Henry Clay People :: "25 For The Rest Of Our Lives"

"We're never gonna settle down/we never settled for anything," scream the Henry Clay People in the middle and then again, louder, at the end of latest single, "25 For The Rest Of Our Lives." Lyrically, the song is one of those old never-grow-up, die-before-I-grow-old narratives, only here and now the age of the protagonists shifts. It long seemed that teenagers held the monopoly on counter-culture; you were 18 and refused to become your father, an old and losing battle. In an era of unprecedented unemployment for the American post-adolescent, an era where this demographic has been more than encouraged to never grow out of an infantilized, perma-teenage state, the teenager has become infinite. Henry Clay People, a band who do blue-collar confessional music for the mouths and tastes of upper-middle class kids, resolve to stay, well, the title says it. Those in search of greater generational clarity can turn toward the chunky guitar line and see more clearly both the malaise and reclamation project that is the specific challenge of babies born under Reagan.