17

A Little of that Human Touch: Knowledge and Empathy in the Music of Bruce Springsteen

SCOTT CALEF

 

 

 

When I was younger I didn’t care much for song stories, especially when they involved specifically named people. Narrative lyrics about Bad Scooter searching for his groove, the Magic Rat crossing the Jersey state line, Crazy Janey in the back alley tradin’ hands, or little Early-Pearly in her curly-wurly (whatever that is!) seemed irrelevant and remote.

These moments, people, and events may have some autobiographical significance for Bruce, I thought, and be meaningful to him, but I don’t know these people. I don’t have a relationship with them. I don’t even know if they exist. So why should I care? Ironically, because the characterizations were so well-drawn, so concrete, they seemed effective as stories but ineffective as art, if art is in part—as Tolstoy argued—about the communication of feeling.⁶⁰

When bands like the Beatles sang about love, I could usually “own” the song because I felt love too, in all of its giddy and tumultuous ecstasy and heartbreak. Those sorts of songs had universal appeal because of their generality. When the Beatles sang about John eating chocolate cake with Yoko, on the other hand, or about Desmond and Molly Jones, well, the rhythm and guitars might still be fun, but something about the lyrics I found annoying. I’m sad to say it was somewhat similar with Bruce. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate songs like “Jungleland,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” or “Johnny 99.” I loved them, and still do. But because they seemed to be about somebody else’s life, they didn’t seem to be about mine. Lyrically, they didn’t move me.

I have no idea whether the experiences I’ve just described are shared by very many other people, and my former attitudes now strike me as absurdly limited. But as a philosopher, I’m still interested in broad, universal, general questions and truths. I also think Bruce Springsteen is one of the most thoughtful, profound, and articulate artists in popular music. His music not only has the power to entertain, but to teach, to show us things we didn’t see or notice before. It also prompts us to internalize truths we may already have known somewhat vaguely at a deeper level. But these facts about the Boss’s work raise a couple of interesting philosophical questions.

How, for example, is it possible to “learn” from Bruce’s lyrics if they tell stories about people or incidents that are imagined and not real?⁶¹ After all, if the songs’ narratives are “fictional”—that is, if they aren’t “true”—how can we derive truth from them? How can an artistic invention—something false by definition—show us so much about the real world? Why should we assume that Springsteen’s song sermons are valid, not only within the fictional world they create, but also to us inhabitants of the real world? And assuming we can learn from Bruce’s story-song compositions, what exactly can we learn?

In sum, the following three statements all seem true, yet mutually inconsistent:

1. We can learn from Springsteen’s narratively-structured songs.

2. Springsteen’s narratively-structured songs are works of musical fiction.

3. We can’t learn from fiction (and therefore, musical fiction) because as fiction its purpose isn’t to convey the truth, and accuracy can’t be presumed one of the author’s intents.

I’ll basically assume that statements 1 and 2 are true. I believe that 3 is false, and that the Boss can help us see why it’s false. Once we see why 3 is false and in what sense Springsteen’s art can not only entertain but educate, we’ll also be in a position to determine precisely what he can teach us.

I Got My Facts Learned Real Good

Some philosophers have thought that if music like Bruce’s can teach us, it must be able to convey new truths. If Springsteen were merely repeating common sense or the folksy sort of wisdom our grandmothers love to dispense after the holiday meal or a few glasses of sherry, he’d only be telling us what we already know. We wouldn’t be learning anything. So the question is: what kinds of new truths can his music communicate?

Well, where do new truths usually come from? One source is science, but Bruce doesn’t seem to be offering us scientific truths. He isn’t reporting the empirical results of carefully controlled physical experiments. And although his songs are rich in sociological, political, and psychological insight, he isn’t really summarizing the findings of professional psychologists, sociologists, economists and the like either. Nor is he drawing conclusions from intuitively plausible or self-evident principles by means of rigorous logical analysis. That is, he isn’t exactly doing what academics call philosophy either.

But now we’re pretty much back where we started. On the one hand, I surmise, many of Springsteen’s fans think they’ve learned something from his music.⁶² But if this sense of realization that occurs from time to time while listening to Bruce’s music is genuine, we have to ask what sort of truth is being communicated. And now we wonder, what sort of novel facts about the world can his music give us if it neither formulates empirically testable hypotheses nor makes inferences from accepted facts to unforeseen, unanticipated conclusions? What can lyrical poetry teach us that science and philosophy can’t?

