In the fall of 2012, a few days after Hurricane Sandy touched ground, Chris Christie received a phone call from Air Force One concerning New Jersey’s relief efforts. On the other end were two very important Americans: One was, of course, the president, Barack Obama; the other was the Boss, Bruce Springsteen. If it’s difficult to determine who outranks whom in a conversation among the president, the governor, and the Boss, it might be due to Springsteen’s inexplicable eminence.
He is less a rock star than a statesman. He and his posse, the E Street Band, do not simply play concerts, but, in the words of Bernard Goldberg, stage revivals. His music is not offered up for mere entertainment, but as necessary listening for processing national traumas. He was, according to Slate, the “poet laureate” of 9/11. His blessing is sought and occasionally received, depending on party affiliation, by would-be and sitting presidents.
The Boss’s latest gift to the world is Outlaw Pete, a graphic novel co-authored with cartoonist Frank Caruso and based on a song of the same name. Rock critic and Springsteen spaniel Dave Marsh calls it “a modern legend of a criminal who starts out in diapers and confronts the roughest edges of adulthood.” To correspond with the publication of this profundity, the New York Times printed a rhapsodically received list of the rocker’s favorite reading material. To nobody’s surprise, he admires Leo Tolstoy and Gabriel García Márquez, and found inspiration in Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail (2009). This was followed by an article about Boss, a new e-journal cataloguing academic references to Bruce Springsteen’s songs, which, according to the Times, “parallel psychological techniques used to promote moral development.”
If you’re surprised that every utterance and observation of the singer of “Dancing in the Dark” is so seriously scrutinized, don’t be. He was the subject of an exhibition of “artifacts” at the National Constitutional Center: “Millions of listeners have found their experience of the American dream reflected in his songs about the lonely, the lost, the unemployed, immigrants, and military veterans,” read the show’s didactics. And he was the topic of a theological seminar at Rutgers, a semester-long contemplation of “Springsteen’s reinterpretation of biblical motifs, the possibility of redemption by earthly means (woman, cars, music) . . . that casts the writer as a religious figure whose message does not effect transcendent salvation, but rather, transforms earthly reality.”
The literature on the subject casts the Boss in similarly reverent terms. “Bruce Springsteen appeals to the best in all of us,” Jack Newfield sermonized back in 1985. “He asks us to forgive the sinner but to remember the sin.” Almost clear-eyed in contrast, Hendrik Hertzberg reasoned that “Springsteen . . . is acutely aware of the moral responsibility entailed by the moral authority he has happened to earn.” More recently, David Brooks, enthralled by his hero’s songs of “teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law,” confessed that the Boss was a mentor of sorts: “Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education,” he wrote in the New York Times. “In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.”
Clearly Bruce Springsteen, not just for rock critics but for our cultural poobahs as well, is some kind of civic saint. And a heartthrob: “He remains dispiritingly handsome, preposterously fit,” David Remnick panted in the New Yorker. “His muscle tone approximates a fresh tennis ball.”
At this point, Bruce Springsteen agnostics might ask what other public figure—in entertainment, in politics, even the clergy—is written or thought about in such terms. With the exception of a slain civil rights leader or two, and possibly Abraham Lincoln, the answer is: nobody.
High Hopes, Springsteen’s 18th studio album, released earlier this year, did little to explain why. Other than the addition of the grating guitar of Tom Morello, formerly of Rage Against the Machine (a Harvard-educated, Los Angeles-based band that mixed equal doses of heavy metal, hip-hop, and Howard Zinn), the Boss still travels those same forlorn highways, still studies the lonely, the lost, the unemployed, and everybody else who has been beaten down by America.
He still visits sleazy bars full of redeemable losers (“Harry’s Place”), still warms himself by migrant campfires (“The Ghost of Tom Joad”), and still laments the Vietnam war (“The Wall”). Rolling Stone, giving High Hopes four-and-a-half stars out of five, described it as “finely drawn pathos bound by familiar, urgent themes (national crisis, private struggle, the daily striving for more perfect union).” In other words, Lincoln’s second inaugural with guitars.
His 1973 debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and its follow-ups, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle (also 1973), and Born to Run (1975), featured songs about Jersey boardwalks, open roads, slamming screen doors, and other assorted bits of romanticized American life, written with a verbosity that would make Bob Dylan tip a leopard-skin pillbox hat (Countryside’s burnin’ with Wolfman fairies dressed in drag for homicide, Springsteen croaks in “Lost in the Flood”). But around the time of his fourth LP, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), and likely influenced by Jon Landau, the former Rolling Stone editor who has served as Springsteen’s producer, manager, and muse since the mid-1970s, the songs increasingly turned to blue-collar angst, and the singer was progressively positioned as the culmination of rock ’n’ roll: Elvis Presley with a social conscience.
