During the Super Bowl on Sunday night, a narrow Bruce Springsteen with a paper voice participated in what Boss-ologists said was their first television commercial: a two-minute ad on the Jeep called “The Middle” in which the singer, clearly inspired by the long-awaited end of the Trump era, he becomes poetic about the philosophical importance of the environment while working in a small town in Kansas that is in the geographical center of the continental United States.
“It’s no secret,” he says of the plaintive groan of a steel guitar. “The environment has been a difficult place to be lately – between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear.” Then, when we see him running his hands over the frozen land of the interior, he tells us: “We just need to remember that the very soil on which we stand is common ground”.
Springsteen’s pitch was not the only gesture toward unity in a closely watched sporting extravaganza that took place a month and a day after the invasion of the Capitol by pro-Trump extremists.
Before the game, in an unlikely duo arranged by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation firm, the national anthem was played by country star Eric Church and R&B singer Jazmine Sullivan – a duet that Church (one of his biggest hits is called “Springsteen ”) Recently told me that it agreed as a direct response to the Capitol riot.
“I avoided that forever,” he said of the notoriously difficult song to sing. Still, watching the January 6 events led him to reconsider: “With what is happening in America, it seems like an important time for a patriotic moment. An important moment for the unit. The fact that I am a Caucasian country singer and she is an African American R&B singer – I think country needs it. “
However, the reaction to Springsteen’s commercial and Church and Sullivan’s “Star-Spangled Banner” – in a broadcast, it’s worth remembering, presented by a league that essentially blacklisted Colin Kaepernick because he knelt down during the anthem – raises complicated questions about exactly what this boasted unit looks like and precisely whose job it requires.
As with any wealthy celebrity who encourages Americans to fix problems from which the celebrity is largely protected, the boss’s plea sparked the expected rollover look on social media. Some conservative analysts pointed out that Springsteen, an enthusiastic Democratic activist who supported Joe Biden in the hard-hitting election of 2020, was calling for a truce only after his guy defeated Trump; many progressives were upset that he was shilling for a car company that spews pollution.
More interesting were the tweets I saw in response to Church and Sullivan’s performance, many of which boiled down to: Why did a black woman as talented as Sullivan have to share her big moment with a white man?
“Now they know very well that they should have let Jazmine Sullivan sing the national anthem because she did it,” I wrote Shea Couleé, former competitor of the “RuPaul’s Drag Race”.
The practical answer is that Sullivan, a magnificent singer and storyteller, simply lacks the broad recognition that the NFL has historically sought as a solo artist. (And, by the way, Church too.) In recent years, the hymn has been sung by names like Lady Gaga, Pink and Gladys Knight; Together, as Roc Nation clearly understood, Sullivan and Church represented an intriguing attraction to rival these familiar names.
But the exasperation justified by Sullivan being asked, like so many black women before her, to accommodate someone else made me wonder about the reaction to a country music controversy that was almost certainly on Church’s mind when he promulgated his vision of racial reconciliation in the Sunday. : Morgan Wallen’s use of the word N captured on video last week and published by TMZ.
As an industry, Nashville was extraordinarily quick to condemn Wallen’s behavior, which happened in his garage when he returned home “from a turbulent night with friends”, as TMZ said. His record label announced it had “suspended” the singer’s contract (whatever that means), while radio conglomerates said they were taking Wallen’s music off the air and commercial groups said they would exclude him from consideration for awards.
Still, many fans quickly joined Wallen’s side on social media – and not just there. On Sunday, Billboard reported that sales and streams for singer Dangerous’s album had risen 14% in the previous seven days, enough to keep the LP at the top of the Billboard 200 chart for the fourth consecutive week.
Attitudes varied among those who expressed support for Wallen. Some said he made a mistake outside of character and deserved a second chance, as Rakiyah Marshall, a Nashville executive romantically involved with the CEO of Wallen’s record company, argued in a widely discussed Instagram post.
“I won’t give up on him,” wrote Marshall, who is black, next to a picture of him with his arm around Wallen’s neck. “I hope the world sees the person I know in this photo.”
Others, however, identified the singer as the latest victim of the so-called cancellation culture and wondered (or pretended to ask) why he can’t use the N word when countless rappers do.
I’m not matching Wallen fans who want to follow him anywhere with Sullivan fans who see Church’s well-intentioned involvement in the Super Bowl as just another product of white privilege. But as personifications of racist and anti-racist thinking, respectively, both flank a supposed moral center that seems increasingly inadequate for those outside the liberal 1960s bubble that Springsteen (and President Biden) occupy.
Could anyone watch this Jeep ad and be genuinely moved – not for its sweeping aesthetic, but for its childish political proposition?
Wallen’s most offended fans don’t want to live in the middle of Springsteen because it’s a place where old hierarchies are challenged and you can’t say what you want without consequences. And few of Sullivan’s fans are racing to get there because they are expected to forgive a lot for the sake of the union.
Of course, Springsteen’s American utopia is something we should wish for – something you could even allow yourself to believe a little while listening to Sullivan use his miraculous voice to celebrate a country that for centuries has made life more difficult than necessary for People black.
But at a time when Trump’s acolytes in the government are saying it is time to leave the uprising, it is disappointing that the great proponent of the dispossessed of rock fails to see that progress requires more work from some than from others.