Dolly Parton's "5 to 9" SquareSpace Super Bowl ad still rankles two weeks later

The New York Times

"What’s interesting about the two versions of the song isn’t what they tell us about Parton," says Brooke Jarvis of the country icon's reworking of "9 to 5" for a Super Bowl ad promoting side hustles. "It’s what they show us about how, four decades later, our economy is still broadly failing the people who toil inside it. The original lyrics offer frustration and disbelief — 'What a way to make a living!' — and a clear diagnosis of the problem: companies that aren’t required to respect or take care of their workers. In Squarespace’s hands, the words become 'a whole new</i> way to make a living — a dream of escape, of going out on your own because you’ve given up on an economy that refuses to look out for you. But listeners reacting online kept mishearing that new line. They detected something a lot closer to how they actually experience our economy. Endless hustling, they heard, now offers neither solution nor escape; it is, simply, 'the only way to make a living.'"