University of Puget Sound Sound Ideas All Faculty Scholarship Faculty Scholarship 1996 From Badlands to Better Days: Bruce Springsteen Observes Law and Politics Bill Haltom University of Puget Sound,
[email protected] Michael W. McCann Follow this and additional works at: http://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/faculty_pubs Citation Haltom, Bill and McCann, Michael W., "From Badlands to Better Days: Bruce Springsteen Observes Law and Politics" (1996). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Sound Ideas. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Sound Ideas. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. From Badlands to Better Days: Bruce Springsteen Observes Law and Politics William Haltom and Michael W. McCann Western Political Science Association San Francisco 1996 Bruce Springsteen defines himself as a story-teller.1 We agree that Springsteen is as tal- ented a story-teller as rock and roll has produced.2 He has written romances of adolescence and adolescents; lyrical tales of escapes, escapees, and escapists; and elegies on parents and parenthood. The best of Springsteen’s song-stories deftly define characters by their purposes and artfully articulate the artist’s attitude toward his “material.” Not so Springsteen’s songs that con- cern law or politics. In these songs the artist’s attitude toward his creations is often lost in a flood of seemingly studied ambiguity and the charactors’ purposes are usually murky. Spring- steen, in legal and political songs as well as in his other stories, almost always evokes emotion. Until recently, too many of his songs of law or politics have been rock-and-roll Rorschach blots: scenes, acts, and actors without clear purposes and attitudes.