Bruce Springsteen’s Americana
Illustration by Vlada Popyk
“The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive”
- Bruce Springsteen
The most money I’ve ever spent in my life was on Bruce Springsteen Tickets. When “The Boss’s” American stadium tour was announced, I knew I had to get tickets for my mother and me. I’ve only really learned about her love of Bruce Springsteen over the past few years. I first found out about it after we took a sixteen hour road trip to Nashville. The radio that day was truly terrible, and we burned through all our CD’s before we got through New Jersey, so the E Street Radio station kept us company for the rest of our trip. Since then, it’s been hard to miss my mother’s love of The Boss; maybe she's leaned into more, or maybe I’ve just latched onto it. The past two Christmases, I’ve bought her some sort of Springsteen memorabilia. I’ve made sure to put at least one Born in the U.S.A song on all of my travel playlists. I can tell that my mom mostly suffers through my music taste. Our car rides are often spent teasing Bruce about his acoustic sets as a recorded concert from 1992 fills the silence. My mom's love of Bruce Springsteen is honestly one of the only real things I know about her interests and hobbies.
Music has always been my way of connecting with my father. My childhood was filled with new wave and punk, with Peter Gabriel and The Cure. If you look at any of my playlists, my father is written all over them. I always knew vaguely of my mother's tastes, mentions of The Indigo Girls peppered throughout my childhood, but she never played them for me. On occasion, I’d come home from school, to music playing through the family iPod as my mother vacuumed the house, trying to remove the never ending dog hair from the carpets. I never learned who those artists were. I have no stories from my mother about her childhood. Only small fragments I’ve been able to pick up, when I listen in on a conversation she’s having with her sister, or when my father lets me peek through the little window he’s made himself over the past twenty three years of marriage. For a long time, Bruce Springsteen felt like the only real window I had into my mom’s life.
I love my mother dearly. We have a complicated relationship, as I’m sure most mothers and daughters do. Which, I’m sure, could do a lot to explain the oddly complex relationship I have with Bruce Springsteen's body of work.
On the one hand, I am almost rabidly defensive of the man. Any attempt by conservatives to co-opt Born to Run or Born in the USA for their rallies and 4th of July parties has me foaming at the mouth. I was sent into at least six tirades about how Springsteen's most popular songs are actually cutting critiques of the Vietnam War and the United States treatment of its veterans. I’m the first one to point out that Springsteen is an outspoken liberal, or that he is openly critical of nearly every move of our current administration. There is something that I hold so dearly about the version of America that I can find in Springsteen's music. A world of working class struggle, an acknowledgment of the pain and suffering inflicted on the men and women of this country, but a celebration of it nonetheless. A real, true love for America and the people who put the hard work into making it run. It’s something I feel the need to protect and to guard from those who want to destroy the very thing his music holds dear.
On the other hand, I am also consistently frustrated by Springsteen and am often left, pretty sadly, wondering how relevant his work can even be. Springsteen's music, despite its critique of the United States, is still at its core patriotic. There is a deep, loving undercurrent for America in his music and aesthetics that is undeniable. But as the United States bombs Iran and continues to fund Israel's genocide in Palestine, is there any room left for this kinda of patriotic liberalism. Springsteen's silence on Palestine has been one of the most difficult things for me to contend with, especially considering his history of using music to speak out against Apartheid.
Throughout Springsteen's current stadium tour, he has made comments both alluding to and in direct opposition to Donald Trump. However, similar to many other liberal artists and politicians, Trump is treated as the cause rather than the symptom. I am not the first one to say that Trump should be impeached. And that he is a danger to our democracy, to our country, and to the world at large. However, we can not act as if the United States was innocent before 2016. Just because we’ve elected a man who wears this country's cruelty on his sleeve doesn't mean it didn’t exist before—Springsteen’s biggest hits address that very issue.
His music offers me not only a point of connection with my mother but, I think, a bridge to understanding her politics. Which is probably why I am so harsh on these songs. My mother's politics frustrate me endlessly. While her hatred of Trump may even eclipse my own, I despise listening to her discuss centrist democrat talking points. I can't wrap my mind around her seeming disinterest in this country's continued role in destabilizing the Middle East, besides “get those boys out of there.” My mom's attention to political issues moves with the news cycle, and while I know she cares, it feels like she thinks nothing can ever improve, and it drives me up the wall. But Springsteen is how I started to carve my own little window into understanding her. I don’t know if it’s a true window necessarily, but it’s the one I have.
