“I’m the President but he’s The Boss.”
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
“A moment comes when you cash in whatever credibility a guy can have who plays and sings rock songs for a living, and you put your chips where you think they might do some good.”
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
The 20th Century Bruce Springsteen was never prolific as a recording artist. Not for him the classic industry template of regular album releases and supplementary tours. Springsteen, other than while trying to build a reputation in those early years of the Seventies, has always listened to his own heartbeat which, in many respects, is the heartbeat of America.
That heartbeat has been louder in the new century than for some considerable time. Possibly since Richard Nixon and Watergate, since the humiliating endgame in Vietnam. There have always been dark forces, long before the term became the mantra of the conspiracy theorists. Power is seldom gained benignly. The public faces of power are seldom as powerful as they seem.
Real power is orchestrated in the shadows by shadowy people. The American electorate thought they were electing George Bush in 2000, but they were really electing an ideology – the Neoconservative ideology. An ideology that brandishes the bible in one hand and an American Express card in the other, with a gun tucked inside the belt of a well-fed waistline just in case. An ideology that wants to impose democracy – you read it right, impose democracy – on parts of the planet that are strategically beneficial to their cause. The objective of which, when you boil it down, is the pursuit of global domination.
My own favourite definition of Neoconservatives can be found in the Urban Dictionary online: “Criminally insane spenders that believe in killing brown people for the new world order. Huge Orwellian government, unfathomable amounts of spending, bomb tens of thousands of people to death to rearrange the globe. Take the worst aspects of the liberal and conservative positions and combine them into one and you would have a NeoCon.”
These were the dark forces that, in the first decade of the millennium, really ruled America while George Bush did his ‘good ole boy’ routine front of stage. These were the dark forces that contravened international law to ensure that Iraq and its oil reserves were secured, and fuck the human cost, gullible, gung-ho American marines included. And these were the dark forces that seemed to be on Springsteen’s mind as, after The Seeger Sessions tour, he rounded up the troops, his E Street comrades, and went to work on his third album in three years.
Is the 21st Century Springsteen prolific? Damn right he is.
It had been five years since The Rising. Five years since Springsteen and the E Street Band gave the American people the succour they needed after 9/11. Five years during which the American government – or at least what, in the eyes of the world, constituted the American government – had done terrible things in its country’s name, in the name of what Bush and his fellow Republican stooges absurdly labelled freedom (absurd because freedom was what was increasingly being denied to American citizens).
Yet even though he had just emerged from Pete Seeger’s America – an America in which the populace sang out against injustice, sang out against oppression, sang out against inequality, sang out against war – Springsteen himself wasn’t about to morph into a modern day Seeger. That is not the way he writes, never has been. He is not a political writer. Nor indeed is he a political singer. The Seeger Sessions is as close as he’s ever got and, for my money, will ever get. And remember, he was singing other people’s songs.
For this reason, and at the risk of repetition (go back two chapters and you’ll know what I mean), some of us found Magic frustrating. Yes, there were allusions to what was happening in America, what was happening in Iraq, but we wanted more.
“I didn’t want a big Bush-bashing record. I’ve found ways to express my political concerns and personal concerns and I always found them best combined, because that’s how people live,” he told Joe Levy in Rolling Stone. What would have been so wrong about a Bush-bashing record? What would have been so wrong about singing out against a regime that was spreading fear and ignorance and death?
Yes, there are songs on which Springsteen the writer lets us glimpse Springsteen the man, when he lays bare his hurt, his disillusionment, his anger; the same hurt and disillusionment and anger anyone who’s not a NeoCon junkie feels. Songs like ‘Magic’ itself, “about living in a time when anything that is true can be made to seem like a lie, and anything that is a lie can be made to seem true”. Songs like ‘Livin’ In The Future’, where the narrator recalls the morning after Bush’s re-election in November 2004, the morning after Springsteen’s candidate, John Kerry, was returned to political obscurity. His faith, he sings, has been “torn asunder”, as he listens to the sound of righteousness going under.
Songs like ‘Gypsy Biker’, another of those Springsteen story songs, this time following a bunch of guys as they prepare for the repatriation of their dead buddy from Iraq. Songs like ‘Last To Die’, the title part of a question posed by Kerry in 1971 when, as a disaffected Vietnam vet coming home, he asked, “Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake?”
But these songs are too few, and even their negligible number are eclipsed by Springsteen’s self-confessed re-infatuation with pop music on ‘You’ll Be Comin’ Down’, ‘I’ll Work For Your Love’ and ‘Girls In Their Summer Clothes’.
Of course, the reviews were overwhelmingly flattering, Springsteen, by virtue of his longevity alone, is beyond the censure of most critics. And let’s face it, music magazines these days read more like glossy publicity brochures for record companies and their charges. Objective criticism is a fine idea, but it can’t possibly work in the absence of independent resources. Magic is an average album by Springsteen’s standards.
