Love The Art. Ignore The Artist.
It's no secret. I'm a longtime, huge Bruce Springsteen fan.
Since I was 15 and discovered Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Springsteen's music has been the soundtrack percolating in the background of my life; Darkness illuminated many of the characters I grew up around. The River focused a lot of things that became very important in my life (the title cut and "Jackson Cage" were in the back of my mind as I realized I had to leave North Dakota), Nebraska underlay my own political conversion, Tunnel of Love and Human Touch showed me during the decay of my marriage that someone out there had felt the same way I was feeling. Naturally, The Rising was the best - maybe only - "September 12th" album out there.
The Rising was, itself, a fascinating case; if you'd have told me in, say, 1980 that an album that constantly reiterated the themes of faith, strength, hope, love and redemption would be the best album of 2002 (shut up, Norah Jones and the freakin' academy), I'd have said you were nuts. And if you'd have told me at the time at the same time that the Village Voice would pan the album, while the National Review's critic would lionize it for those exactly reasons, I'd have probably had you committed.
And yet...
In the "News" section of his website,
Springsteen reprints Algore's entire NYU speech - you know the one, the one where he foams at the mouth and bellows "George Bush Lied!" - while saying:
Al Gore gave one of the most important speeches I've heard in a long time. The issues it raises need to be considered by every American concerned with the direction our country is headed in. It's my pleasure to reprint it here for my fans.
He also links to "moveon.org", a site we've been lambasting in this space for a couple of years now.
The only thing that's changed - the only actual disappointment in this whole episode - is that Springsteen used to keep himself pretty scrupulously out of politics; while the lefty press still crows about his repudiation of Reagan's attempt to appropriate Born in the USA twenty years ago, they forget that he slapped down Walter Mondale just as hard. To throw away twenty years of moral capital for...MoveOn? For Algore? Bad choice.
Beyond that, who cares? I'm still a fan. If I limited my listening to good conservatives, I'd be flitting back and forth between Johnny Ramone and Ted Nugent and country-western. Nothing wrong with any of them (except that I can't stand Nugent, and Johnny Ramone never sang much, and most country bores me stiff.
As I said in a post a long time ago, a lot of my biggest personal and cultural influences from the left had the biggest impact in turning me into a conservative. Springsteen would be another example; Nebraska's collection of drifters and dead-enders reacted with the rotten taste the Carter Administration left in my mouth and the decrepitude of the Democrat's foreign policy vision and many other influences, and left me...a conservative. Not that it was primary influence - music can influence your life, but certainly not musicians.
That may be the greatest satisfaction of this whole episode; as I've mentioned before on this blog, I credit many of my biggest leftist influences in my life - my parents, Joe Strummer, the minister that confirmed me, Springsteen, my college philosophy prof - as my biggest influences in becoming a conservative. And I have to hope that fact would mortify them.
Posted by Mitch at
July 6, 2004 05:00 AM
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Hey Mitch
In the mid nineties Bruce made an album called "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and I have never heard it but I recall reading about it and believe it had political under/overtones. He also made a snarky comment about Newt Gingrich on the tour supporting that album. (He dedicated a song about the poor to Newt Gingrich) Message received Boss. I don't know of any other examples; I would be interested to know if that was an isolated case or not. Great blog by the way, you are on my daily reading list. FYI I live in Los Angeles and listen to Hugh every day, so I have heard the NARN fill in for him, and well done.
Posted by: Erik at July 6, 2004 03:28 PMEric Alterman is a pompous jerk, but he can turn a phrase. Apparently during the whole Mondale/Reagan/Born in the USA controversy George Will wrote that the song was a “grand, cheerful affirmation” of American life. Alterman wrote that this is true “in much the same way that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is a grand, cheerful affirmation of the Stalinist penal code.”
My older brother introduced me to Bruce in 1978 after coming back from college at Notre Dame with Born To Run. He described Bruce’s concert there, a 4 ½ hour marathon that culminated in a rendition of the Notre Dame fight song that, according to my brother, had the crowd dancing on the ceiling. Then again my brother did dabble in drugs.
Anyway, I was hooked, and have been ever since. My younger brother and I used to bike down to the Down In The Valley record store in Golden Valley on the first day of a new release, played it until it was completely scratched, then bought another one.
Like Mitch my politics have changed considerably since those days, but my love of Springsteen’s music hasn’t. I don’t necessarily see a contradiction here. We generally expect our artists, storytellers and musicians to be liberal. Maybe it’s because most start our poor, spend years in poverty (and surrounded by like minded liberals) trying to make it, and once they make it they wear their liberal-ness as a badge to show they haven’t “sold out.” It’s a kind of tacit understanding between artist and audience.
My love of Springsteen has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with energy and rhythm, stories and dreams, passion and the desire to perform – night after night, year after year – until every last drop of energy (audience and performer) is expended.
My best friend never went through the political evolution I did. He’s been a staunch Republican since high school. He’s now an attorney. (How he ever survived Macalester with his sanity intact I’ll never know.) I introduced him to Springsteen’s music in high school, and he’s been a more avid fan than me ever since.
You don’t have to love the politics to lover the performer.
Posted by: chris at July 6, 2004 05:41 PMI also discovered Springsteen with Born to Run, and fell in love with his poetry in song. I have alway admired the wordsmith, weither scribe or singer. I generally ignore the politics of most entertainers.
Posted by: shawn randall at July 7, 2004 08:02 AMAnother great example of this is my favorite short story author Harlen Ellison. Harlen makes Algore look moderate, but try to read Deliulsion for a Dragon Slayer or Deathbird and be moved. I even liked The Glass Teat, his columns on TV for the LA undergound papter, where he savaged Nixon and Agnew when I was a Nixon Youth.
It's not the politics you react to but the ability of the creator to put you in the picture. To touch your heart. Harlen was a great beliver in the individual and his/her taking resoncinblity for their life, at least in his writing.
Ain't that the truth. If I worried about the politics, I'd be cleaning up about 75% of my IPod's hard drive.
Posted by: kelly at July 7, 2004 09:35 PMHmm. After a 2nd look, 75% is a low estimate.
Posted by: kelly at July 7, 2004 09:38 PM