''Living in Your American Skin'': Bruce Springsteen and the Possibility Of
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‘‘Living in your American skin’’: Bruce Springsteen and the Possibility of Politics Roxanne Harde Abstract: Springsteen’s songs have a stake in our shared world. They also have the depth and the density of the best lyric poetry, and the narrative force and immediacy of the most enduring ballads. This essay reads Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics as literature and as political narratives. Drawing on Rancie`re, Isin, and other political theorists, I examine Springsteen’s politics and the ways of being political he has exemplified for more than thirty years. Keywords: Bruce Springsteen, politics, social justice, activism, recession, Vietnam War, war on terror, George W. Bush, 9/11 Re´sume´ : Le pre´sent essai reconnaıˆta` la fois l’inte´reˆt de Springsteen dans le monde que nous partageons et que ses chansons posse`dent la profondeur et la densite´ de la meilleure poe´sie lyrique, que ses re´cits ont la force et l’instantane´ite´ des ballades les plus durables, et de´finit aussi les paroles de ses chansons comme de la litte´rature et de la politique. Puisant dans Rancie`re, Isin, et d’autres the´oriciens politiques, j’examine la politique de Springsteen et les fac¸ons d’eˆtre politique qu’il a propose´es en exemple durant plus de trente ans. Mots cle´s : Bruce Springsteen, politique, justice sociale, activisme, re´cession, guerre du Vietnam, guerre au terrorisme, George W. Bush, 9/11 In his 1844 essay ‘‘Politics,’’ Ralph Waldo Emerson laments, ‘‘We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force’’ (252). Politics should address this ‘‘low state,’’ Emerson argues, because politics rests ‘‘on necessary foundations, and cannot be treated with levity . [T]he wise know . that the State must follow, and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; . and they only who build on Ideas, build for eter- nity; and that the form of government which prevails, is the expres- sion of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. 6 Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’e´tudes ame´ricaines 43, no. 1, 2013 doi: 10.3138/cras.2013.006 The law is only a memorandum’’ (242). From his first record, likely from the first song he wrote, Bruce Springsteen has been one who builds on ideas and quite consciously so. In a 2004 interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, Springsteen says, ‘‘I always felt that the musician’s job . was to provide an alternative source of information, a spiritual and social rallying place, somewhere you went to have a communal experience’’ (73). Politics begins, writes Jacques Rancie`re in The Politics of Literature, ‘‘when those men and women who don’t have the time to do anything other than their work take the time they don’t have to prove that they are indeed speaking beings, participating in a shared world’’ (4). Recognizing Springsteen’s stake in our shared world, the poetic depth and the density of his lyrics, and the enduring force and immediacy of his narratives, I read his lyrics as literature and as politics, as connected and collective practice. Rancie`re makes clear that the politics of literature is ‘‘not the same thing as the politics of writers,’’ but, he argues, the purity of a writer’s art ‘‘has something to do with politics’’ (Politics 3). Responding to Canadian Review of American Studies 43 (2013) Wenner’s notice that he has scrupulously avoided commercial use of his music and consequently built a reputation for integrity and 126 conscience, for the purity of his art, Springsteen described his work this way: ‘‘I tried to build a reputation for thoughtfulness—that was the main thing I was aiming for. I took the songs, the issues, and the people I was writing about seriously’’ (73). Springsteen avoided partisan politics for the most part while he took seriously the subjects of his songs and therefore did not seem overtly political, at least until President George W. Bush began his ‘‘war on terror.’’ But if personal politics, if becoming political, to paraphrase Engin Isin, is that moment when an established rank—the superior over the inferior, the rich over the poor, the Christian over the Muslim, the white over the black—is challenged or subverted, then the ways of doing politics can be rethought (276). If politics is that thing we do as citizens, as we make collective decisions, including activism on behalf of specific issues or causes, then Springsteen has never really avoided politics, as made evident in part by his early affiliations with and work for No Nukes, Amnesty International, the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, and Musicians United for Safe Energy. If politics is that thing we do as individuals when we conclude what is just and unjust, and then take responsibility for and action in accordance with our conclusions, then Springsteen has long offered his fans, in his lyrics and his life, the possibilities of politics. Drawing on Rancie`re, Isin, and other political theorists, this essay examines—in a roughly chronological fashion and drawing from many of his albums—Springsteen’s politics and the ways of being political he has exemplified for more than thirty years. ‘‘Growin’ Up,’’ from his first album, 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., details a young Turk wending his way through teenage angst. It seems crucial that, using the long lines and youthful ver- bosity so prevalent on his first two albums, Springsteen has this figure come out of tortured young manhood unscathed, with his soul intact. That untouched soul ultimately gives this speaker the courage to move from hiding amidst the crowd to asserting his dif- ference, his rights, and his own voice, and the song concludes with the speaker refusing to sit down; instead he stands up and finishes growing up. This standing up and claiming the right to speak is the part of growing up that anchors Springsteen’s poetry and politics. He is not the poet of ‘‘Jungleland’’ who just stands back until he winds up disgracefully wounded, without the dignity of death, or more accurately, of the death of the Rat, killed by his own dream: Outside the street’s on fire in a real death waltz Between flesh and what’s fantasy and the poets down here 127 Don’t write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be Revue canadienne d’e And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead.1 In The Flesh of Words, Rancie`re asks, ‘‘isn’t a new form of political ´ experience necessary to emancipate the lyrical subject from the old tudes ame poetic-political framework?’’ (10). I would counter with, ‘‘isn’t a new poetic-political framework necessary to emancipate the subject ´ and open him or her to political experience?’’ In ‘‘Jungleland,’’ poets ricaines 43 (2013) are rendered passive, but the enterprising Rat, another boy from Jersey, at least chases and faces down his dream. Rather than the political leanings of a given poet, rather than the political interpre- tation of a given text, Rancie`re looks for ‘‘what essential necessity links the modern stance of poetic utterance with that of political subjectivity’’ (Flesh 9). From ‘‘Growin’ Up’’ to ‘‘Jungleland,’’ Springs- teen’s quest for freedom, for justice, for autonomy, for the right to speak is the necessary link between lyric and subject. The poets and the Rat of ‘‘Jungleland’’ end Springsteen’s 1975 breakout album Born to Run, and the song seems in many ways to conclude and to define his first works as a trilogy (the middle being The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle) about youthful questing for largely undefined names, claims, and freedoms. All that changed with 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town when Springsteen’s political subjects began to yearn after social as well as personal justice. Embroiled in a legal battle with his former manager, Mike Appel, Springsteen was unable to release new music, so he spent years writing and recording a host of songs, some of which went onto that record, the rest now out in The Promise,a remarkable boxed set released in late 2010. As video footage in- cluded in the deluxe edition shows, it was a dark time for Springs- teen professionally even as he came into his own in his art and his politics. And it was, to my mind, when he rethought the ways of being political. Becoming political, Isin suggests, is that ‘‘moment when freedom becomes responsibility and obligation becomes a right, and involves arduous work upon oneself and others’’ (276). Darkness was written and recorded as Springsteen examined the idea of his own freedom as an artist and citizen, and as the United States suffered through the recession of the mid to late 1970s. If Canadian Review of American Studies 43 (2013) Springsteen had defined himself as a voice of and from the working class in his first three albums, then he explicitly became a voice for 128 the working class on his fourth. He later noted in ‘‘Chords for Change,’’ an op-ed piece in the New York Times, that ‘‘a nation’s artists and musicians have a particular place in its social and political life. Over the years I’ve tried to think long and hard about what it means to be American: about the distinctive identity and position we have in the world, and how that position is best carried.