Philosophers sometimes distinguish between two kinds of knowledge, knowing how and knowing that. The former concerns skills of various sorts. So, I might know how to make a C chord, case the promised land, walk like a man, dance in the dark, “prove it all night” or build “a ’69 Chevy with a 396 . . . straight out of scratch” (“Racing in the Streets”). Unfortunately, however, this isn’t the kind of knowledge I’m likely to get from listening to Bruce and the E-Street Band. No matter how many times I play Lucky Town, The River, or Magic, I still won’t know how to win at Blackjack, re-plumb the kitchen or conjure a rabbit. Perhaps, though, there are some skills I might acquire or improve. Maybe, for example, I can become a more articulate critic of social injustice by listening to The Ghost of Tom Joad and Born in the USA again and again. Or, if I already know how to play the guitar, I might be able to figure out how to play some of Bruce’s songs by strumming along while listening intently. I don’t think, though, that our feelings that we’ve learned something while listening to albums like The Rising or songs like “American Skin” has anything to do with developing our talents.

“Knowing that”—the other commonly recognized form of knowledge—refers to factual knowledge. For example, “everything dies, baby, that’s a fact” (“Atlantic City”). And if “I got my facts learned real good,” I might know that “Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / And a king ain’t satisfied / Till he rules everything” (“Badlands”). When I come to know that something is the case, I acquire information I previously lacked, and it’s tempting to think that if we’re learning from poetry and lyrics it must be this kind of learning that’s taking place. After all, an awful lot of the factual knowledge we’ve accumulated we picked up by hearing or reading something, and lyrics are heard or read. And maybe we can learn from lyrics in this way, but it’s doubtful.

Suppose, for example, that I didn’t know rich men want to be king or that everything dies or that the Rangers had a homecoming in Harlem late last night. Or, to take an even more specific example, suppose that before listening to the first verse of “Youngstown” from The Ghost of Tom Joad I didn’t know that in northeast Ohio in 1803 James and Dan Heaton found ore in Yellow Creek which was made into the cannonballs that helped the Union win the Civil War. Do I now know these things just because I’ve heard Bruce sing them? Probably not. Even if I assume Bruce is sincere and so believe him, and even if what he says is true, all I’ve now got that I didn’t have before is a true belief. And true beliefs aren’t the same thing as knowledge.

Plato makes this point in the Theaetetus, a dialogue on the nature of knowledge. Consider: Prior to my meeting across the river, I believe that making two grand is a dead certainty and that the money’s practically sitting in my pocket. Eddie keeps his mouth shut and the deal goes down like it’s supposed to. I go home and triumphantly throw the money on the bed, showing Cherry this time I wasn’t just talking. I believed I’d get the money and my belief turned out to be true, but that doesn’t mean I knew I wouldn’t get burned and that tonight would turn out to be “everything that I said.” A combination of wishful thinking, dumb luck and careful preparation might make for a Cinderella story, but that doesn’t mean we knew the end from the beginning.

To constitute knowledge I’d also have to know why Bruce (or anyone else) believes these things, and determine that the reasons were adequate. That is, I’d need not just the Boss’s charismatic authority, but something like sufficient evidence or independent justification.

A Little of that Human Touch

Since we’re unlikely to acquire either “knowledge that” or “knowledge how” from an artist’s lyrics, some conclude we can’t learn from music after all. Fortunately, as it stands, this is too simple, for there’s another sort of knowledge—often overlooked—which Springsteen imparts abundantly. This third way of knowing involves knowledge of what something is like. It’s knowing how chocolate, oysters, or pineapples taste, or how Bruce’s harmonica or Clarence Clemons’s saxophone sounds.⁶³ It’s the sort of experience we have when, in a field of blood and stone, the blood begins to dry and the smell begins to rise (“Devils and Dust”). But knowing what something is like isn’t necessarily limited to things we have experienced ourselves, and here’s where a gifted artist like Bruce can really expand our horizons.

If I’ve never tasted a grape, I probably can’t come to understand that flavor just by having someone else describe it to me using especially vivid metaphors or imagery. But we might be able to learn what something comes to as a possible form of lived experience, even if we haven’t experienced it personally. In this sense, “Springsteen has always been the most cinematic—and literary—of rock composers.” ⁶⁴ When we listen to “The River” we come to know what it feels like to lie in the grass with a high school sweetheart and pass happy summer days driving and swimming. We understand the rude shock of discovering she’s pregnant out of wedlock and the feeling of being forced into marriage and monotonous work at nineteen. We identify with the discouraged husband as he struggles to find work during an economic downturn, and drifts apart from the person he once loved so passionately, tormented by the memories of how things used to be and might have been.

