Why Bruce Springsteen's Music Matters Now More than Ever

As I rejoice in having secured tickets to my 47^th through 50^th Bruce Springsteen concerts – part of my “my book will be out so let’s go celebrate” tour, two concerts of which will be in my beloved New York City – it felt fitting to reflect on why Bruce’s music isn’t just compelling, but necessary in this critical moment.

I’ll start with the personal. Even though I was born in the wrong decade (my top three artists are Springsteen, Dylan, and The Beatles, and Spotify estimated my age at 78 in my most recent Spotify Wrapped), Bruce is the soundtrack of my life. I began seeing him in 1995 at the Bridge School Benefit Concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View (for when you need The Boss with a side of Hootie) and then on the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour in 1996. My first Springsteen shows with the “heart stoppin’, earth shockin’, earth quakin’, heart breakin’, air conditioner shakin’, Viagra takin’, history makin’, legendary” E-Street Band were in the three Oakland Arena shows on the 1999 reunion tour. Memorably, my mom and I waited outside for hours for tickets (an experience my students will never have) and only had tickets for the first two nights, then showed up on night three, got behind the stage tickets from a scalper, and had the time of our lives. And so this then-thirteen-year-old was hooked, and I mean hooked. When The Rising was released, my mom and I drove around the Bay Area listening to it on repeat, stopped for lunch, then drove some more, immediately falling in love with it and deciding which states we could plausibly travel to in order to maximize our time with The Boss (Portland, OR was drivable from the Bay Area and my grandmother lives in Florida so we could schedule an overdue trip around that show, and mercifully more northern California dates were added.

And from the general admission pit, leaning on the stage over the course of many tours, I received from the band two setlists (framed in our living room), blew kisses to Bruce, supported Bruce when he crowd surfed over me (why yes I did support a part of his anatomy featured prominently on a certain 1984 album cover), said hi to Clarence (rest in power), had my sign request taken (“I Came From Harlem FOR YOU,” and in another instance laughed at: “Professor Seeking Professor for NSA Dance”), and made more memories than I could have ever dreamed as a merely wannabe Jersey Girl from firmly middle-class roots. And perhaps most importantly, while waiting in line for the bus from the Meadowlands to the Port Authority in 2012, I met someone who has become one of my two closest friends in the world, with whom I did a memorable duet to “Thunder Road” at my wedding, after I quoted from “If I Should Fall Behind” in my wedding vows and before my husband and I had our final dance together, to Kingdom of Days,” a lovely song on a mediocre album, about growing old with the love of your life (“we laugh beneath the covers and count the wrinkles and the grays”).

With Bruce, it isn’t just music. It is yearning. It is urgency. It is conviction. It is righteousness. It is storytelling about all too forgotten voices in American communities from the Jersey shore to California’s central valley and everywhere in between. In his most recent concerts, it’s been a contemplation on mortality and making every moment count. “It’s your ghost moving through the night, your spirit filled with light, I need, I need you by my side, your love and I’m alive.”

John Lennon and Bob Dylan are the true masters of the “fuck you” song. (Oh the hours I’ve spent fantasizing about singing “Positively 4th Street” to Trump…) Bruce’s anger is often tied to disillusionment and broken dreams, but in the end, there is always redemption. To paraphrase Jon Stewart at the Kennedy Center Honors, when you listen to Bruce’s music, you aren’t a loser; you are a character in an epic poem… about losers.

And of course, in the aftermath of the tragic murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Bruce released his new song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” filled with an unmistakable righteous outrage at the lawlessness terrorizing American cities at the direction of the current occupant of the White House:

“Against smoke and rubber bullets, in the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice, their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets, Alex Pretti and Renee Good

Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land and the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed in the winter of ‘26
We’ll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis”

The conditions now are more dire than ever, as America descends so far into authoritarianism that even Neil Gorsuch is beginning to see the light. And amid so many challenges our nation has faced, Bruce has not only always had public service announcement to support local food banks, but lent a voice to the downtrodden and shined a light on injustices… at least for those looking beyond the energetic beats of songs like “Born in the USA” and “Badlands” to listen to the meaning. (Arguably, if the 1982 version of “Born in the USA” had been released instead, while Bruce wouldn’t have quite the same net worth, he would have had fewer Reaganites coopting his music to wrap themselves in the flag while stepping on the American dream.) Beyond the romance of my favorite song, “Thunder Road,” and the coming-of-age of “Growing Up,” one finds a portrait of American struggle that only the Boss himself can do justice in capturing, echoing the struggles of everyone from Vietnam veterans (even drawing on John Kerry’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee speech for inspiration: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”) to those facing broader economic turmoil and self-doubt.

