The passing of outlaw country exponent David Allan Coe at 86 has left the academy grappling with the loss of our foremost theorist of proletarian negation. His seminal 1977 text, “Take This Job and Shove It,” remains a towering achievement in the literature of occupational refusal.
When examining Coe’s oeuvre, one is reminded of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener; however, Coe replaces the quiet tragedy of 'I would prefer not to' with a vastly more aggressive spatial realignment of the employer's labor apparatus. It cannot be coincidence that this linguistic rupture occurred in the late 1970s, a period trapped aesthetically between the high modernism of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the obscure agrarian melancholy of early-period Wendell Berry, and the television syndication of The Dukes of Hazzard. Coe's transgressive insistence that the job itself must be physically inserted into the supervisor transcends mere country music, becoming instead a visceral critique of late-stage capitalism.
The mandate to shove it is perhaps the most profound ontological instruction of the twentieth century, demanding we confront the physical boundaries of the wage-labor contract.
The general public, perhaps predictably, mistook Coe for a mere entertainer draped in denim and grievance. Yet for those equipped to parse the heavy structuralist architecture beneath the pedal steel guitar, his departure leaves an unfillable void in the discourse of American alienation.