I just came across this Ted Shires vlog which I think I definitely need to flag up. In it, Shires looks at his top disability-related song, but rather than going for anything specifically related to disability, or anything cheerful or uplifting, he selects Can’t Win by Richard Thompson. While the song itself is not about disability, Shires shows how it could relate to many disabled peoples’ experiences: the lyrics are about being told that you will never amount to anything, and how one’s dreams get shot down by the forces that be. Of course, while I’ve never heard the song itself, I suspect it is actually probably about class, and how working class people get kept in their place. Yet I find shires’ rereading of it very astute: we crips arguably experience such repression more than most, and from the sounds of it this song describes the way we are all taught to not even try very well indeed.