Springsteen's Affairs of State
When Songs are inevitably political
In my Home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”
“Tonight we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring.”
Lately, my mind has been so focused on politics that I’ve almost forgotten about songs, despite one and the other often being the same.
Some people stateside don’t like Bruce Springsteen, his politics or his music, but that doesn’t change his extraordinary success, especially in Europe, where he’s sold more than 20 Million records.
Springsteen’s music is a massive cultural export. He pays his taxes to the US Treasury, but the blue-collar troubadour is still humble enough to joke about never having “worked an honest job in my entire life.” Work in this sense is having to do something you don’t want to do, rather than being paid to do something you love to do. Or, more prosaically, like the old American farmer, in this 1929 film, who thinks of hoeing his field as play.
You know what work is?
You don’t?
Why work is doing something you have to do...
When you’re doing something you want to do, that’s play.
Springsteen is hardly a ‘sponger,’ his concerts prove he puts in the hours. In 2023, his European stadium tour sold over 1.6 million tickets. He may have made it all up, but, unlike the George Burns joke, you can’t fake sincerity. His success emanates from the integrity of his songs. They may be anchored in America, but they resonate around the world.
Here’s my deep dive into three of his most raw songs: The River, American Skin and The Ghost of Tom Joad.
As it turns out they’re all, in one sense or another, political.
The River
The River is a folk song that slowly sets out to rock your world. The opening line, set to lonesome arpeggio guitar chords and harmonica, grabs you by the gut and drags you down into the streaming current.
“I come from down in the valley when mister when you’re young, they bring you up to do just like your daddy done.”
“Once I got the opening lines…the rest fell out,” says Springsteen.
The unfolding story might be set in New Jersey, but it could be Pennsylvania, or Penrhiwceiber, a Welsh mining village. For me, it relocates to the remnants of the working-class culture that once ran through the de-industrialised valleys of the Tyne River. It’s no bad thing to grow up as your daddy did, if there’s a choice, but when that choice is taken away, it becomes a problem; and that’s what was happening all over the western world, in 80’s Tyneside, in Clydeside, or Ohio-side. I’ve written more about this global process of deindustrialisation in Rust Belt Blues, below.
Back to The River, with a quote from Springsteen himself:
"It was a record made during a recession, hard times in the United States. The song that gives it its name I wrote for my brother-in-law and my sister. My brother-in-law was in the construction industry, lost his job, and had to fight hard in the late '70s, like many people today. “
The River gives voice to a disillusioned married man reminiscing on days not so long ago, when he was only nineteen. Relief from life in the valley was provided by driving down to the river with his then seventeen-year-old high school girlfriend, Mary.
There’s more than one Mary in Springsteen’s songs. As he once said, “I'm sure it's the Catholic coming out in me, y'know?” The two young lovers at the centre of the song are likely Catholic, too, given the events that unfold.
Following the acoustic introduction, the song pauses dramatically, before diving headlong into the rollin’ river with drums, bass and piano.
An out-of-wedlock pregnancy befalls the lovers, calling for a courthouse wedding without flowers or a wedding dress. The guy dutifully goes to work in construction, but “lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy.” Memories become a curse, the dreams of his future die, the river is dry, but he still seeks solace at the water’s edge. Meanwhile, Mary acts like she doesn’t care. Then, as the song reaches its climactic end, he delivers a final line as pulverising in it’s potency as the gut-punch opener: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
In the coda to fade, operatic overtones levitate the listener into believing there might well be a way out. Another gear is grabbed for in the darkness, some propulsion is found in the engine, but we don’t know where they’re going. The River, like all of Springteen’s music, taps into the core human response when facing down impending doom: the rage that refuses to die into despondency.
American Skin (41 Shots)
This somewhat controversial song was written in response to the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean immigrant, who was shot 41 times by four NYPD officers. The NYC Police Benevolent Association boycotted Springsteen’s concerts as a consequence, but he still chooses his moments to play it.
It starts with two tones, similar to a police siren, accompanied by the repetition of a three-word mantra: “41 shots.” The first verse invokes the scene of the shooting, expressing some sympathy for the position of the police officers: “You’re kneeling over his body in the vestibule / praying for his life.”
The song builds to a chorus. Two tones change to three, and a little more complexity arrives as the crucial question is posed: ”Is it a gun, is it a knife, is it a wallet?” The reply hangs in the air, “It ain’t no secret / it ain’t no secret / no secret my friend,” before dropping open the secret: “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.”
That was the line that sparked the backlash. Though skin colour isn’t mentioned, it’s implied. Stats show that while more white folk are killed in police incidents as a whole, more black, Latino and Native Americans are killed as a proportion of their population. And that’s an argument too subtle for some.
The scene switches to the heartfelt warning of a mother preparing her son for school: ”If an officer stops you / promise you’ll always be polite / that you’ll never ever run away / promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight.” The mantra“41 shots” kicks in again, emphasising the overwhelming repetition of the fatal shots themselves, before giving way to a Tom Morello guitar solo that turns from a siren in the night into screaming outrage.
The third verse grounds us back in the political reality that even though some of us think of ourselves as our brother’s keeper, we’re stuck in betrayal of one another: “Got my boots caked in this mud / We’re baptised in these waters and in each other’s blood.”
Then, suddenly, the backing music drops out, leaving Springsteen’s lone vulnerable voice delivering the literal killer line: “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.” By now, the mantra “41 shots” has become hypnotic. A sweet saxophone of solace descends, cutting through the night sky like a soul departing.
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Inspired by John Steinbeck’s book, The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford’s film of the said same novel, and Woody Guthrie’s song Tom Joad, Springsteen relocates the unending story of poverty, dispossesion and homelesnesses to mid 1990’s California.
The song opens with migrants walking along a railroad tracks to a campfire under a bridge. The song’s startling imagery came back to me in 2016, when I witnessed similar scenes in refugee way stations spread along the railway lines in Northern Macedonia.
The lines for food and clothes in the Balkans were the same as the “Shelter' line stretching 'round the corner,” in America, where Springsteen wrote of, “Families sleeping in their cars in the southwest / No home, no job, no peace, no rest.”
In the second verse, and just like Steinbeck, Springsteen turns biblical quotes into the pithy phrases of a preacher: “Waiting for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last / In a cardboard box 'neath the underpass.”
"But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first." Matthew 19:30
In the next verse, an inferred question remains unanswered: when you’re hungry, when your pillow is a rock, and your bath is an aqueduct, what might you do with a gun? In The Grapes of Wrath, the answer is straightforward: Tom Joad goes on the run after killing the strike-breaking deputy who murdered his friend, Preacher Casey. Sitting by the campfire light, the choruses build from searching for, to waiting for, and finally sitting with, the Ghost of Tom Joad. Finally, like Woody Guthrie, Springsteen pulls the curtain by paraphrasing Tom Joad’s final speech; the famous one where he says goodbye to his mom, before fleeing from the long arm of the law.
Tom said, "Mom, wherever there's a cop beating a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight against the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me, Mom, I'll be there
Where there's somebody fighting for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody's struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Mom, you'll see me"
"I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere—wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad and—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there."
John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath
Coda:
Springsteen’s album“The Ghost of Tom Joad,” carries at least two songs inspired by the combined journalistic work of writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson. Two of their books concerning poverty in the USA, Journey to Nowhere, and Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, provided inspiration for the Springsteen songs Youngstown and The New Timer.
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