Bruce Springsteen crosses the picket line
Jesse Adams
I once inadvertently torpedoed a budding relationship when I told the girl in question 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.
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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 mid-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 father 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.
The comeback album, The Rising, was better, but the sound was unrecognizable. The band was buried under glossy digital production like the bastard spawn of Pearl Jam and Train, or a campaign commercial. And the songs were almost as synthetic, as if Springsteen and company were methodically manufacturing anthems instead of channeling personal experience. He had several releases like that in the 2000s, records that were solid, professional, poorly produced, and clinically calculated. (The less said about the cringey NPR hootenanny that was The Seeger Sessions, the better.)
Contrived is one thing, offensive is another: My fandom came to an abrupt halt in 2009 with the release of his Obama inauguration album, Working On A Dream. It was bad enough to start with “Outlaw Pete,” an abysmal Western pastiche, but a song called “Queen of the Supermarket” was the kind of bad that made me wonder if Springsteen had ever been good in the first place. It was a cloying, condescending caricature of a poor workin’ stiff dreaming of that cute checkout girl down at them thar grocery store — as if Bruce was mocking those he’d long claimed to represent and whose image he was long since back to appropriating. His whole act had turned more and more a kind of bougie minstrel show, helping enable the privileged to read whatever their priorities into the supposed people’s struggle.
Periodically I’ve dipped back into what Springsteen Inc. has been up to lately, hearing the material how one might slow down to gawk at a wreck on the highway. I had plenty of opportunity to go see Springsteen on Broadway but wasn’t about to drop several hundred bucks on the privilege. Today tons of progressive ticketholders still cheer on The Boss from front rows and luxury boxes, shouting along with “The Promised Land” as if 40-odd years later, the downscale protagonist wouldn’t likely be a Trump supporter adamantly against the Green New Deal, critical race theory, top surgery, and whatever else is fashionable on Martha’s Vineyard. As Bruce readily admits, myth almost always sells better than reality. Even if the shows were vastly more affordable, the Bruce that means anything to me survives only on tape, no matter how well rehearsed the stage monologues. He can’t properly perform the old songs like “Thunder Road” or “Racing in the Street” anymore, let alone write new ones, because he’s forgotten what they mean.
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In this late day and age, it’s better that the man has finally turned to extraneous cover albums. If it’s going to be exhausted oldies karaoke, best to take on material he still retains some capacity to interpret. As Bruce himself sang on “Better Days” back in 1992, “it’s a sad funny endin’ when you find yourself pretendin’, a rich man in a poor man’s shirt.”
Jesse Adams is the New York-based writer and consultant behind the pseudonymous Substack The Ivy Exile.