But here’s the key point. Fortunate circumstances or prudence (if you’re a “Cautious Man” or woman) may have protected you from these sorts of disappointments. You might move in upper-middle class circles and have a stable, high-paying, white-collar vocation. Perhaps you’re single, or married for the first time only later in life. You may never have been pregnant or had a child. Maybe you’re fortunate enough to be in a longterm relationship where the passion burns more brightly now than it did at the beginning. In short, you may never have experienced the dashed hopes, desperation and heart-rending nostalgia of Mary’s husband in “The River” and you may not be personally acquainted with anyone else who has, either. But when you listen to the song, you know what it would be like. You feel for and identify with this man, a fellow human being who returns to the river years later knowing all the while it’s dry.

Since most of us probably have experienced money worries or fading love, perhaps “The River” isn’t the best example. So consider “Nebraska”, a song about two serial murderers who went on a killing spree from Lincoln to Wyoming.⁶⁵ By the time they were apprehended, ten people lay dead. At trial, the male member of the couple denies feeling sorry for what they’ve done, remarking simply that it was fun while it lasted. All he can say by way of explanation for his brutal crimes is that “there’s just a meanness in this world.” The way the spare musical accompaniment complements the quiet, polite, resigned yet remorseless inmate is deeply affecting. Though bound for the chair, the killer is just as indifferent to his own death as to the deaths of his victims. All he wants is to be executed with his partner so they can take one last wild ride together. The stunned and outraged community spit that he’s unfit to live and that his soul will enter the void, but the way Bruce represents Starkweather, we experience the numb void that is his soul.⁶⁶ Or rather, what it’s like to have no soul.

When we learn what its like to be these people, we’re engaged in what Springsteen has called “a collective event of imagination.” In a recent interview Bruce emphasizes the importance of imagination to his work, which he describes as “an ongoing dialogue about what living means.... You create a space together. You are involved in an act of the imagination together, imagining the life you want to live, the kind of country you want to live in, the kind of place you want to leave to your children. What are the things that bring you ecstasy and bliss, what are the things that bring on the darkness, and what can we do together to combat those things?”⁶⁷ If, with Bruce’s help and a little imagination, we can answer these questions we will have learned something important indeed.

Living Proof

Examples like those I’ve borrowed from “The River” and “Nebraska” could be multiplied indefinitely, but the point is, I no longer feel as I once did that songs structured around stories or narratives are, for all the scene setting and character development, oddly impersonal. For by entering the lives of these people through song, I have a momentary insight into what it’s like to be them. On that level, I can relate and I can learn. By allowing us to empathize with and share the stories and emotions of others—even if those others are fictional and never existed—Springsteen lets us participate in a vast range of experiences that otherwise would elude us. As Bruce puts it in “No Surrender,” we might learn more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school. Springsteen’s art gives us the opportunity to live more than one life. Perhaps in part because we’re mortal, this is deeply satisfying.

This way of understanding Bruce’s skill as a songwriter fits well with the painstaking effort he expends to get nuances and descriptions exactly right. He wants to show us something, and we won’t have the experience he’s trying to convey unless the details and moods are captured perfectly. In Songs he offers an explanation worth quoting at length:

As with Nebraska, on “Tom Joad” and the songs that followed, the music was minimal; the melodies were uncomplicated, yet played an important role in the storytelling process. The simplicity and plainness, the austere rhythms defined who these characters were and how they expressed themselves.

The precision of the storytelling in these types of songs is very important. The correct detail can speak volumes about who your character is, while the wrong one can shred the credibility of your story. When you get the music and lyrics right in these songs, your voice disappears into the voices of those you’ve chosen to write about. Basically, I find the characters and listen to them. . . .

But all the telling detail in the world doesn’t matter if the song lacks an emotional center. That’s something you have to pull out of yourself from the commonality you feel with the man or woman you’re writing about. By pulling these elements together as well as you can, you shed light on their lives and respect their experiences. (Songs, p. 274)

The Ties that Bind

Bruce emphasizes how important it is that he finds an authentic voice. When he sings, his vocalizations are really the voices and perspectives of the people in the songs. Otherwise, he says, the music doesn’t ring true. In hearing their stories, however, we learn something of what it would be like to be those people suffering those hardships in those circumstances, even if we never have to go through those things ourselves. And if we have gone through them, the music enables us to relate to those experiences more universally. We no longer consider them purely personal tragedies, but human ones.

