Ah, Friday. That perfect cocktail of nervous excitement for the weekend and growing irritation that you’re stuck in an office. You spend your day pensively perusing the pages of the web, often stopping to read the most inane drivel if only to pass five minutes. We’re talking useless, mind-rotting garbage. That you read. On the web.

But what of a time when there was no magic garbage machine sitting on your desktop to help carry you into the weekend? How did people waste entire workdays procrastinating in the 70s, for example? The answer: music. The weekend-themed music of every generation tells a unique tale of angst and anticipation, bottled and pressurized like a bottle of something pressurized.

Let’s look back:

THE 70s

Take This Job and Shove It – Johnny Paycheck - 1977

While Johnny essentially birthed the genre with this track, his motivations have been badly misrepresented over the years. Due to his “post-homeless” appearance, JP was sadly never able to find gainful employment, and wrote this song to sing to HR reps when they would call to tell him they’d “decided to go another way.” Every day was the weekend for Johnny Paycheck.

THE 80s

Working for the Weekend – Loverboy

Oh the buoyant 80s – when money was freedom and freedom was cocaine. Sure, the melody’s chipper, but take a closer look at the chorus:

You want to pizza my heart
You better start from start
You want to be in the show
Come on baby lets go.

That’s right. The song was written for a baby. Unless I’m missing something.

THE 90s

Friday – Ice Cube – 1995

The title track from the film of the same name, Cube’s “Friday” is a missive on the state of mid-90s hip-hop culture. Lyrics like “He's about as hard as Darth Vader/in his sweatshirt, khakis and Chuck Taylors,” speak to the transforming image of rap music in the post-grunge landscape. The super-aggressive, NWA-inspired gangsta rap of the late 80s was fading into a more nuanced form, allowing rappers to maintain their street-cred while softening their image into a more mainstream style of dress, whereas lyrics like “Forty sipping/set tripping/fo' dipping/pistol gripping/never slipping,” speak to how he wants to get super fucked up.

In a way, weekend music is like a time capsule, a peek into the collective consciousness of the generation that spawned it. While technology may change with the times, the essential restlessness of the working man and woman extends back through time, connecting us with our forefathers of frustration as they hunched over their old-timey typewriters, waiting for the clock to let them go home.

Are we there yet?
Reggie