My musical heroes have always been the working-class poets, the street-rat rockers who wrote hard-edged songs filled with heartfelt lyrics: Phil Lynott, Ian Hunter, Bruce Springsteen, Phil Mogg, etc. So it’s no wonder that I gravitated towards Sacramento-based punk band City of Vain, a group steeped in the stories of everyday struggles, of a shrinking middle-class doomed to the fate of obsolescence in a century defined by technology rather than manual labor, trading out the blue collar for the white one. As vocalist Steve Ross sings like a battle cry on “Lessons in Social Class” from their album Backs Against [...]