Eric Alterman: Bruce Springsteen's Political Voice
Excellent article!
Bruce Springsteen's Political Voice
Eric Alterman
April 11, 2012 | This article appeared in the April 30, 2012 edition of The Nation.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform onstage at SiriusXM's 10th anniversary celebration at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York March 9, 2012. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
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This article is adapted from The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama, coauthored by Eric Alterman, recently published by Viking.
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He took his music gradually from the personal to the political. Born to Run led to the grim but powerful Darkness at the Edge of Town, which led to the raucous The River, which led to Nebraska, a stark, Woody Guthrie–like album recorded at home on a cassette tape recorder. Released in 1982 as national unemployment reached 11 percent (and while President Reagan complained that he was tired of hearing about it every time someone lost a job in “South Succotash”), the album offered an intimate portrait of the people victimized by America’s winner-take-all economy.
This work was filled with what literary historian Bryan Garman calls “working-class geographies,” like closed factories, mines and mills. For Springsteen, Garman writes, “These markers—the industrial town, the factory, and the neighborhood bar—have become so marginalized that it is impossible to forge a collective working-class identity which provides people with a sense of self-worth.”
Springsteen remained cautious to a fault when it came to traditional politics, consistently resisting myriad pleadings to lend his reputation for integrity to one cause or another. He spent much of this period, as he put it, “tryin’ to figure out now where do aesthetic issues that you write about intersect with some sort of concrete action, some direct involvement, in the communities that your audience comes from.” At his first-ever political concert appearance in 1979 to protest nuclear power, he left his part of the printed concert program wordless. Three years later, when he made a surprise appearance with a single song alongside Jackson Browne at a 750,000-person nuclear freeze rally in Central Park, he again let the music do all the talking.
Springsteen made his first stab at direct political involvement after reading Ron Kovic’s harrowing Vietnam memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, which would inspire the Oliver Stone film. Speaking from the stage at a series of Los Angeles fundraising concerts, surrounded by handicapped veterans, Springsteen compared his learning process to “walking down a dark street at night and you see somebody getting a beating in an alley. You want to keep walking because you don’t want to feel involved, but you feel guilty.”
If Nebraska had been Springsteen’s quietest album, then what followed it, 1984’s Born in the USA, would be his loudest. Released as America was undergoing an orgy of right-wing patriotism during Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” re-election campaign, Springsteen suddenly found himself at the center of America’s political debate. The album, another commercial breakthrough, became Columbia’s bestselling album to that point in its history, and Springsteen’s world tour was an event of political and cultural significance—widely understood to represent an alternative model of American patriotism from that so ominously emanating from the Reagan White House.
In a story that has been told and retold many times now, the conservative columnist George Will attended a Springsteen concert with cotton in his ears, and after leaving at midpoint in the show, offered up Springsteen as a right-wing icon. The president’s staff read the column and sought to hijack Springsteen’s left-wing patriotic bombast and turn it into right-wing patriotic bombast. Springsteen resisted, warning audiences with respect to Reagan’s war plans for Central America that “blind faith in your leaders can get you killed.” But the train had left the station and in truth, “Born in the USA” invited misinterpretation, as few people listen to rock music for the lyrics.
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http://www.thenation.com/article/167356/springsteens-political-voice
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