Raymond J. de Souza: What Trump can learn from The Boss

Taylor Swift was in the news this week. Young as she is, it has almost been twenty years since her eponymous debut album. This week’s attention though is on Bruce Springsteen, whose breakthrough album Born to Run was released fifty years ago last Monday.

Fifty years on and Springsteen is still hard at it; he was touring Canada last year at the same time as Swift. And two months ago he releaseds seven new albums all at once. Over more than a half-century of songwriting, he had written and recorded so much material, unused for one reason or the other, that at age 75 he released in one day what for many others would be the work of a career.

The seven new albums are extensions of what Springsteen has been singing about for five decades — there are songs that sound like versions of his greatest hits, which is perhaps why they were not originally released. Outside of the considerable legion of Springsteen devotees, there has been limited interest. Perhaps after Springsteen’s own storytelling of the soundtrack of his life — in his 2016 autobiography and his confessional multi-year New York residency, Springsteen on Broadway — there is not much new to say.

Yet the phenomenon that began fifty years ago is still deeply relevant. There is, at the heart of Springsteen’s career, a contradiction that drives so much current cultural and economic anxiety and consequently political anger.

In Brilliant Disguise (1987), the singer speaks of the contradictions that lurk in the heart, and analogously the culture: “I want to know if it’s you I don’t trust/ ‘Cause I damn sure don’t trust myself… You better look hard and look twice/ Is that me, baby/ Or just a brilliant disguise?”

There is something of that in the career of the Boss. Born to Run was the new voice of a Jersey rocker, the working-class kid backed up by a local bar band. There was more to it than that. A massive marketing push landed him simultaneously on the covers of both Time and Newsweek when tens of millions read them. This outsider was backed by the corporate power of Big Music. Nine years later, with the nation in the patriotic fervour of the Los Angeles Olympics and Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” re-election campaign, his Born in the USA flag-draped tour cashed in, even though the title track is an indictment, not a celebration, of America.

Indictment of his roots is what Springsteen writes; celebration of those roots is what Springsteen sells.

Dozens upon dozens of songs celebrate the smalltown world of Springsteen’s upbringing. From the beginning he has lamented the loss of the New Jersey life of the 1950s — the factories, the mines, the mills, the Irish and Italian neighbourhoods (his father the former, his mother the latter), even the Catholic school he hated and the parish church he would abandon. The lament was sometimes tender (My Hometown), sometimes rousing (Glory Days), but always apparently affectionate.

Apparently, because the affection disguised the indictment under the celebration. The opening track in 1975 was Thunder Road, which concludes with this characterization of his hometown — and himself: “It’s a town full of losers/ And I’m pulling out of here to win.”

He did pull out. The title track of Born to Run was about running toward opportunity, but also about running away from Freehold, NJ. He did that definitively at age 19, “sprung from cages out on Highway 9.” Freehold was something worse than a cage: “this town rips the bones from your back/ It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap/ We gotta get out while we’re young”.

Springsteen laments the loss of a world that doesn’t seem worth lamenting. Sentiment wrapped in nostalgia can be attractive as entertainment, but who would want to live in the bleak landscapes Springsteen remembers?

Over the past decade, Springsteen has become increasingly critical of all things Trump, yet Springsteen long ago made the grievances of Freehold culturally potent. He was singing about closed mills, shuttered factories and dying towns in the 1970s — long before free trade and globalization and the rise of China. He sang of decline but did it exuberantly — the four-hour concerts with the E Street Band were equal parts spectacle and stamina — and his audience never tired of it.

The political-cultural moment feeds off grievance, and another exuberant entertainer found it potent enough to win two terms in the White House. If Donald Trump listened to more Springsteen he would realize that the nostalgic world he pretends to protect was gone long before those he blames — China, Canada, Mexico — were on the scene.

When Springsteen was honoured at the Kennedy Centre in 2009, fellow Jersey boy John Stewart recalled playing Springsteen in his car as a young man driving home after closing up the bar where he worked.

“I never again felt like a loser,” Stewart said. “When you listen to Bruce’s music, you aren’t a loser; you are a character in an epic poem — about losers.”

The Springsteen chapter in the American songbook is a chronicle of loss — tragic loss, pointless loss, cruel loss, deserved and undeserved losses and the celebration of that which was lost. And his enduring gift is that his listeners who have lost and lost again don’t consider themselves to be losers. That’s a gift worth four hours in concert. To his distress, it has also produced another four years in the White House.