If you watch the original West Side Story, Dickey, you will note that that song had a satirical bite to it. The Puerto Rican girls were singing merrily about the stuff they liked in America....then the Puerto Rican guys would respond, sarcastically, "for a small fee in America"...implying that things were not exactly a bed of roses for Hispanics like themselves who were rather toward the lower end of the social pecking order in America. It was a juxtaposition of the irony of being poverty-stricken in the midst of the most affluent society on Earth....and with references back to the even worse poverty they had tried to escape back home in Puerto Rico...but they found the bitter taste of it again in the slums of New York.

This aspect was completely lost on my upstate New York high school, however. ;-) I was in the chorus and we did a medley of songs from West Side Story. We sang "I Like To Be in America" totally upbeat and enthusiastic on every line....no sarcastic bite at all in the phrase "for a small fee"...no, everything was apparently just absolutely wonderful and ideal for everyone in America according to my high school. Heh! There was a real little white bread town...no slums to be seen, and no Hispanics or Black people either. I had no idea that the song had a double message until I saw the movie some years later.

This is how the sharper messages in art get watered down and de-fanged as time goes by as they are absorbed into a not very analytical mainstream. How many people still realize that "This Land Is Your Land" was originally a song of angry protest and defiance by Woody Guthrie, who sang it in defence of America's poor and disenfranchised in those hard years of dust bowl and depression?