Springsteen’s Empath Opus

In the midst of global panic, Bruce narrows his gaze on the personal — creating one of the only 9/11 albums capable of aging gracefully…

I get this a lot from people who never got into Bruce. They’ve been picturing something simple:

A pile of work-worn Levis in front of a bleeding flag that fills the margins of stage and screen, pandering in gravelly meter about punching in and workin’ ’til the day is done. A Billy Joel version of Toby Keith, I guess.

But they know he wrote Dancing in the Dark. So, presumably, they would know him as a great articulator of the incalculable, unexamined angst that lives inside every warm body yearning for love, respect, or recognition.

So if they just pressed ‘next’ on the record, they’d hear My Hometown. Something that takes the same brawn, the same clear-eyed inward gaze and leverages it into the political, crafting a small handful of verses that drag the listener through midcentury racial unrest, Reagan-era socio-economic privation, multi-generational paternal guilt, and the crisis of national identity, all with staggering verbal economy.

They’d see that he’s a very effective pile of jeans.

This is why I’m thinking about him today.

In 2001, I was a kid, looking for some semblance of cognitive guidance in the wake of something I had no capacity to understand.

I talk about this a lot with people my age, because, at the time, when we looked to our adults for counsel, by and large, we weren’t met with nuance or reflection, but instead by inexorable, commercial-grade, tricolor lock-step ideology that supposedly linked us all, neighbor-to-neighbor. We sewed it onto sweatshirts and screen printed it onto anything that wasn’t nailed down.

When the voices of musicians rose above the fray in the raw skinned weeks following 9/11, we were met with a gritty and penny-tasting torrent of jingoistic, anger-fueled, hyper idealized songs from classic rock stalwarts who felt their perspectives could lend some modicum of clarity to the matter — McCartney’s maladroit anthem attempt, Freedom, or Neil Young’s ever-confounding Let’s Roll come to mind.

These songs treated the disaster in isolation— something that dictated specific prescriptive countermeasures, be they physical or ideological. They took something they didn’t understand and sold their material on vague, cure-all agendas that ultimately paved the way for decades of endlessly cataclysmic foreign policy.

I needed thought leaders, because, shit, I was a fourth grader. And the ideals that I was fated to internalize would wither spectacularly in the coming years. Its not fashionable to talk about- but we were all really in war-bond radio flyer mode. There was a lot of interesting, progressive shit going on at the time, I’m sure, and I know that now, but, at the time, I certainly couldn’t hear it over the tidal wave of Lee Greenwood patriotism that was being shoved down my nine year old gullet.

Eventually, thank fucking christ, my dad took me to see Bruce at Dodger Stadium in ’02 and I started listening to his records. Weirdly, it seemed natural for me to start with the new one.

The Rising was the first piece of culture I saw that actually looked at 9/11 with a delicate touch. It was an unsparing look at tragedy through the lens of personal loss. It was an inward facing exploration of death, spirituality, anger, and community. It discussed the void left in the hearts of the bereaved, without implying that there was anything at the ready to fill it.

But against the sea of unsparing, solipsistic, imperialist, broad-strokes trash-verbiage that I was faced with in the early oughts- I was suddenly hearing real and focused empathy. It wasn’t about ‘me’ or ‘us’ and it didn’t have answers. It just had someone else’s story.

woke up this morning I could barely breathe

just an empty depression in the bed where you used to sleep

I want a kiss from your lips I want an eye for an eye

I woke up this morning to an empty sky

Contrast this with Paul’s

This is my right

A right given by God

To live a free life

To live in freedom

Talkin' about freedom

I'm talkin' about freedom

That piece of shit was a big single for a while.

Anyway, the album took its time to surpass the indignant diatribes in defense of, as so many of the day phrased it, “our way of life.” This idea that our collective safety was up for grabs, that our inalienable liberties were at stake — this was a third party sham. Bruce showed me how far I would have to travel to connect Cheney’s warmongering to the emotionally dichotomous wake depicted in, ‘Mary’s Place.’ Complicated feelings of loss did not have to lead to unfocused recrimination. This was radical shit to me in the midst of my “5th Graders SING EVERY FUCKING SONG ABOUT AMERICA” class play. Or something. It was a weird time. I’ve got the tape somewhere, it’s frightening.

The Rising took its cues from the anthemic work that pervaded the Vietnam era- showing that the real way to take inventory of American conflict isn’t in the idealism that it purports to represent, but in the tallying of human loss.

These songs brought a lucid and minute kind of American pain back into the foreground. It was not a record with an agenda, per se, but an elegiac snapshot of the old jackets and athletic socks left behind by the deceased — a dark and politically nebulous haunting that was occurring in thousands of homes with one less person in them.

For being delicate, empathetic, deliberate, compelling, and perhaps, above all that, visible to me, I’ll always be grateful to this guy. He wasn’t the only one that did this, but nothing else could have reached me. This was on TV. This was at Best Buy. Between the Joels and Keiths. That’s important.

All in all, this wasn’t a commercial. It wasn’t a half-baked, iron-on manifesto. It was counseling. For a nation that had been knocked off its axis by an event its broadcasters, politicians, and entertainers had largely refused to reckon with.

And I hadn’t seen anything like it before.