Borrowed politics defeat a former rock-music hero.
Bruce Springsteen’s May 14 concert in Manchester, England, part of his “Land of Hopes and Dreams” world tour, included a reverse-ambassador speech: “The majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuse of an unfit president and a rogue government.”
Stepping out of his lane as an entertainer, Springsteen appealed to anti-American interests (video clips captured a pathetic smattering of applause from the Brit audience, which is undergoing its own social crises), in the form of perverse Americana. He transgressed the emotional — nationalistic — sentiment of his music’s working-class subject matter. Springsteen violates the formerly compelling romanticism of Born to Run, his 1975 breakout album. (We should have known better when he traded that in 1984 for the faux-Americana of Born in the U.S.A.)
What could move a popular artist to risk his popularity this way? The blue-collar pretense of millionaire Springsteen indulges blue-state politics. That stance can have a particular effect on home turf, but when Springsteen takes a particularly hateful partisanship abroad, it’s not rock ’n’ roll; it goes beyond citizenship or fellow-feeling and becomes dangerous adversarial posturing.
Speaking of the “majority of elected representatives,” he said, “They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.” This is Hanoi Jane Fonda stuff, fueled by a self-righteousness that is indifferent to the damage it causes overseas and the shame and hurt it inflicts back home.
“The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with great people.” That’s when his ugly-American calumny turned to blather. Springsteen’s attack on the current presidential administration wasn’t exactly in violation of the Logan Act, but in his effort to persuade foreigners, he did portray the U.S. negatively. It resembled those resentful statements Michelle Obama makes on her psychodrama podcast IMO — as if speaking “in my opinion” exempts anti-American speech from being taken politically. Springsteen’s own 2021 podcast with Barack Obama, Renegades: Born in the USA, shows the wealthy titans (leaning back, casually crossing their legs before cameras and microphones) feigning humbler-than-you kinship.
The politically strident Springsteen on view in Manchester abandoned his old, rollicking, common-man ambitions, as if convinced (by Obama, perhaps) that he could manipulate that schmaltz into international political force. The speech got worse:
The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll, in dangerous times. . . . The America I love, the America I’ve written about, and has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experience to rise with us, raise your voices against the authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.
Does New Jersey’s demagogue “Boss” know what “democracy” or “authoritarianism” actually mean? Praising America while talking against it sings from the Biden Fake Book. From there, Springsteen shifted into blatant partisan talking points:
There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous sh*t going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. . . . They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom.
Springsteen left out key facts about global invasion, illegal aliens, Ukrainian-war money laundering, and election interference. Never answering for his implicit endorsement of the Biden regime and campaigning for Kamala Harris, he made generalized DNC-style accusations: “They’re removing residents off American streets and without due process of law are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.”
This is worse than the Dixie Chicks in Europe attacking George W. Bush during the Iraq War, largely because the Dixie Chicks were D-list celebs whose music never mattered to me. But Springsteen had reenergized his homeboy career in the late 1970s with the superb Darkness on the Edge of Town, which was so recognizably, agonizingly personal that it felt truly American. Back then, Springsteen acknowledged a spiritual drive and ambivalence that went deeper than politics. Since then, he’s gotten richer and gone shallow.
Darkness was released during the period when British punk rock enlivened pop music’s social consciousness. But Brits didn’t go to foreign lands and berate their home turf. Springsteen does precisely that because he mistakes youthful dissent with moral righteousness — the narcissism of the Village Voice, Rolling Stone magazine, and today’s legacy media.
This media revolt — including Springsteen’s own — betrays its audience, using borrowed, group-think enthusiasms and unsophisticated rhetoric. When Springsteen complains about implicit, conservative “ideological demands,” he disregards that rock ’n’ roll liberalism is also ideological.
Springsteen has recorded some unfortunate songs, including “My Hometown,” and “We Take Care of Our Own” (the latter atrocity worthy of future analysis), but nothing so offensive as this European speech. His trite bromides are typical of showbiz cretins struggling to appear principled. This hackneyed stance has turned his concert performances shrill and hollow.
Former defenders might wonder how pop romanticism became pseudo-political. Artists such as Pete Townshend and Kid Rock lament Springsteen’s fall, but they forget how even the great Darkness album ran head-on into the shock of political consciousness — as expressed by Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces, on which the song “Green Shirt,” going beyond Springsteen’s naïveté, warned about “the Quisling clinic,” a reference to Vidkun Quisling in World War II history that analogizes social conformity to showbiz sedition. Costello neatly compressed the clichés of political pop. Whatever it is that drives Quisling Springsteen to bash America overseas, his gaslighting rhetoric in patriotic guise stirs moral ambiguity, a devilish tactic of the enemy within.