Springsteen’s Chimes of Freedom
This is an excerpt from media critic Jamison Foser’s interesting website, Finding Gravity. You can read the full version here.
In line before the first of two Bruce Springsteen concerts in San Sebastián, Spain last summer, a gentleman with whom I had been chatting asked where I was from. When I told him I live in San Francisco, he smiled a little and said “San Francisco. That’s a great city for freedom. It has a great history, no?”
We talked on and off for a couple of hours, about the show we were both excited to see; about strategies for surviving a several-hour wait in the hot sun; about my country and his. He told me America had always been a beacon of hope and freedom to him, his words accompanied by a facial expression and tone of voice that carried a question: What is it now? I didn’t have a good response, and mumbled something about thinking maybe it was our time to draw inspiration from outside our borders.
I thought of that unspoken question that evening, towards the end of a nearly-five-minute speech in which Springsteen excoriated “the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government,” that is “persecuting people for using their right for free speech” and “rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just society” and “siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom” and “removing residents off of American streets and without due process of law deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons,” a litany of abuses so anathema to “what it means to be deeply American” that Springsteen felt compelled to insist: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for fifty years is real.”
For the ten months since that show, two questions have kept swirling around in my mind: What is that America, and is it real? And Is this tour the greatest thing Bruce Springsteen has ever done?
I’ve been struggling to articulate some thoughts connected to those two questions for weeks.
During the 2004 Vote for Change concert tour Springsteen headlined, he introduced his nightly political comments near the end of each night’s set with a slightly self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that many in the audience might not have been there primarily for a political rally: “And now, the moment everyone's been waiting for: my Public Service Announcement!”
There is no such self-consciousness in the Land of Hope and Dreams tour, which just wrapped up. It was a confidently, unapologetically, thoroughly political show. Each night the setlist was substantially the same, dominated by a carefully constructed arc of songs and spoken word-introductions and short (and not-so-short) speeches. I’ve been to quite a few concerts in my life, and I’ve spent the last thirty years working in and around national politics, and what I saw in Spain and Italy last summer and in San Francisco and Phoenix last month may have taken the form of the former, but the content was more deeply and urgently political than the vast majority of political rallies I have seen.
The whole show is one sustained public service announcement with guitar. It is a warning and an attempt to rally the world to stand against authoritarianism. For years, the “shut up and sing” crowd has responded to the briefest of political statements from musicians with sarcastic cracks about going to a concert only for a political rally to break out. Springsteen’s Land of Hope and Dreams tour was the right-wing’s overheated rhetoric come to life, in the best possible way. There was music — great music, performed by supremely talented musicians — but the art was fully in service of a cause.
It’s an almost preposterously ambitious thing to try to pull off a (nearly) three-hour political rally dressed up as a rock concert, but it worked. It held up because it is sturdy. It has roots. Springsteen has been preparing himself and his audience for it for fifty years.