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.