But you wouldn’t think it from Keith Cameron’s fawning analysis in Mojo. Springsteen, he wrote, was “a man with one eye on the clock, eager to make permanent records of this creative virility”. He further applauded him for continuing to disinter “the ancient rock’n’roll texts, trying to fathom new meaning, grapping with the eternal issues”, among them the classic soul searcher, “I wanna know if love is real”, when we all know that love, as Bob Dylan once declared, is just a four-letter word.
Uncut was no less effusive in its praise, Andrew Mueller claiming it as a hybrid between Born To Run and Tunnel Of Love, “an attempt to recover the indomitable youthful fury of the former, astutely tempered by the older, wiser, sadder resignation of the latter”.
Calm down, guys, calm down.
If Springsteen was re-infatuated with pop on Magic, he was stark bollock naked on all fours with it on Working On A Dream. And who, in the first month of 2009, when America was ushering in its first ever African American President – a momentous day that diehards like Pete Seeger couldn’t have imagined he would ever see – could deny that joyous pop wasn’t the perfect soundtrack to change?
Barack Obama’s inauguration was party time, a time to rejoice in the achievement of the prize that many good people, black and white, had strived for. The prize for which Dr Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X had sacrificed themselves. The prize that had sadly eluded generations of African Americans. But for that one day at least, their blood, instead of screaming in the ground, sang in the ground, the sweetest melody.
Working On A Dream caught the mood perfectly. It belongs to those halcyon weeks and months of the Obama presidency as much as it belongs to Springsteen. Despite being crushed by Kerry’s defeat to Bush four years earlier, Springsteen nonetheless threw his weight fully behind the Obama campaign. ‘The Rising’ became the anthem of the Democrats’ rallies, and blasted from the speakers at Obama’s victory celebration in Chicago.
But two years on, speaking to Nick Rufford in The Sunday Times, Springsteen sought to temper the optimism of late 2008/early 2009, by acknowledging that there was only so much one guy could do, even if that guy was supposedly the leader of the free world.
“The climate (in America) is very, very ugly for getting things done. The moderate reforms President Obama fought to make are called Marxist, socialist. I mean, the most extreme language is put into play to describe the most modest reforms that would move the economy back towards serving a majority of its citizens. There’s a tremendous distortion of information. The biggest problem we have now is almost 10% unemployment, but we also have the disparity of wealth. You can’t have an American civilisation with the kind of disparity of wealth we have. It will eat away at the country’s heart and soul and spirit.”
He placed the blame squarely at the door of Conservative America, part of whose constituency is part of Springsteen’s own constituency (don’t forget, the blue-collars voted in their millions for Bush).
“You have a guy (Obama) who comes in, he gets to be president for four years. Maybe eight. But you have the financial institutions, you have the military, the corporations. They’re in play constantly and, in truth, they’re shaping the economy and shaping the direction the US is moving in. Those forces are huge. The money and lobbyists are pouring in to do everything they can (to preserve the status quo). It’s a very tough time, a very hard time here in the States.
“Our economy has oriented itself away from the mass of US citizens and oriented itself to be at the service of the folks at the top, the plutocracy. It has to be oriented back to where it serves the health and purposes of a majority of American citizens. That’s not on the books right now.”
Although there is a whiff of fatalism in Springsteen’s depiction of the new America (and he didn’t even mention the internecine conflict instigated by Sarah Palin that has riven the Republican Party), his are fighting words as well. Sounds to me like Springsteen’s pretty hacked off with what’s happening to the good folk in his country who are just trying to get by. Sounds to me like Springsteen from another time. Think about it. He could be talking about Reagan’s America, the very era that created Nebraska. How pertinent those songs are now to the hard times sweeping the States once more.
Nearly three decades on, the America of Nebraska remains largely unchanged despite the great changes that have occurred, none greater than Obama’s election. For what is Obama but a man? A man within a machine stoked by economics and worked by political operatives. Political operatives whose functionality is guided by those dark forces. Obama’s political power is illusory – his real power is as an illusionist. He makes believe he is in charge, and he makes us believe that under this charge we will all – American citizens and citizens of the globe – be delivered to the promised land.
Springsteen’s songs, too, believe in the same biblical concept. You can still hear it on Working On A Dream. And of course the world needs its dreamers, it needs something and somewhere to which it can aspire. But it needs truth more, however unpalatable or ugly that truth may be. The kind of truth that Springsteen captured in the stories on Nebraska. Stories that stand up however often they are recounted, stories that remain relevant, stories that have their genesis in human beings, stories that go to the very heart of darkness in all of us.