From Steinbeck to Springsteen, "You Either Die A Hero, Or..."
Taking the pop out of populism is a good idea when you're dealing with billion dollar celebrities
“The pale one here is Dick. He’s a bedroom radical. We get many a cake because of Dick…See how beautiful he is? He tells stories to the ladies about the working classes and we get cakes with pink frosting.”
– In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck
Regular readers will know that I was recently displaced from New York to New Jersey because of my resistance to the covid vaccine. Sizing up my new home, my mind naturally keeps wandering to Bruce Springsteen. For one thing, he’s the most famous pop figure to come from here. For another, he is the anointed poet of the American worker, and I now work a maintenance job—very Springsteen to be a manual laborer. I also live down the street from one of those notorious north Jersey oil refineries that Springsteen often sings about. To top it off, the man is in the news for a controversy involving Ticketmaster price-gouging his current tour, apparently with his blessing; the costs of many of the seats will now set you back thousands of dollars
Growing up as an old soul with an appreciation for dad-rock, I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Springsteen. The love is for the obvious reasons that won him accolades early on: great songwriter, showman, etc. The hate is a bit more complicated, but it has to do with the way his almost innate naivete parades itself as nobility, and this in turn collides with the corrupting nature of celebrity.
Bruce never had these callouses!!
Firstly though, I commend Springsteen for capturing the desperation of the working-class in this region. Looking around downtown Newark, downtown Jersey City, and even some of the suburbs around here, there is no shortage of people with the look of a “dog that’s been beat too much” (to quote “Born in the USA”). Pan handlers, emotionally disturbed, and other varieties of the unhoused are everywhere. (Some areas of Newark are so decrepit it’s absurd. There are huge stretches of the city where the sidewalk essentially doesn’t exist.) There’s no discount for living among these conditions though. The tightness of the housing market means its nearly as expensive as NYC.
Similar tragedies afflict the five boroughs to be sure, but you can always distract yourself with the proximity to world-historic art and architecture. Even in the upstate New York rust belt, you can go a couple miles outside city limits and usually find yourself in some idyllic farmland. The only idyllic thing in NJ I’m aware of is the shore in the south; this includes Springsteen’s old homebase in Asbury Park—but one of the major themes of his second album, The Wild and the Innocent, is that real life is not a boardwalk and Asbury doesn’t really represent Jersey.
So I can appreciate Bruce the Realist and the way he projects his talent and charisma onto issues that most pop stars ignore. But he clashes dissonantly with Bruce the
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