Scritti Politti’s ‘Faithless’ — political songwriting done right
A book could be written about Bruce Springsteen’s betrayal of rock and roll, starting with his song “Faithless” — cited by his pal Barack Obama as one of 2025’s best recordings — which blasphemes America and Christianity in its allegory of political duty. In keeping with early rock and roll’s combined religious and sexual metaphors (the famous sacred-and-profane dichotomy), Springsteen blurs the romantic and the semi-religious in his campaign to keep America divided into partisan camps.
Springsteen’s recent New Jersey concert in which he denounced the ICE deportation raids of criminal and illegal aliens in Minneapolis goes against what many had taken to be his faith in all-American patriotism.
“Faithless” indicates that Springsteen has abandoned his spiritual foundation for liberal hysteria. His attack on ICE agents harks back to the disloyalty that was first evident in the specious, overrated Nebraska album, with its song “Highway Patrolman,” which subverted the beliefs of men working American’s thin blue line: Patrolman Joe Roberts and his ne’er-do-well brother Frankie (who “ain’t no good”) were figures in a Cain-and-Abel drama about blood oaths, yet it intended to address moral uncertainty. The story’s national miasma, the beginning of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate ambivalence that coursed through the Born in the U.S.A. album, resurfaces in Springsteen’s current anti-American liberalism. He now adds Obama’s “imperfect union” tactics to his usual working-man shtick. (“Man turn his back on his family, he ain’t no friend of mine” justifies any form of sedition.) Those regular concert outbursts against conservative politicians and “anti-authoritarian” accusations allow Springsteen to address gullible fans like the gullible electorate of 2008 and 2012.
Springsteen’s bipolar celebrity patriotism is worse than Robert De Niro’s delusion that profanity is a defense of the common man, worse than just Trump Derangement Syndrome, although its cause might go as deep. The unexamined agnosticism of “Faithless” voices the pride of an unrepentant skeptic, a doubter pretending to be a believer.
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When the British post-punk group Scritti Politti released its own “Faithless” from the album Songs to Remember in 1982 — the same year as Nebraska — its singer-songwriter Green Strohmeyer Gartside directly grappled with politics and primal doubt. Green, as he is popularly known, was a post-structuralist student from Leeds University who named his band to signify “political writing,” in honor of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Green applied progressive political theory to pop music, interrogating its language and embellishing its seductive strategies. His “Faithless” examined the surprise of being overwhelmed by sexual passion and brought unexpectedly closer to faith. (“That’s the price that the boy has paid / To choose not to be afraid.”)
Springsteen’s “Faithless” trivializes Green’s personal discovery by resorting to literal religious platitudes. Putatively a love song, Springsteen’s “Faithless” makes its basic appeal with the lyric “I reached for the hem of his garment.” In a context that can refer only to Springsteen’s Renegades podcast pal Obama, this violates the song’s romantic entreaty. Springsteen’s relentless political commentary during his millennial concerts contradicts the pure blue-collar (apolitical) zeal of his early-’70s ascension. The lyric “then I found you” conflates spiritual salvation with the gratitude of political sycophancy.
This transition from romance to ideology is new and debilitating for American pop. But pop-music adepts will recognize the change in Springsteen’s phony song title. “Faithless” insults the profound rethinking that is so thrilling in Scritti Politti’s extraordinary post-punk innovation. Green, an agnostic smart enough to know better, reinvented himself as an intellectual troubadour.
Scritti’s “Faithless” single featured a richly embossed jacket sleeve that paid homage to the Aramis cologne brand, as if pop music itself was an ethereal fragrance (a political jest worthy of Jack Mason, the ingenious conservative podcaster known as The Perfume Nationalist). It was perfectly fitting for a production that whirls a listener through the history of pop-gospel seduction. The richness of Songs to Remember synthesizes reggae with early hip-hop, R&B, and gospel, culminating in the coup de grâce of “Faithless,” its luxurious centerpiece. The contrast of psychological skepticism and romantic longing was unique — an elegant mix of Jacques Derrida with Smokey Robinson and Chic. Leading the gospel R&B backup vocalists, Green sang about the complexity of modern psychological and spiritual yearning (a balancing act repeated in his “After Six,” from 2006). Scritti Politti elevated pop while Springsteen lowers it to demagoguery.
Both Scritti’s “Faithless” and Songs to Remember (the group’s second album) were initially available only in import record stores and noticed by few American pop-music critics. Cult status gained legendary significance, as with artworks that the general public would take years to appreciate. But Springsteen’s betrayal of rock-and-roll fervor and democratic unity is an aberration. That explains why a song as spurious and unspecific as his “Faithless” was refused by the public, despite Obama’s endorsement, even in an era as cynical as this. The secularism of Springsteen and Obama converge in a meeting of minds as hollow and lacking resonance as a mountebank’s sermon.
Springsteen warps patriotic attitude into ideological deception — and manipulation. He should be ashamed to steal the title of Scritti Politti’s great epic recording.