Springsteen embraced the imagery, iconography, and gestures of the genre. He threw on a leather jacket, sculpted his sideburns, and posed broodingly in Corvettes and Cadillacs. Then he name-checked John Steinbeck and Flannery O’Connor, sang of American decay and inequality, and rebuffed Ronald Reagan, whose reelection campaign had the nerve to assume that “Born in the USA”—a gloomy song about a homeless Vietnam veteran dolled up with a misleadingly anthemic chorus and sold with imagery of Springsteen draped in Old Glory—was actually a statement of patriotism. Which is not to say that Sprinssteen isn’t a patriot. It’s just that he articulates progressivism’s brand of national pride: America is noble in theory, nightmarish in reality; cool around the edges, but rotten to the core.
James Wolcott, writing in Vanity Fair, once quipped that it was almost as if Springsteen was “built to rock-critic specifications.” Others, such as Fred Goodman in Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, and Springsteen and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce (1997), have suggested that his career since partnering with Landau has been one long and meticulously plotted public relations exercise to present the Boss as a rock ’n’ roll holy man.
If that’s the case, it has worked: Springsteen has sold and continues to sell millions of albums, and his shtick is catnip to baby boomers. In fact, a standard component of Springsteen hagiography is the breathless recollection of that moment, long ago, when the author, young and searching for truth, first stumbled across the Boss’s magic. For David Brooks, it was February 1975, when he caught a live performance on WMMR in Philadelphia. For David Remnick, it was November 1976, from his perch on the balcony of New York City’s late Palladium. It was heady stuff, no doubt—and it forged four decades of adoration, which often gives the impression that some writers view Bruce Springsteen the same way young boys do, say, Superman.
And yet, despite the comparisons to Elvis Presley, as well as to Chuck Berry, both of whom created music that was an amalgamation of prior American styles, Spring-steen’s work is strikingly inorganic. With its fist-pumping chord changes, cluttered arrangements full of guitars, runaway xylophones, and honking saxophones, layered behind his maudlin, over-emoting voice, with its affected “heartland” accent, Spring-steen’s music is meticulously processed and choreographed, akin to ersatz rock show tunes conceived by a committee of rock critics and Broadway producers.
Moreover, it presents a view of this country, its working classes, and its music, that plays out like a Sergio Leone film: spaghetti Americana, in essence. This is a fantasized view of a world that does not exist in the starkly black-and-white terms in which Springsteen depicts it, and that many of his greatest cheerleaders—white, white collar, highly educated, and happily employed—romantically mistake for the America they only visit when driving to and from the airport.
Springsteen’s songs, in fact, often overlook how dynamic this land truly is: In his telling, untouchable corporations, cruel lawmen, and lawless leaders inevitably block the working folks’ access to the American Dream. You need not turn a blind eye to America’s deficiencies to see how incomplete this picture is, as summed up by “The River,” the title track from Springsteen’s 1980 album. Its young protagonist takes his love down to the aforementioned river and impregnates her. Then comes the shotgun wedding and the union card (I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company / But lately there ain’t been much work on the account of the economy). As Springsteen sings, Man, that was all she wrote. But isn’t the Boss’s success and fortune—he is, after all, the son of a working-class father, as his admirers never tire of pointing out—evidence against the inevitability of his own narrative?
That’s unlikely to register, since Bruce Springsteen’s medium is melodrama, not irony. Like Bob Dylan, he plays a character; he sticks tightly to a script. But unlike Dylan—who, for better or worse, has always been contrarian and sufficiently self-aware to change costumes from time to time—the Boss is the Boss. There is no daylight between the man and his role.
As a result, with a few slight deviations and dips into Appalachia and Pete Seeger territory, Springsteen’s records all sound the same; his polemics never change or surprise. Sure, there are cleverly crafted pop numbers, energetic rockers, and a few evocative mood pieces. But the same could be said of Meat Loaf. Springsteen’s act would be easier to comprehend if his three-chord tunes were not treated as something akin to a rock ’n’ roll Goldberg Variations, and his musings were not mistaken for those of a modern John Locke.
But he carries on, still singing about “The Queen of the Supermarket” (As the evening sky turns blue / A dream awaits in aisle number two). The New York Times still marvels that “his peerless muse has neither boundaries nor fatigue”; museums treat his blue jeans and leather jacket as sacred relics; scholars at prestigious institutions ponder his spiritual significance; and journalists contemplate the luminosity of his flesh—all while he huddles with the president aboard Air Force One. It’s tempting to laugh it off, but that would be sacrilege.
Ryan L. Cole is a writer in Indiana.