On the 1999 Reunion tour, Bruce debuted two poignant songs – one calling attention to an injustice that tragically has persisted, and another a portrait of hope and redemption in the face of despair.

On February 4, 1999, the unarmed 23-year-old Amadou Diallo was shot and killed when the New York City Police Department fired 41 bullets at him, 19 of which struck him. This was hardly the first example of police brutality, in particular toward people of color, and far too little has been done to address these systemic injustices that I have proudly marched in the streets of New York City and Los Angeles to combat (even acquiring the badge of honor of an arrest by the LAPD due to a curfew violation with BLM in June 2020). There are policy solutions that we know are not only possible, but necessary, from body cams to accountability of police officers who have committed infractions to not hiring police officers with domestic abuse records. And of course, music is not substitute for policy change. But as we’ve seen with songs like “Hurricane” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Dylan, and the eternal “We Shall Overcome,” music can animate, move, and raise to public awareness these injustices that not every corner of society sees, but which are all too real for those living on the margins.

In October 1999 in Oakland arena, I listened to Bruce perform “American Skin (41 Shots)” and I cried as he highlighted the fear with which far too many Black and Brown people feel in interactions with law enforcement:

“41 shots, Liana gets her son ready for school
She says, “On these streets, Charles, you’ve got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you, promise me you’ll always be polite
And that you’ll never ever run away
Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight

Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life
It ain’t no secret (it ain’t no secret)
It ain’t no secret (it ain’t no secret)
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living in your American skin”

And of course, I recognized my own privilege because I do not have the demographic characteristics that would make me likely to be questioned by police if my hands were not in view, or be subjected to an inappropriate search.

This was hardly the only song I heard that tour that was a call to action: As a native Californian who often went to Sacramento, it was hardly uncommon to see laborers facing not only fears about immigration status, but dire working conditions. Don’t let anyone tell you that immigrants are taking jobs that Americans want… or if they make that argument, invite them to spend a day picking avocados and then ask them how their back is feeling and how they feel about those wages relative to the physical toll, not to mention in the summer heat that often surpasses 100 degrees.

Enter The Ghost of Tom Joad, both the title song (inspired by one of my favorite books, The Grapes of Wrath) as well as the lesser-known ballad “Sinaloa Cowboys,” telling the story of immigrants trying to make a living working in the orchards and then falling down the path of helping to make drugs at a Central Valley ranch, leading one of them to die.

“They left their homes and family
Their father said, “My sons one thing you will learn,
For everything the north gives, it exacts a price in return.”
They worked side by side in the orchards
From morning till the day was through
Doing the work the hueros wouldn’t do…

You could spend a year in the orchards
Or make half as much in one ten hour shift
Working for the men from Sinaloa
But if you slipped the hydriodic acid
Could burn right through your skin
They’d leave you spittin’ up blood in the desert
If you breathed those fumes in.”

All too often, especially under the Trump presidency, people degrade and dehumanize immigrants, not only lacking the compassion that should be afforded anyone trying earnestly to make a living and simply exist in a world that seems to constantly impose on them seemingly Sisyphean tasks to simply be employed and insured, but also apparently forgetting the very fabric of how America was built.

We are a nation of immigrants, and I’m damn proud of it. I’m a European mutt who spent college teaching ESL and creative writing to students whose immigration status I couldn’t have cared less about, and whose professional life is enriched every day by the perspectives of my diverse cohort of students, many of whom are international or first generation or otherwise from communities unlike my own.

Enter “American Land,” which appeared on the 2012 album Wrecking Ball but which he debuted in 2006 on the Seeger Sessions tour and shined a light on the immigrant roots that run deep in New York City and beyond:

“There’s diamonds in the sidewalk, there’s gutters lined in song
Dear, I hear that beer flows through the faucets all night long
There’s treasure for the taking, for any hard working man
Who will make his home in the American land…

The McNicholas, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
They come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below

They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago, they’re still dying now
Their hands that built the country we’re always trying to keep out.”