The ability of Springsteen’s music to invest mundane circumstances with universal meaning also imbues them with philosophical significance. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) denies that there’s any such thing as human nature, but he does believe in what he calls “the human condition.” He writes:

Although it is impossible to find in each and every man a universal essence that can be called human nature, there is nevertheless a human universality of condition.... And diverse though man’s purposes may be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me . . . Consequently, every purpose, however individual it may be, is of universal value. Every purpose, even that of a Chinese, an Indian or a Negro, can be understood by a European... There is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man, or a foreigner if one has sufficient information. In this sense we may say that there is a human universality, but it is not something given. . . . I make this universality . . . by understanding the purpose of any other man, of whatever epoch.⁶⁸

The ability to identify with others and so unite with them enlarges us and increases our humanity by joining us with the rest of humanity. Since we are humans, we become more of what we are. We feel more complete, and this is literally fulfilling.

Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive

I’ve tried to argue that that Bruce’s music can help us imagine lives and circumstances to which we’re unaccustomed. And, I’ve suggested, he enables us to transcend our purely private worlds and exchange them for vaster realms in an intensely gratifying way. If I’m right about those things, they help to explain another phenomenon which is quite curious if you stop to think about it. Many of Bruce’s songs—“Empty Sky,” “You’re Missing,” “Reno,” “The River,” “Factory,” “Born in the USA,” “Reason to Believe,” “Streets of Philadelphia,” “Wreck on the Highway,” “When You’re Alone You’re Alone,” “Souls of the Departed,” and innumerable others—are deeply sad. They come from, and dwell in, the darkness on the edge of town. Not only are many of his themes frankly depressing, but thanks to his artistic sincerity, we experience the futility, emptiness and loss of his characters to the full. Why then do we like listening to them? Who wants to feel sad or defeated? Ironically, Bruce is so good at what he does that no one should want to listen to him! So why do we?⁶⁹

Aristotle gives an answer:

Imitation is natural to man from childhood . . . and [he] learns at first by imitation. And it is natural for all to delight in works of imitation. The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art.... The explanation [of our delight in art depicting unpleasant situations] is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind . . . the reason of the delight [in the unhappy episode represented] . . . is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things.⁷⁰

Aristotle is saying that people love to experience even tragic art because we love to learn, and we learn through imitation. Because we delight in learning, we can delight even in songs about unhappy people in miserable circumstances. When those lives are “imitated” artistically or poetically in song we learn “what it is like” to live those lives. We “gather the meaning of things.”

Aristotle goes on remark that the poet’s function is:

. . . to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen . . . what is possible . . . Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. By a universal statement I mean one as to what such or such a kind of man will probably or necessarily say or do—which is the aim of poetry, though it affixes proper names to the characters. . . .⁷¹

Bruce’s more narrative lyrics “affix proper names to characters,” but they are universal—and thus philosophical—nevertheless. Discovering “what is possible” and what a certain kind of person “will probably say and do” is akin to knowledge. Because art imitates life, though on a universal level, music like Springsteen’s captivates us by broadening our life experience. By doing so, and quickening the imagination, it makes us more alive. The situations Springsteen sings about may be depressing, but the realization of what it would be like to live in those alternate realities appeals to us as rational beings who desire to know. In other words, the joy at learning from the Boss’s songs compensates us for the sad facts that are learned. We love sad music, not just uplifting and hopeful music, because on some level it satisfies our natures as knowing, empathizing beings.

Lonesome Day

This may also clarify why so many people were so deeply affected by The Rising. For the rest of the country, far from New York and east coast values, the facts of what happened on 9/11 were clear enough. But many of us, confronting an event so unprecedented, so shockingly momentous and ruthlessly diabolical, were simply stunned to incomprehension. We couldn’t process the total emotional overload. The Rising helped us collectively make sense of the numbingly unfathomable events of that day by reducing them to a personal scale. We could then relate to them in more familiar terms: “Shirts in the closet / shoes in the hall / . . . / TV’s on in the den / Your house is waiting / For you to walk in / But you’re missing.” (“You’re Missing”). “I woke up this morning, I could barely breathe / Just an empty impression / In the bed where you used to be” (“Empty Sky”).

This isn’t the whole truth about why The Rising was such a healing album, of course. While helping us to understand, it also gave us hope, hope that we as a people could again “rise up.” Reminding us of our vast potential as a nation, it helped us to look forward and not just back. It showed us something important, not about the Magic Rat, Bad Scooter and Crazy Janey, but about ourselves and each other.