Let’s Go… East Bay, Dublin, Reading…

To say that Rancid’s second album Let’s Go is the punk equivalent of James Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners might initially sound like either overreach or playful provocation. It is meant neither way. Rather, it is an attempt to take both works seriously as realist cartographies of working-class life: as composite portraits in which the true protagonist is not any singular character but the city itself, understood as a collective subject and structuring space of experience. James Joyce gives us Dublin not as romantic capital but as dense social atmosphere: clerks, daughters, drunks, minor political operatives, each moving through the muted light of empire’s periphery. The stories of Dubliners are individually modest. Their power lies in accumulation. Paralysis is not simply a theme; it is a climate. The famous snow of “The Dead” falls “general all over Ireland,” dissolving the distinction between living and dead, success and failure, into a shared condition.

Rancid’s Let’s Go performs a similar operation on the Bay Area of the early 1990s. Union halls, bus stops, immigrant histories, cheap apartments and waterfront docks: each song sketches a fragment. Taken together, they generate a social map. The individual narrative arc matters less than the composite portrait that emerges between tracks. We have had enough of Aristotelian drama and the tidy moral geometry of the hero’s journey. These works refuse Joseph Campbell’s reassuring ascent. Instead, they dwell in stalled departures, compromised solidarities, and small acts of endurance. Consider “Harry Bridges.” The song invokes the radical union leader as emblem, but the real subject is not heroic biography. It is the waterfront as contested terrain, the memory of collective power sedimented into everyday life. The red flag in the chorus is both invocation and elegy. One hears a distant resonance with “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” where Joyce’s minor political figures commemorate Parnell not through triumphant mobilization but through exhausted ritual. Politics lingers as atmosphere, in pub smoke, in dockside rumor, in half-remembered songs. Heroism dissolves into collective memory.

Or take “St. Mary,” which shifts the scene from institutional discipline to fugitive motion. “She’s got her ticket and she’s waiting at the station / She’s got to get away as far as she can.” The song is structured around departure – Greyhound buses, Salinas, letters that trail off into silence – but this is no romantic flight westward. Mary leaves “shrouded in anger, encompassed by pain,” carrying a loaded .44, bent on avenging “the law that shot down her dear departed man.” Mobility here is inseparable from grief and retaliation. The station platform is not a threshold to reinvention but a staging ground for desperation. This resonates with Joyce’s “Eveline,” where the ship waits in the harbor and departure trembles under the weight of obligation and fear. In both cases, leaving is imaginable, even urgent, yet saturated with constraint. Catholicism and law alike function less as caricatured villains than as ambient structures: lived infrastructures shaping feeling and action. Movement circulates without delivering transcendence. The Bay Area, like Dublin, becomes a closed circuit of precarity where flight often intensifies rather than resolves the conditions one seeks to escape. Paralysis is updated into a restless, combustible drift.

To triangulate this comparison further, we can turn to Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, which stages deindustrialized Reading, Pennsylvania with a similar ensemble logic. Sweat has no central hero. There is no singular redemptive arc. Instead, there is a bar, a factory floor, a group of workers whose lives interlock and unravel under the pressure of plant closures and global capital flows. Cynthia, Tracey, Jessie, Chris, Jason: each has motives that are understandable, even sympathetic. Each is capable of harm. The play’s force lies in refusing to isolate a villain or sanctify a protagonist. What Nottage makes painfully visible is how neoliberal restructuring strips away forms of collective agency. The union – however imperfect – once provided a shared horizon: wages, benefits, a sense of dignity tethered to labor. When those guarantees erode, characters are reorganized as competitors. Scarcity narrows perception. The understandable individual pursuit of survival – accepting a promotion, crossing a picket line, clinging to seniority – generates disastrous outcomes. But this is not because these individuals are uniquely monstrous, but because the field in which they act has been constricted.

Here Sweat resonates with both Dubliners and Let’s Go. Joyce’s paralysis is not moral weakness but structural entanglement. Rancid’s waterfront nostalgia in “Harry Bridges” gestures toward a time when dockworkers could shut down the ports – when solidarity was materially enforceable. By the 1990s, that horizon has dimmed. The red flag flies, but as memory as much as strategy. In Sweat, we see what happens when that memory curdles into resentment. The privatization of risk – neoliberalism’s signature move – leaves individuals to navigate forces far beyond their control, while narrating this isolation as freedom. All three works refuse the fantasy that a singular charismatic figure will redeem the social field. Jason frequently invokes his father’s history in the union, holding onto it as a kind of inheritance, a narrative of masculine pride, solidarity, and shop-floor dignity. That memory becomes both anchor and burden. It gives him a sense of identity (“my dad stood his ground”), but it also intensifies his rage when he feels that world collapsing around him. The strike legacy becomes less a living tradition of collective power and more a fossilized story of a time when workers could still win. That haunting is crucial: it shows how collective memory persists even as the material conditions that sustained it disappear. Jason clings to a memory of solidarity, yet finds himself pulled toward resentment and racialized grievance when the structure that once organized that solidarity – the union shop floor erodes. The past becomes mythic compensation for a present of diminished agency.

Instead of heroic individuals all these works offer ensembles, collections and stories and people working through and despite the situation they find themselves in. Dubliners accumulates minor lives into a major testimony. Let’s Go layers gang vocals into collective utterance; the chorus is the crowd. Sweat assembles fractured friendships into a portrait of structural diminishment. In each case, the space – Dublin’s snow-covered streets, the Bay Area docks, the Pennsylvania bar – becomes the real protagonist. These are social containers gradually emptied of sustaining force. And yet, none of these works succumb to pure despair. If it is hard to be a saint in the city – as Bruce Springsteen once reminded us – sainthood was never the point. The point is recognition. Nottage’s play insists on understanding how each character arrives at their breaking point. Joyce attends meticulously to interior hesitation. Rancid documents without romantic gloss. They contextualize harm without excusing it. They render it legible as the product of constrained choices within damaged systems. The snow falling “general all over Ireland,” the shouted refrain of “Harry Bridges,” the tense silence after a factory shift ends in Sweat – these are collective atmospheres. They remind us that when formal structures of solidarity erode, what remains are fragments: stories, songs, scenes. But fragments can assemble. The ensemble is not simply an aesthetic choice; it is a political wager. It asks whether, by placing these compromised lives side by side, we might glimpse again the outlines of a collective subject – flawed, pressured, but not entirely extinguished.

In that sense, to read (well, to listen to) Let’s Go alongside Dubliners and Sweat is not to collapse distinctions between high modernism, punk rock, and contemporary drama. It is to recognize a shared commitment to documenting how ordinary people navigate structural constraint. The hero dissolves. The city speaks. And in the space between stories and songs, a composite portrait emerges – one that insists that even in paralysis, even in precarity, the struggle to make sense of one another remains worthy of our attention.