Pleased to make the cover of the Washington Examiner Magazine…
I once inadvertently torpedoed a budding relationship when I told her that The Boss was what rich people liked to play to pretend they gave a damn about the working class—it hit a little too close to home. Word to the wise: some of these Northeasterners take their Springsteen awfully seriously. It’s like he’s not just an entertainer, not just a rock star, but somehow the voice and conscience of America itself.
If I’ve grown cynical about Bruce, it’s because his best work has meant so much to me and now feels so far away. He had a nearly two-decade run of some of the greatest records and concerts ever, but the once working-class hero has turned plastic celeb sipping almond milk with Barack Obama.
A little history of how Bruce became The Boss and how The Boss, perhaps inevitably, became the troubadour of management—after his verbose early period, by late 1972 Springsteen had discovered the winning formula later crystallized for all time on Born to Run: molten hunger and ambition poured into searing projections of his internal drama upon a mythologized vision of the New Jersey proletariat. My mother’s a Jersey girl of Bruce’s vintage who assures me the local greasers were nowhere near so poetic, but no one’s ever better captured the feeling of restless dreamers staring up at the stars.
The litigation with his manager that held up Darkness on the Edge of Town was perhaps the greatest thing that ever happened to Springsteen creatively. It gave him the opportunity to write and rewrite, hone the live act, and start universalizing his preoccupations into more political contexts. It all turned out brilliantly, and by the time of the stark Nebraska in 1982 he’d become an explicitly if hazily political figure, a blue-collar persona he leaned into for the populist anthems of the multiplatinum Born in the U.S.A.
To Springsteen’s credit, he seems to have realized that megastardom meant his workin’ man schtick was becoming untenable; he’d lost any connection with the kinds of people whose stories he purported to tell. He’d moved to Hollywood, and life had become more Michael Jackson than Joe Lunchpail. And so he stepped away from the E Street Band for his next album, Tunnel of Love, a self-consciously mature portrait of his crumbling marriage that closed out his classic years.
Few would call the ensuing Human Touch and Lucky Town great records, but at least they were authentic: the middle-aged celebrity dad reflecting on his life and career, along with some undistinguished genre exercises. The problem was that they didn’t sell, not in anything like the numbers he expected, not even after MTV started airing a “Plugged” special that likewise underperformed.
With the success of “Streets of Philadelphia,” from the movie, came a hastily assembled greatest hits with a few new tracks from a tentatively reassembled E Street Band and, before long, a nearly tuneless acoustic sequel to Nebraska. Even with the ubiquity of “Secret Garden,” as heard in Jerry Maguire, the former arena god was still stuck playing theaters. It was becoming inevitable that, probably sooner rather than later, there’d be a nostalgic reunion tour and that it might not go so great. The resulting concert film and double CD, Live in New York City, is easily Springsteen’s worst release up to that point. The band was way off its game, and Bruce had adopted an affected Okie drawl he’s leaned on ever since. But the tour made boatloads of money from aging fans who wanted to feel like it was 1986 again.
Read the rest at the Washington Examiner Magazine.
I enjoyed discussing my conflicted ambivalence about The Boss in a spirited yet amiable conversation on the “Set Lusting Bruce” podcast with Jesse W. Jackson.
Next: Indiana Jones and the Indefinite Culture War
Well said. As a fan from the mid/late 70s, who saw him live on stage at Penn State's Rec Hall, that guy disappeared sometime around Nebraska. He is far away from his roots now.
I still have Nebraska on vinyl. I read that Howard Zinn inspired the album which was released on the cusp of economic renewal. Certainly THAT had something to with Boss's more optimistic turn. Victimnomics didn't sell well after 1984.