Bruce Springsteen

"Nebraska" can never be considered merely a collection of folk songs, however great, inspired or dramatic they may be. In fact, this deceptively linear work, stark in its musical architecture and in the popular sentiment that runs through its songs, is actually such an (apparently) unusual endpoint, both in its author's history and in the context of its release, that recounting something of its genesis and the stories it tells can probably help us better understand its importance, its centrality within a career as rich as his, and perhaps even something of its intimate beauty.

In 1982 Bruce Springsteen is at the peak of his success, understood as a combination of popular acclaim and critical acclaim; literally worshipped as the saviour of rock'n'roll, he has built his career from nothing, with a pride and stubbornness worthy of his native United States of America. He has just come off the release of the double album "The River", a veritable encyclopedia of the most exhilarating, genuine rock, its classicism brought to life by musical skill, masterful lyric-writing and above all a sincere talent (fully evident in his torrential live shows), which thrills fans with its earthy artistic vein and its ever-present attention to the humble and the losers. His stories, despite the sometimes bombastic musical emphasis, with the well-timed keyboard and sax flourishes courtesy of the E Street Band, explore the other side of the American Dream and highlight its contradictions, the painful yet romantic defeats of the many outcasts against the backdrop of the few winners on whom the allure of the promised land rests.

Bruce is a man who made it, but he hasn't forgotten his roots, the great interpreters of the folk tradition he drew from, from the most obscure figures who defined the ethics and aesthetics (read: the stories and the sound) of American popular music, unsung storytellers who emerged thanks to the collections of Harry E. Smith and Alan Lomax, all the way up to key figures like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. But Springsteen also draws on his country's great literary tradition in shaping his body of lyrics, from John Steinbeck to Flannery O'Connor and beyond, giving his characters dignity and fidelity to their world.

For his new work he retreats into himself in "his" New Jersey and writes several tracks alone with a 4-track recorder, accompanied only by guitar, harmonica and flashes of other instruments. When it comes time to record the master in the studio with the rest of the E Street Band, he realizes the sketched-out songs work much better as they originally were, and after much discussion decides that what were meant to be mere demos would become the definitive version of the new record. He also has a hard time convincing his record label, Columbia (though Springsteen's stubbornness had already shown itself earlier, when he chose to sit idle for three years rather than keep his first manager), and the album, practically untouched, comes out in September.

The most evident value of "Nebraska" lies in its strong cohesion, in the painful consistency that binds every aspect of the work, starting with its cover; the photo shows one of the classic American routes surrounded by the usual sweeping landscape, but this time immersed in a spectral, frozen atmosphere, one imagines existential too, and doubly enclosed within its own point of view: the windscreen of a car, the stark black-and-white of the title. And what you hear is the full expression of that desolation: for example, the theme of the car journey, already widely celebrated in Springsteen's musical frescoes, is revisited here several times in acoustic form but its metaphorical meaning is turned inside out: no longer a race towards a better future, a social redemption, but a flight from nothing, the nowhere cited in "Open All Night" and "State Trooper", towards nothing, since what one flees from is carried within.

There are various subjects explored here, but all are united both by the musical setting, an acoustic folk occasionally tinged with country or blues, which in "Open All Night" vibrates with stripped-down rock'n'roll accents, and by the underlying concept, an other perspective on life in small-town America, a masterful series of narratives about how many fragile existences are leaves in the wind, destined for ruin, regret, violence, victims of something bigger than themselves that they don't fully understand and, in any case, cannot control.

And while the album's starting point, the title track, is nothing other than a murder ballad, like those to which, ten years later, Nick Cave would dedicate an entire album, namely a story of murders committed without any motive (directly inspired by Terrence Malick's film Badlands), presented moreover without offering any moral judgment, elsewhere the point of view is more personal, pained, touching. Emblematic in this sense is "Highway Patrolman", in which two verses sketch the figure of officer Joe, torn between his sense of duty and the bond he shares with his brother Frankie. When Frankie badly wounds a rival, it's Joe who lets him escape towards Canada and freedom, in the name of the times they had fun together and a blood bond stronger than anything else. Between the State and his own lived experience, it's the latter that prevails, without hesitation of any kind. The State and its representatives, judges, policemen like the one in "State Trooper", though constantly evoked in titles and lyrics, appear as abstract, distant, icy entities.

"Atlantic City", the song chosen as the single (complete with a grainy black-and-white video, in keeping with the cover's graphic style), is the richest one, the one whose melody lingers longest, and it's also the first true piece of this decalogue of lost lives, when it speaks of death and possible resurrection; the voice is pained as it narrates, with a raw, shouted counter-melody, the chance the protagonist seeks to escape a hopeless economic situation, with "debts that no honest man could pay". How it ends is revealed in "Johnny 99"; the story of a man convicted of murder, but whose hand was armed by necessity and chance, with no possibility of receiving understanding from the Law.

