The Salesmen open “From Behind” with a vocal sample that sounds like something recorded in the 1940s or 1950s with an old man talking about a conversation he had with an “independent businessman” who complained about not being able to get poor people our narrator was saying he was trying to help and discouraging him from helping them. It turns out his so-called job paid $4 a day sunup to sundown and the narrator said it’s like slave wages and no wonder no one would work for him. But, really, isn’t that the kinds of conversations people have these days with massive income inequality hitting hard now but more like the famous frog example in systems theory but with the working class going back to the 1970s when austerity politics and economics began to be implemented in the banking and finance sector ahead of the Reagan administration and then accelerated over decades. So when the band kicks in with sounds like they grew up listening to a lot of weirdo art/progressive rock like Mr. Bungle and Frank Zappa alongside The MC5 and 1980s DC post-punk (i.e. Fugazi) it’s a fitting soundtrack to its lyrics about having to basically work yourself to death to survive often enough or certain not have enough time for yourself often enough. Certainly not many politicians are doing anything to put in regulations and corrections for this oppressive state of affairs like implementing modern monetary theory principles and putting in brakes on the accumulation of wealth and effectively ending the billionaire class with a robust return to anti-trust type of regulations put into place in the 1930s and 1940s including a full restoration of laws like the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. But The Salesmen in identifying some core issues with the song,and with the sample seem aware of American economic history, and setting it to the kind of psychedelic progressive punk on this song is more than a hint that people know that things have gotta change. Listen to “From Behind” on Spotify and follow The Salesmen at the links below.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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