Volume 4 • 2020 Published by Mcgill University
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Volume 4 • 2020 Published by McGill University 2 Volume 4 • 2020 Managing Editor: Caroline Madden Editors: Jonathan D. Cohen Roxanne Harde Irwin Streight Editorial Board: Eric Alterman Jim Cullen Steven Fein Bryan Garman Stephen Hazan Arnoff Donna Luff Lorraine Mangione Lauren Onkey June Skinner Sawyers Bryant Simon Jerry Zolten Mission Statement BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies aims to publish scholarly, peer- reviewed essays pertaining to Bruce Springsteen. This open-access journal seeks to encourage consideration of Springsteen’s body of work primarily through the political, economic, and socio-cultural factors that have influenced his music and shaped its reception. BOSS welcomes broad interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to Springsteen’s songwriting and performance. The journal aims to secure a place for Springsteen Studies in the contemporary academy. Submission Guidelines The editors of BOSS welcome submissions of articles that are rigorously researched and provide original, analytical approaches to Springsteen’s songwriting, performance, and fan community. Inter- and cross-disciplinary works, as well as studies that conform to specific disciplinary perspectives, are welcome. Suggested length of submission is between 15 and 25 pages. Contact To access BOSS, please visit http://boss.mcgill.ca/ Please address all queries and submissions to Caroline Madden (Managing Editor) at [email protected]. Cover Image By Danny Clinch. Used with kind permission from Shore Fire Media (http://shorefire.com/). Contents Introduction to BOSS Caroline Madden Contributors 7 Articles Everyday People: Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and the Gospel Tradition Brian Conniff 9 Signifying (and Psychoanalyzing) National Identity in Rock: Bruce Springsteen and The Tragically Hip Alexander Carpenter & Ian Skinner 50 Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams”: Towards Articulating and Assessing Its Inclusiveness Barry David 88 Reviews Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen, edited by Jonathan D. Cohen and June Skinner Sawyers Prudence Jones 129 Introduction For Bruce Springsteen (and many of us), 2020 was a year of reflection and nostalgia. In Letter to You, Springsteen honors the ghosts of music past—those who have shaped his lifelong artistic journey. He invites us into his house of a thousand guitars, erected in his formative years by his first band The Castiles and cultivated by the E Street Band and countless other inspirations. This year, Springsteen also appeared with Bleachers on the song “chinatown,” adding a gruff resonance to its soft yearning. It is a unique collaboration that reinforces Springsteen’s continual expansion of his musical horizons. In the spirit of artistic influences, BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies Vol. 4 explores Springsteen’s connection to other musicians. Barry David studies the Gospel roots and various interpretations of “Land of Hope and Dreams” from other artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seeger. Brian Conniff explores Springsteen’s longtime kinship with Elvis Presley. Lastly, Alex Carpenter and Ian Skinner contrast the nationalistic themes of Springsteen and The Tragically Hip’s music. Prudence Jones reviews Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen, which offers a fascinating retrospective of Springsteen’s body of work and impact on popular culture. We hope this issue will contribute to discussions about Springsteen’s ongoing legacy and wellspring of musical knowledge and inspirations. Caroline Madden, Managing Editor BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies 4 (2020) Contributors Alexander Carpenter is a musicologist and music critic. He is Professor of Music at the Augustana campus of the University of Alberta, where he teaches courses in music history, music theory, popular music and aesthetics. His research interests include the music of the Second Viennese School, post-punk music, the connections between music and psychoanalysis, and film music. Brian Conniff is Professor of English at the University of Scranton, where for the past decade he was also Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of The Lyric and Modern Poetry, a book on the relationship between “lyricism”—involving ideas of music and transcendence--and the work of several modern and contemporary poets. His articles have appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including American Literature, African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Religion and Literature, Christianity and Literature, Logos, Catholic Education, Journal of Reading, and Review of Contemporary Fiction, as well as scholarly books on Robert Hayden, Truman Capote, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, W.H. Auden, Robert Creeley, prison writing, and literature and law. Barry David received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, his M.A. from Carleton University, and his B.A. from the University of King’s College at Dalhousie University. He has taught at St. Anselm College, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Ave Maria University. He has written several articles in philosophy on topics in medieval philosophy, ethics, philosophy of God, and metaphysics; and is also co-editor of Aquinas the Augustinian, editor of Passionate Mind, and author of Pursuing and Praising God: Augustine’s Confessions. He teaches a wide range of courses in Philosophy and Humanities, covering topics in Classical Antiquity through Modern and Contemporary Culture. Ian Skinner Ian Skinner is a graduate of the University of Alberta (BA in Music) and Dalhousie University (MA in Musicology). His academic research undertaken in these degrees focuses on Canadian folk music and Canadian popular music studies, most notably the music of The Tragically Hip and Drake. In 2017, his research on Canadian folk music for the Kodály Society of Canada was published by Cypress Music for the re- issued, two-volume folksong collection Reflections of Canada. His Master's thesis (2019) 7 CONTRIBUTORS integrates socio-geographic concepts of space, place, and identity with the music of Canadian rapper Drake. He is currently awaiting approval for a doctoral degree in Musicology at the University of Alberta. He now lives in Dawson Creek, BC, with his wife and two daughters. BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies 4 (2020) Everyday People: Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and the Gospel Traditixon Brian Conniff University of Scranton Abstract Bruce Springsteen has often referred to Elvis Presley as the primary inspiration in his own vocational journey. This essay considers Elvis’ complex significance over the long course of Springsteen’s career. Elvis has been Springsteen’s most important point of entry into older populist traditions, including the blues, country, and gospel. He has also been, in his later isolation and self-destruction, Springsteen’s main cautionary tale. More recently, Springsteen has seen Elvis as the originator of a version of Rock and Roll that draws directly from gospel—particularly from the interactions between the minister, the choir, and the congregation—to create a “front man” who moves the audience toward a collective experience of restoration and hope. Along with Elvis’ populist eclecticism and his crossing of racial boundaries, this dynamic of gospel redemption has played a central role in Springsteen’s music, from the late 1960s, when he set out on his own career in the midst of the racial uprisings in Newark and Asbury Park, through his most recent albums and some of his most powerful recordings and performances, including “Land of Hope and Dreams.” Throughout, the gospel tradition has shaped Springsteen’s understanding of an American identity with a need for collective redemption grounded in the music and the religious faith of “everyday people.” Bruce Springsteen has often spoken and written about the evening of September 9, 1956. It was then—after dinner, two weeks before his seventh birthday, as he watched the Ed Sullivan Show in his family’s living room in Freehold, New Jersey—that he saw Elvis Presley for the first time. In his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies 4 (2020) 9 EVERYDAY PEOPLE Springsteen provides his most elaborate and deliberately extravagant version of this story: Elvis’ appearance is “a moment of light, blinding as a universe birthing a billion new suns, there was hope, sex, rhythm, excitement, possibility, a new way of seeing, of feeling, of thinking, of looking at your body, of combing your hair, of wearing your clothes, of moving and of living.” More than ever before, Springsteen frames this set piece as his own moment of vocational discovery, fusing our culture’s two most prominent origin stories, the scientific ( the Big Bang) and the religious (Genesis, with a glimpse of “God and Satan’s glorious Kingdom on earth”). One of his most familiar stories has gone so far over-the-top, grown so full of ironic inflation, that we might ask if he is kidding. Mostly, he is not. He really does believe he has been called. Yes, it is a “joyous demand.” But it is a demand, all the same.1 To say the least, it is a lot to ask of Elvis, especially in 2016, and even more today. While Elvis has come to seem more and more out of place, in so many ways, in contemporary America, Springsteen’s appreciation for him has only grown. Fortunately, it has also grown more reflective and thoughtful. Like many matters related to Rock and Roll, the early canonization of Elvis—by Springsteen, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and others—has often depended on specific constructions of originality and authenticity, which have always been questionable and which have obscured or misrepresented a long and complicated history of commercial and cultural exploitation. Springsteen’s continued allegiance with Elvis and his legacy can sometimes seem difficult to reconcile with other aspects of his career, perhaps most of all his generally progressive 1 Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (New York:” Simon & Schuster, 2016), 38-40. BOSS: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies 4 (2020) 10 EVERYDAY PEOPLE social and political views.