More intimate, "Mansion On The Hill" and "Used Cars" explore the impact of economic hardship on naive hopes for a better life. The mansion on the hill where laughter and music resound is an unreachable paradise, a castle for the chosen few, in which this writer seems to hear echoes of Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby; while in the other song there's a strong sense of humiliation, almost like a mark of shame, over a second-hand car, the only one one can afford to buy. Through secondary glimpses, with a spine-chilling delicacy, Springsteen approaches the terrible economic crisis that has struck the US, and indirectly indicts the government, deemed incapable of confronting the prevailing poverty, or worse still, of shamelessly favouring those who are already rich.

It should be noted that, however simple, the melodies woven here are wonderfully intertwined with the stories and feed off one another in pathos and intensity; guitar and harmonica recreate the habitat in which these stories take shape and come to life: if, for instance, in "Mansion On The Hill" the notes are sweet, caressing, it's to make the message even more brutal, through the arabesque-like contrast between music and words, so deceptively dreamlike. And in "Nebraska", the title track, the path taken is that of a folk sound built on the simplest of guitar figures, poisoned by the harmonica that opens and closes the track. The raw sound bears witness to a desire to dig down to the very heart of things, as if to uncover their essence... and to discover previously unsuspected connections with other musical experiences, which in fact draw on the same underlying spirit. Thus "State Trooper" reinvents, with a one-chord blues, the sound of Suicide, the pioneering New York electronic duo, and the chilling scream of the protagonist of yet another car ride from nothing towards nothing is the same as in "Frankie Teardrop", a manifestation of the fear and despair of the beast that resurfaces when a man has exhausted every rational justification and is left alone, crushed by his unbearable burden of guilt and defeat.

Without any intellectual forcing, sustained solely by his folk soul, Springsteen finds the point of connection between the deep core of toxic white paranoia, the chilling nihilism that dwells in Suicide's urban sound, and the feelings, hopes and disillusionments of the small-town working class of which he is the storyteller par excellence. It is precisely "State Trooper", among other things, that opens the eyes of a certain uncompromising critical faction which, caught up as it was in new musical waves, had looked down with condescension on those rich, thick-sounding ballads and that vital, upbeat take on rock'n'roll.

The last two tracks further expand the universe of "Nebraska". In "My Father's House", regret dominates for a relationship, that with his father and metaphorically with his own country, that can never be mended, with tones so nostalgic and bitter as to move one to tears. But it's the closing "Reason To Believe" that delivers the final, decisive blow, introducing for the first time elements of hope into the litany of actions and events that, despite everything, never stop people from finding new reasons to carry on, all set to a country-flavoured nursery rhyme that unravels in its closing bars, with the voice slurring and seeming to lose the strength to truly believe what it's expressing.

Released at a time when the process of reconnecting with roots music was also being taken up by a new generation of artists (think of the Gun Club and, in some ways, the Replacements, Thin White Rope, etc.), "Nebraska" takes the most radical approach: rather than updating tradition to a post-punk-revolution present, it pulls it entirely out of time, lifting it to heights so hazy that it fades into myth. And more still, the birth, more than ten years later, of a new generation of singer-songwriters and of an entire genre, lo-fi or even no-fi, stripped down to the bone, has been traced back to this stark monolith, endowing it with meanings that perhaps go beyond its actual influence. It remains, without question, an unsurpassed example of artistic integrity, one that today feels almost incomprehensible, given how much has changed in the building of a music career, and even in the very definition of a rockstar.

Finally, a thought on how the medium not only becomes the message, to quote Marshall McLuhan, but can also subvert its meaning. Among the songs Springsteen wrote for "Nebraska" was one about the difficult homecoming of a Vietnam veteran, and how he had been forgotten and cast aside by the very state that had sent him to risk his life in a foreign country. Well, three years later "Born In The Usa" would become the battering ram with which Springsteen would achieve global success. But, somewhat as happened with the contemporaneous "First Blood" (that is, the film "Rambo" starring Sylvester Stallone), the hyper-inflated rock production and that grandiose title would turn it into a rallying cry for the more rhetorical, populist currents of the Reagan administration, quite unlike its author's actual intentions. For this reason too, the presence, the testimony of "Nebraska" is essential: because, even in times when it's easy to misread and cheapen intentions so noble and deeply felt, its fragility and, at the same time, immense strength allow for no pretence whatsoever.

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28/11/2010