Shortly after the release of 1982’s Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen was in a bad place.
He did not like being famous, did not like the pressure of celebrity. He’d dreamed of being a rock star, but this was something else entirely. People were calling him the voice of a generation, the balladeer of America’s soul, and he felt this was putting an untenable distance between him and his art. On top of all that, Springsteen may have been America’s Boss, but Reagan had just been elected as its president, and Springsteen was, shall we say, not a fan of him.
What he found, he’d later write in his autobiography, was anger. Americans were mad. The post-war pride that had elevated the nation into a global superpower was festering under Reagan’s watch, as the paint job we’d slapped over systemic racism, poverty, and inequality were rotting the nation’s foundation. Springsteen has always been a bigger patriot in theory than practice, mindful of the dream but focused on the reality. But on this trip, he found the dream was even more far gone than he’d thought. Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.
So nobody should be particularly surprised that Springsteen, now 75 years old, is no fan of President Donald Trump. I do not seriously think Trump is surprised either, no matter how much he might post to the contrary. Trump may want to remake the world and everything in it into his image, but he also lives for drama and loves wallowing in the criticisms of his haters.
And, to be clear, Springsteen is a hater. After opening a slew of shows in Manchester with extended speeches in which he referred to Trump as “treasonous,” “corrupt,” “incompetent,” “authoritarian,” and a “moron,” Trump got on TruthSocial to post one of his exhausting rants, calling Springsteen “a dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker.”
Springsteen frequently releases his live performances on streaming services, and he included his Trump takedown on the track. So now you can head on over to your streaming service of choice, and listen to the Boss tell British audiences that “In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent,” “they’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation,” and that “the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death.” And there’s lots more where that came from.
This is, as far as I’m concerned, all well and good. I don’t know that I have what I could exactly call a “favorite artist,” but if I did, it’d probably be Bruce Springsteen, and I’m glad he’s speaking out about the importance of things like attacks on free speech and the exploitation of kids. What I don’t love is how quickly this stand is flattening him into just another liberal mascot. A fake photo of Springsteen in a “Keep America Trumpless” T-shirt has gone viral. A viral claim that the U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that it was “illegal” for Springsteen to call himself the Boss had to be swatted down by Snopes. There are also claims that Trump threatened to investigate Springsteen for performing at one of former Vice President Kamala Harris’ rallies. That one, to be fair, is real.
All of this bugs me more than it should, because I think a songwriter of Springsteen’s stature deserves better than to be a political balloon animal. He has spent a good deal of his career being misunderstood by thoughtless nationalists who thought “Born In the USA” was just an anthem about how cool it is to be an American. Now I fear he’s in danger of spending his elder statesman years as an idol to thoughtless resistance types.
Because one of Springsteen’s great strengths as a writer has always been clarity. Who else but him could have spun “Born in the USA” into a furious middle finger at a nation that sent its young men off to fight in a war they barely understood and then cast them aside when they came back? What other rock ‘n’ roll superstar would dedicate a song to the 1999 police killing of Amadou Diallo, whose body was riddled by 41 bullets for the crime of taking out his wallet in front of the NYPD? On “Death to My Hometown,” Springsteen rails against the twin engines of state and corporation that ransacked rural America in the wake of the economic crisis, a move he would call “wrong and unpatriotic and un-American.” Bear in mind he was saying this in 2012, during President Barack Obama’s administration. Springsteen and Obama are friends, but Springsteen’s criticism of the U.S. transcends party lines.
“There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism,” he told The Guardian in that same interview. “A big promise has been broken. You can’t have a United States if you are telling some folks that they can’t get on the train. There is a cracking point where a society collapses.” Springsteen saw something important coming, and he sensed that its spread transcended the already clear toxicity of the Republican Party. We all should have listened.
In T.S. Elliot’s Murder In the Cathedral, Archbishop Thomas Beckett, later known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, is tempted to despair about the looming fallowness of his legacy, with one tempter reminding him that no matter how complex his life may seem now, there would come a time after his death when “men shall declare that there was no mystery / About this man who played a certain part in history.”
Social media has hastened this flattening of legacies. People like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and C.S. Lewis are being subjected to amazingly stupid memes that sand their edges down into the easiest, most digestible ideological slop possible. Pull up @CSLewisDaily, an X account followed by 1.5 million people, and look how Lewis’ legacy has been reduced to a collection of inane hokum. Listen to politicians invoke the words of MLK to support gutting causes King championed. Springsteen seems likely to be heading into this same machine. And of course, Jesus was one of this machine’s original victims — a man with a message so powerful that people across the world have spent millennia trying to cram it into their own worldview instead of letting their worldview be shaped by it.
Springsteen used the anger he found on his road trip as fuel for the release of Born in the USA, still his best-selling album, one of the best-selling albums of all time, period. If he was uncomfortable with fame, Born in the USA didn’t exactly help matters. He became a legend, but to his lasting credit, he became one on his own terms, looking America full in her face and writing what he saw with unvarnished honesty. If we try to turn him into a partisan puppet, we have only ourselves to blame. No defeat. No surrender.
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