foreign immigrant even more desperate and alienated–“the millions of faces, but still I’m alone”–not able to speak our language and thus usually suited only for those jobs at those jobs at the bottom rungs of our social ladder, relegated far below the values of wealth and success we value so highly. Such immigrants know exactly where they stand in their new world.

It is worth pointing out that the line ” . . . it’s what we needed to do, they were telling me, I’m telling you” sounds fit to be the urging of friends or family members that the best or only chance they have out of economic difficulty is to migrate to a country with better opportunities–go north, usually. I never saw this song in this way until now. The songs we love become a chronology and often an emotional history of our lives. The best of them tell stories and teach us with lyrics told by another but to things with which we are familiar and can viscerally relate. Many of you remember “A Long, Long Way From Home”. What I hope is that a song beloved and culturally and emotionally relevant to you will help you see others that are often despised in an entirely different and humane light. Try imagining the protagonist of the song, the song being about, a person of color, a person of Indian descent, or Mestizo, a person with brown skin who out of economic desperation came to this country to grind out a living for his or herself and loved ones counting on them to do so. This is exactly the plight of the man in the Foreigner song yet probably few of us imagined that man to look like the man in the picture above.

Rock music fans, hard rock and metal in particular, I’ve come to realize, see things through a white cultural lens even though the origin of the music is in the blues and early rock and roll, both African-American art forms. As we know, it largely took white artists on both sides of the pond to popularize it into the lasting worldwide phenomenon that it became. Do many U.S. rockers realize the the bands of your lives have fanatical followings throughout Latin America? For example, one live recording of “Enter Sandman” by Metallica made in Mexico City was at times close to being overwhelmed by the loud, mass reaction of those in attendance. We see, I suspect, the protagonists our our songs, those for example, betrayed by a lover or a boss, as largely white characters. Yet these and other themes portrayed in the music us rockers listen to suffer many of the “slings and arrows” of life along with its joys and triumphs that almost anyone in the world would, especially when they are culturally similar to us. Being “A Long, Long Way from Home” in an alien world is one of those themes, and casting a different and deserving protagonist in your mind’s eye when you listen to the song will help you to see the humanity of desperate others who don’t look quite like you do.