"In the Ghetto" (originally titled "The Vicious Circle") is a song written by Mac Davis and made famous by Elvis Presley in 1969. Click on the above video to listen to the song.
I appreciate this song and indeed, use it several times to meditate over the poverty that characterizes the lives of people in the various “projects” that spread across the United States.
“In the Ghetto” embodies the usual struggles for survival in the American inner cities. It’s an emotional narrative of generational poverty among the American poor. In the song, a boy is born to a mother who already is saddled with the tough chore of raising and caring for more children than she can “handle” in the ghetto of Chicago. Typical of the moribund lives of kids that are the products of unprotected sex, “babies having babies” and fathers “missing-in-action” in many inner cities, the boy grows up hungry. He soon resorts to stealing and he is always getting into fights.
One day, and out of sheer frustrations, he decides to “get-rich-or die-trying” as many of today’s poor young men do. Unfortunately, not many inner city kids with this type of fatal ambition will succeed as Jay Z, 50 Cents and others have managed to do.
In the case of the character in this song however, instead of pursuing education, the young man goes for a gun and steals a car. When he attempts to run though, he gets shot. Ironically, as he lays dying on the street, a child is being delivered somewhere at that precise moment by another woman who has no business having a baby in her impoverished condition.
The lesson in this great, emotional song therefore is that the newborn child (like many such kids across the United States) will most likely meet the same sad end. And, of course, the evil cycle of poverty and violence in the nation will continue.
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