Last week, when Nebraska’s Lincoln Journal Star reported that Bruce Springsteen had been seen in the city with a film crew, my heart skipped a beat: maybe he was working on a documentary for a 1982 reissue Nebraska, which is due to the handling of the file dig box set. This beloved solo album had Springsteen mixing images of his childhood in the 1950s with stark descriptions of Ronald Reagan’s economic division in America, coming out with a series of haunting vignettes that seem increasingly relevant today. Nebraska arrived during a fertile period in Springsteen’s career, while he was assembling his eventual commercial breakthrough, 1984 Born in the USA Outtakes are legendary – including an electrifying version of rumors with their loyal E Street Band – and there are also mountains of previously unreleased songs, such as a so-called “The Klansman”, which clarifies his conflicted and notoriously misunderstood position on American patriotism. So, I optimistically imagined him visiting the album’s eponymous state to shed light on all of this, offering a new insight into an artistic peak.
Instead, he was filming a Jeep commercial called “The Middle” for the Super Bowl. It is the 71-year-old man’s first commercial appearance, his first product endorsement and, apparently, a project in which he had a significant, creative stake. In the moody two-minute announcement, Springsteen visits a humble church located in the geographic center of the country. Alone, he meditates on what makes us Americans while driving a jeep and offers a message of hope to a country that, in his view, has strayed far from its initial promise. “We can reach the top of the mountain, through the desert,” he says hoarsely, trying to reach gravity. “And we are going to cross that division.” At the end, a message on the screen is addressed to the “United States of America”.
Now, if you’ve never been receptive to Springsteen’s patented rock’n’roll transcendence brand, or if you’re skeptical of the working-class fixations that helped make you one of the most famous musicians on Earth, then this commercial don’t convince him otherwise. In fact, this may be how you ever I saw him: Here he is preaching a vague message of unity while remaining distant from any real human being. He is speaking to a promised land that may never have existed. He looks incredibly well looked after, although he wants you to think he’s worn and worn out by years of manual labor. He’s selling you a car.
And even for someone like me, who sees his work as a complex and empathic portrait of American life, the message here seems blurry – and even worse, not entirely yours. On the one hand, Springsteen himself never sought any kind of compromise, and the political perspective in his lyrics never wavered. Of the bitter class struggles portrayed in 1978 Darkness at the City Limit through the effervescent prosecution of the Iraq War in 2007 Magic, he showed us, over and over again, exactly where he is.
Not to mention that he struggled for decades against being co-opted by corporations and politicians trying to align himself with his hard-won integrity. When powerful people once tried to stick to a chorus’s “Born in the USA” red-white-and-blue sticker while covering up their damning lines, Springsteen was adamant about his refusal. In the mid-1980s, he reportedly declined a $ 15 million offer from Chrysler to license the coup, and rejected President Reagan, who shouted at him during a campaign stop in New Jersey. “The president was mentioning my name the other day, and I kind of started to wonder what his favorite album must have been,” Springsteen told an audience at the time. “I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. “Although he tried to laugh at such advances at the time, Springsteen was shaken: for the first time in his career, his work got out of hand.
“A composer writes to be understood,” he admitted in his 2016 memoirs, and after the huge fanfare that followed Born in the USA, he never tried to match those pop heights again. His work became more subtle and personal, while his political songs – like the controversial brutality police ballad “American Skin (41 Shots)” and the 2012 recession-era protest music Demolition ball– it seemed more direct, almost allegorical.
He also felt more comfortable aligning himself with like-minded politicians, campaigning for Democratic candidates like John Kerry and Barack Obama. When he performed at Joe Biden’s opening last month, Springsteen chose to sing “Land of Hope and Dreams”, a gospel-influenced song he wrote in the late 1990s to accompany the E Street Band meeting (another called for unity after a polarized era) Although the music itself is as powerful as any of its radio classics, the tone is more melancholy, narrated by a traveler near the end of his journey. Fittingly, the performance that night at the Lincoln Memorial was neither commemorative nor triumphant. It was a slow and silent version, looking for its rhythm.
As with other recent film projects, such as the 2019 accompanying documentaries Western stars and last year Letter to you, “The Middle” was co-directed with Thom Zimny and his images are exuberant and poetic. The commercial has a soundtrack to a Springsteen soundtrack and his studio collaborator Ron Aniello – I immediately felt a wave of gratitude that he didn’t use something like “Glory Days” – whose melancholic mix of strings and pedal steel hits a similar chord that opening presentation. But the message of the narration seems closer to the overarching chorus of “Born in the USA” than to its thorny verses: As familiar and uplifting as Springsteen sounds against images of rustic country roads and rural landscapes, I sometimes don’t recognize the voice disembodied behind the words.
Two days before the Jeep commercial aired, Springsteen officially released the last recording of his ongoing live archive series. He captures an extraordinary 1997 show from his first solo tour, behind his discreet solo album The Ghost of Tom Joad, and represents the furthest he has ever moved away from the mainstream. For two hours, he is heard strumming a guitar while singing elaborate story songs about immigrants crossing the border to America only to be forced to cook meth, sell their bodies and die alone, away from their families. The music is weak and dark, and the message is overwhelmingly tragic. It is hard to imagine Springsteen saying to any of the characters in these songs, as he does in the Super Bowl commercial, that “the very ground we are on is common ground.”
Of course, perspectives and context change. In addition to Tom Joad Springsteen peppered the setlist with reinvented versions of more iconic material. He plays “Born in the USA” the way he initially wrote for Nebraska– with monotonous acoustic accompaniment, constantly in danger of disappearing. He plays “This Hard Land”, one of the most famous outtakes in Born in the USA, moving away from the microphone to allow the audience to deliver the final message back to him: “Stay strong, stay hungry and stay alive … if you can”. To close the show, he plays a funereal version of “The Promised Land”, a song that is not about getting anywhere, but just struggling to move on. Slowing the melody to a crawl and hitting the body of his guitar, he cuts the last line of the final chorus – “And I believe in a promised land” – in half: “And I believe. ”It was all he needed to say.
Originally appeared on Pitchfork