Bruce Springsteen: Voice of the Decade
On the night of November 5th, 1980, Bruce Springsteen stood onstage in Tempe, Arizona, and began a fierce fight for the meaning of America. The previous day, the nation had turned a fateful corner: With a stunning majority, Ronald Reagan — who campaigned to end the progressive dream in America — was elected president of the United States. It was hardly an unexpected victory. In the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis in Iran and an economic recession, America developed serious doubts about its purpose and its future, and to many voters, Reagan seemed an inspiring solution. But when all was said and done, the election felt stunning and brutal, a harbinger of the years of mean–spiritedness to come.
The singer was up late the night before, watching the election returns, and stayed in his hotel room the whole day, brooding over whether he should make a comment on the turn of events. Finally, onstage that night at Arizona State University, Springsteen stood silently for a moment, fingering his guitar nervously, and then told his audience: “I don’t know what you guys think about what happened last night, but I think it’s pretty frightening.” Then he vaulted into an enraged version of his most defiant song, “Badlands.”
On that occasion, “Badlands” stood for everything it had always stood for — a refusal to accept life’s meanest fates or most painful limitations — but it also became something more: a warning about the spitefulness that was about to visit our land as the social and political horizon turned dark and frightening. “I wanna spit in the face of these badlands,” Springsteen sang with an unprecedented fury on that night, and it was perhaps in that instant that he reconceived his role in rock & roll.
In a way, his action foreshadowed the political activism that would transform rock & roll during the 1980s. As the decade wore on, Springsteen would become one of the most outspoken figures in pop music, though that future probably wasn’t what he had in mind that night. Instead, Springsteen was simply focusing on a question that, in one form or another, his music had been asking all along: What does it mean to be born an American?
Well, what does it mean to be born in America? Does it mean being born to birthrights of freedom, opportunity, equity and bounty? If so, then what does it mean that many of the country’s citizens never truly receive those blessings? And what does it mean that in a land of such matchless vision and hope, the acrid realities of fear, repression, hatred, deprivation, racism and sexism also hold sway? Does it mean, indeed, that we are living in badlands?
Questions of this sort — about America’s nature and purpose, about the distance between its ideals and its truths — are, of course, as old as the nation itself, and finding revealing or liberating answers to those questions is a venture that has obsessed (and eluded) many of the country’s worthiest artists, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Norman Mailer, from John Ford to Francis Coppola. Rock & roll — an art form born of a provocative mix of American myths, impulses and guilts — has also aimed, from time to time, to pursue those questions, to mixed effect. In the 1960s, in a period of intense generational division and political rancor, Bob Dylan and the Band, working separately and together, explored the idea of America as a wounded family in albums like The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band; in the end, though, artists shied from the subject, as if something about the American family’s complex, troubled blood ties proved too formidable. Years later, Neil Young (like the Band’s Robbie Robertson, a Canadian obsessed by American myths) confronted the specter of forsworn history in works like American Stars ‘n’ Bars, Hawks and Doves and Freedom. Yet, like too many other artists or politicians who have come face to face with how America has recanted its own best promises, Young finally didn’t seem to know what to say about such losses. In some ways, Elvis Presley, a seminal figure for Springsteen, came closest to embodying the meaning of America in his music. That’s because he tried to seize the nation’s dream of fortune and make himself a symbol of it. It’s also because once Presley had that dream, the dream found a way of undoing him — leading him to heartbreak, decline, death. American callings, American fates.
Bruce Springsteen followed his own version of the fleeting American dream. He grew up in the suburban town of Freehold, New Jersey, feeling estranged from his family and community, and his refusal to accept the limits of that life fueled the songwriting in his early, largely autobiographical LPs. Indeed, records like Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run were works about flight from dead-end small-town life and thankless familial obligations, and they accomplished for Springsteen the very dream that he was writing about: That is, those records lifted him from a life of mundane reality and delivered him to a place of bracing purpose. From the outset, Springsteen was heralded by critics as one of the brightest hopes in rock & roll — a songwriter and live performer who was as alluring and provoking as Presley and as imaginative and expressive as Dylan. And Springsteen lived up to the hoopla: With his 1975 album, Born to Run, Springsteen fashioned pop’s most form-stretching and eventful major work since the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But for all the praise and fame the album won him, it couldn’t rid Springsteen of his fears of solitude, and it couldn’t erase his memory of the lives of his family and friends. Consequently, his next LP, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was a stark and often bitter reflection on how a person could win his dreams and yet still find himself dwelling in a dark and lonely place — a story of ambition and loss as ill-starred and deeply American as Citizen Kane.
With The River, released in 1980, Springsteen was still writing about characters straining against the restrictions of their world, but he was also starting to look at the social conditions that bred lives split between the dilemmas of flight and ruin. In Springsteen’s emerging mythos, people still had big hopes, but they often settled for delusional loves and fated family lives. In the album’s haunting title song, the youthful narrator gets his girlfriend pregnant and then enters a joyless marriage and a toilsome job in order to meet his obligations. Eventually, all the emotional and economic realities close in, and the singer’s marriage turns into a living, grievous metaphor for lost idealism. “Now, all them things that seemed so important,” sings Springsteen. “Well, mister, they vanished right into the air/Now I just act like I don’t remember/Mary acts like she don’t care.” In The River’s murky and desultory world, people long for fulfillment and connections, but as often as not they end up driving empty mean streets in after–midnight funks, fleeing from a painful nothingness into a more deadening nothingness.