I’m not sure that there’s a better encapsulation of America ignorance about our roots, and the devastating consequences on full display with ICE’s lawlessness, than that last line. Whether it’s my great grandmother coming from central Europe to the US only knowing the words “I go” but enabling her daughter – my grandmother – to grow up to work in the California State Capitol, or whether it’s the ESL students I tutored while working my way through UC Berkeley, we all have an immigrant story (some more recent than others) and deserve to work toward what the American dream means for us. Bruce’s music reminds us of that.

Of course, the American experience is deeply flawed even for those of us whose families have been here for generations (not that that seems to insulate us from ICE’s inhumane tactics), and so much of Bruce’s music is about those trying to make ends meet, hitting walls, and feeling as though so many once closely-held dreams and promises have been broken. All too often, what once appeared to be opportunity becomes obscured by disillusionment, a sentiment that Bruce echoes arguably better than anyone.

One of my favorite songs is “The Promised Land,” and I couldn’t tell you how many times – in the depths of despair, or when feeling like my best was never good enough (another good Bruce song from Tom Joad) – I listened again and again to the lyrics:

“I’ve done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start.”

And of course, this is a rocker that elicits fist pumping determination at redemption. The acoustic version that I heard for the first time on the Devils and Dust tour at Oakland’s Paramount Theater felt different, not just because it was muted, but because it wasn’t clear whether he still believed in these possibilities that we so often latch on to as we hear the opening harmonica chords.

And of course, who (other than Ronald Reagan and his acolytes) could forget the eternal words of “Born in the USA”: “You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up.”

When Bruce announced his new tour, making zero secret of the fact that it was in direct opposition to the seemingly daily atrocities and constitutional violations that we’re witnessing (and which make Watergate look, quite frankly, quaint by comparison), the White House issued a statement that made a number of Springsteen references, a poor effort at getting a rise out of him. But the reality is that Trump is exactly who Bruce has been singing about for decades, every time he plays a song I love so much that I had its lyrics tattooed onto me. That song, of course, is “Badlands.”

Trump has everything he could possibly need, and then some. He has enriched himself while in office well beyond what the Emoluments Clause of our Constitution permits. He golfs more than the demands of the presidency should allow. He has hangers-on who dote on him as much as their collagen-filled bodies will allow. And yet when the Supreme Court had the temerity to rule against him on tariffs, he announced that he would not withdraw, but rather increase the tariffs to 15% (further complicating geopolitics and harming Americans’ pocketbooks). He is the very embodiment of,

“Poor man wanna be rich,

Rich man wanna be king,

And a king ain’t satisfied

‘Til he rules everything.”

(And boy do I wish Trump were the Chicken Man.)

From the rustbelt of Youngstown, OH (“Youngstown”) to the agricultural fields of California (“Ghost of Tom Joad”) to the economic depression of Asbury Park (“My City of Ruins,” “My Hometown”), to the working man’s struggle as bankers enrich themselves (“Jack of all Trades”), to a couple struggling with crippling debt such that “there’s winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line” (“Atlantic City”), Bruce’s music reminds the downtrodden that they still matter. That they are heard. That they are seen. And in a nation whose vulnerable and conscientious communities currently live in alternating states of fear and anger, that is precious.

I wish that my doctorate in political science helped me see a way out of this nightmare. I lost track of the number of nights I’ve wanted to find a reason to believe, but listened to “The Promise” instead. But even without a clear end in sight, we know that there will be a time after this. Midterm elections are this November, hence Republican determination to impose poll taxes by another name. The mixed blessing of America’s election administration fragmentation is that it is difficult to have a comprehensive assault on American election administration, though to be sure John Roberts as well as those who are pushing for the SAVE Act are doing their darndest. And even without much more than a glimmer of hope, putting one foot in front of the other is not only important, but necessary.

I am devastated for our country, but I am also determined. In these dark times, alongside elevating the voices of the too many people and communities left behind by failed policies, Bruce’s music provides the essential reminder: Dreams will not be thwarted, faith will be rewarded.

Thanks, Boss.