I grew up in a super suburban place where the mundane middle-class issues were similar to what Ray Davies was singing about. All the topics he was singing about were middle-class woes and humanitarian woes - human-being woes.
Woes cluster. Rare are solitary woes; They love a train, they tread each other's heel.
A soul singer is always singing to their crowd. They're always singing about their woes to you. And I really appreciate that when a singer is making you feel... when they're directing it at me. When they're including me.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Sweden, which, during my teens, gentrified and is now completely middle class and even upper middle class.
I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.
The many woes that afflict out nation are rooted in the morally bankrupt paradigms of socialism, interventionism, and empire that have held our nation in their grip for decades and that the only real solution to such woes is libertarianism.
I grew up middle class - my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.
In Maryland, I didn't grow up around poor white people. Where I grew up, the white people were middle class or upper-middle class. It's interesting how screwed up it is in reality, because most people who receive assistance from the government are white, but not in my head or in my experience.
I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
The 1970s - I was ten in 1975 - were a bad decade in all sorts of ways but the middle class had comfortable assumptions about the prospects for its children. The middle class was smaller then; it was a much less competitive Britain, less meritocratic.
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.
What is the deepest passion for me and for us is the historic investment in the middle class and in - as I say often because I was that guy growing up - the dreams of those who look up who want to get into the middle class. That I feel the strongest about.
I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America in the middle of the last century.
The only time being in the middle class hurts you is if you're in the middle class with players who are on bad contracts. If you're in the middle class and all your players are on good contracts then I don't think that's a problem.
I grew up in Queens, in New York City, in a middle class Jewish family. My mother was a public school teacher, my father was a lawyer. They were Democrats - kind of middle-of-the-road democrats.