Trickle Down Lyrics - Up Up Up Up Up Up - Ani Difranco

You cease to smell the steel plant 

After you've lived there for a while 

Smoke is snow is ash are leaves that blow 

Through the air aloft 

All our houses dim their sliding 

To the same soot gray style 

And we hang our laundry out on Sundays 

When they turn the furnaces off 

Everybody's daddy works up on the line 

The Stienbrenners and the Wilczewskis 

Have been there the longest time 

And everybody's mommy squints into the sun 

Sunday afternoon after all the laundry's done 

And sometimes a distant siren 

Can set a dog to barking late at night 

Then it dominoes on down 

Till every dog is joining in 

The first rumors of the lay offs 

Sang like a distant siren might 

And we all perked up our ears 

And paced the fence of the ensuing din 

And every night, we were glued to the TV news 

At six o'clock 

'cause it was hard to tell what was real 

And what was talk 

They explained about the cutbacks 

All the earnest frowns 

What they didn't say was that the plant 

Was slowly shutting down 

This town is not the kind of place 

That money people go 

They make their jokes up on the TV 

About all the snow 

And they're building condos downriver 

From where the plant had been 

But nobody really lives here 

Now that the air is clean 

And the president assured us 

It was all gonna trickle down 

Like it'd be raining so much money 

That we'd be sad to see the sun 

Mr. Wilczewski's brother had some business 

Out in Denver, so they left Denver 

Everybody knows they were the lucky ones 

You cease to smell the steel plant 

After you've been here for a while