From a distance I have always found Bruce Springsteen interesting, especially in his current incarnation as a committed populist straddling the line between his own politics and those of his many MAGA fans. But his set-to last spring with President Trump, who called him “overrated” and “not a talented guy,” made me realize how very little of Springsteen’s music I have ever really engaged. I must come clean and say that I just never got it.
That fact came up in conversation the other day with a Springsteen fan, a fellow member of the Catskills bungalow colony I visit every year. He gave me a song list, and I sat down to listen.
And I mean really listen: My mantra is that you have to give something seven tries to really get it. That’s tough in the thick of a workweek, but I’m on vacation, so I made time for all of it: “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” “New York City Serenade” and the album “Born to Run.”
As engrossed as I was, I kept having to remind myself to listen to the music. What grabbed my ear was the lyrics. That had been my mistake all these years — waiting for these songs to be, primarily, songs, as if they were Schubert lieder. For me, Springsteen’s work is poetry with musical accompaniment. Realizing that helped me understand something important about him, but something important about America, too.
There were certainly some musical moments that struck me. Clarence Clemons’s justly famous saxophone solo on “Jungleland,” with its gospel-inflected wail, is a marvel. It starts suddenly, about four minutes in, with a soaring, authoritative clarion call that brings us abruptly from C major to an unexpected E flat, a new world. It feels like when the film “The Wizard of Oz” goes into color.
But moments like that were the exception. Even about “Jungleland,” the music blogger Michael Miller offers the praise that it’s “nothing less than pure rock and roll poetry” (italics mine).
In the HBO Max documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes,” Springsteen says, “I’m obviously more identified with New Jersey, so I came more out of a folk rock ’n’ roll background. Billy is still more identified with New York — he had all that Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, which is why his melodies are better than mine.”
Joel’s melodies are indeed better. They sound good even when they’re just played on the piano, without vocals. But this is only part of a larger point Springsteen was making. He was saying that the two artists are rooted in different artistic ambitions.
Springsteen’s primary contribution is as a poet. And the enormity of his popularity should put to rest forever the notion that Americans don’t like poetry. I have previously argued that the poetry Americans live is Black. It’s hip-hop. I see now that was only part of the picture.
This “Thunder Road” stanza is poetry.
Don’t run back inside
darling you know just what I’m here for
So you’re scared and you’re thinking
That maybe we ain’t that young anymore
Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night
You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re all right
Oh and that’s all right with me
It uses rhyme in an improvisatory rather than mechanical way, as much modern poetry does. It describes a situation with a high degree of emotional specificity, including somehow finding warmth in the news that the person the song is addressing is not beautiful. Its accurate transcription of the way people actually talk is a kind of art in itself, reminiscent of how precisely Elmore Leonard got down the structures and cadences of colloquial English.
The last thing I want to imply is that Springsteen fans don’t appreciate music itself. Among my many friends who revere him, one of the most devoted fans is a cellist who is equally into the super-melodic and harmonically complex Burt Bacharach. Rather, it’s that I am, as always, fussy. If the words are complicated, I want the music to be as well, less like Springsteen and more like my beloved Steely Dan. Maybe I need to get over that.
My Bruce immersion teaches me that the reason poetry on the page is such a rarefied taste in America today isn’t that Americans don’t have a taste for verse. It’s because there are pop music artists whose lyrics scratch that itch, just as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Lowell once did. Taylor Swift’s music fits into the same category for me, as well as for many people over 40 I have spoken to about her work. I hear her songs as poetry; the music’s job is just to help get it across. And that’s what I hear when I listen to Springsteen: I hear poetry, and I hear Americans’ love of it.
By the way, there is finally a book for the curious lay reader on how one language, born in what is now Ukraine, came to dominate most of Europe as well as Iran, Afghanistan and India. Snap up Laura Spinney’s “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global,” which reconstructs its history through archaeology, genetics and linguistics. And while you’re shopping for books for your summer vacation, do bring along Joseph Zellnik’s “The Sound of Murder,” which intertwines a murder case and the premiere of the original production of “The Sound of Music.” Show-music fans will enjoy the pitch-perfect historical detail, and it’s also a crackling good story.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
The post I Stopped Listening to Springsteen’s Music. I Heard Something More. appeared first on New York Times.
