Bruce Springsteen

(1982 – Included on the album "Nebraska", Columbia, 1982)

“In Bruce Springsteen's songs you can stay and rot, or run and burn,” with these blunt words Rob Fleming – the protagonist of Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" – sums up the Boss's entire poetics. And it really is that simple. Those who love Springsteen love him for the exact same reason as those who hate him: his songs put you with your back against the wall. You can choose to chase your dreams or hold out a whole lifetime in the name of an ideal that, if you haven't already betrayed it, you sooner or later will; you can choose to risk everything on your desires or resign yourself to failure, but there's no room for indifference. No damn compromise. You either believe or you don't. Whether it's a romantic escape, an impossible redemption, or a "Promised Land" that probably never existed but that the gaze keeps searching for beyond the "Darkness On The Edge Of Town", for the Boss the world is split into two categories: those who keep believing and those who simply give up. And every time the harmonica, the guitar or the sax rise up in full force, it's the same question: "So, whose side are you on?"

In "Thunder Road", the song that opens the gorgeous "Born To Run" (1975), it's impossible – unless your soul is already withered – not to side with the believers: Mary is dancing on the porch and the wind sways her dress, the radio is playing Roy Orbison's "Only The Lonely" in tribute to lonely hearts, he arrives and wants to take her away. She's scared, she feels she no longer has the naive enthusiasm of her blooming years, but she's spent a lifetime praying for something to redeem her from the colorless existence she's condemned herself to. He's no hero, mind you, and yet he offers her a chance. He picks up the guitar and starts making it speak, for her. Then he starts the car without worrying about the destination. It doesn't matter where that ride will end up, what matters is that she gets in, into that car. For one spin or forever, in the end what difference does it make to know. Two lovers – perhaps lovers – escape from a "town full of losers" and speed toward a tomorrow that is already today, Clarence Clemons's saxophone bursts in triumphantly, hinting that maybe, yes, they made it. As true as only literature can be.

In "Nebraska" (1982) – the record Springsteen released after the monumental "The River" (1980), which had crowned him the new prophet of world rock – you no longer know whether to side with the believers, because faith is now drained of its magic. It resembles more a duty to cling to so as not to drown in a sea of shit, the habit of hoping just to keep from dying: "At the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe." On the cover of "The River" there's a close-up of the Boss: proud, determined gaze, fierce eyes, iron will; he looks almost like a Michelangelo's David sculpted from the stardust of the American flag. On the cover of "Nebraska", by contrast, there's the black and white of an American highway swallowed by an empty landscape. Clothes sometimes do make the man, and that's often true for great records too. "Nebraska" sounds exactly like that road – desolate yet aimed toward some somewhere – and it's an album at the opposite pole from its predecessor. If "The River" had shaped the figure of the tough, charismatic, ruthlessly unattainable rocker, "Nebraska" took that portrait and turned it inward. Since the world wanted to slap on him a kind of quality seal with a vaguely macho flavor, Springsteen wriggled free and – armed with a four-track recorder – recorded, in complete solitude, a handful of songs fragile in arrangement but sturdy in structure. Guitar (always acoustic except in one instance), voice, harmonica and very little else. There was still plenty of rock in it, only in its archetypal form. The same form that had made the acoustic sermons of Johnny Cash aggressive beyond any plausible electrification (along with Woody Guthrie and the early Bob Dylan, one of "Nebraska"'s guiding spirits). Fans and critics expected fresh, bloody meat from Springsteen to cook on rock's big grill; he gave them the bare bones instead (conceptually, some tracks even bring to mind Suicide in the way they strip the rock'n'roll song-form down to its skeleton). A statement of artistic independence beyond price.

"Nebraska" is an intimate, literary, cinematic record. Its stories – like those told in Lou Reed's Lou Reed "New York" – belong by right to the great American narrative, to that imaginary made of words, sounds and visual matter which, as if it were a single stream, runs from Aaron Copland to Martin Scorsese. It's no coincidence that one of the record's sources of inspiration is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, in which the political, economic and social events of the United States since 1492 are told from a radical perspective: that of the subordinate classes, the minorities, the defeated. Indeed, there isn't a single winner in "Nebraska". Not the pair of killers who go on a mad spree leaving ten victims behind just for the thrill of it, nor the judge who sentences them to death. Not Joe, the upstanding cop in "Highway Patrolman" who, just this once, breaks his own code, letting his brother Frankie, wanted for attempted murder, cross the border into Canada and avoid jail. And certainly not, in the end, the man who has "debts no honest man can pay."

The same line is spoken twice in the record: first by the protagonist of "Atlantic City", the song chosen as the single to launch the album and the very first video ever made for one of the Boss's tracks; then by "Johnny 99", a factory worker who – after losing his job and getting drunk – kills a night watchman and is sentenced to ninety-nine years behind bars for it. But while Johnny would have preferred the death penalty to rotting in prison for the rest of his days, the man in "Atlantic City" seems to have one last chance to start over. His past is tied to Philadelphia's underworld: the opening line mentions a certain Chicken Man, who has just been blown up by a bomb planted on the porch in front of his house. Chicken Man was the nickname of mob boss Phil Testa, who together with Angelo Bruno ran the gambling racket in Atlantic City in the late Seventies. After their deaths, a power vacuum opened up in the local mafia, one that Nicky Scarfo, who had ordered their killings, tried to fill. The song's protagonist too seems determined to seize the opportunity to finally get out of the criminal world. His future is uncertain, but perhaps in New Jersey he can rekindle love and find the strength to redeem himself: "⟦Q1⟧"

Musically, the song rests on a lazy strum and a resigned vocal that – with the impetuous entrance of the harmonica – catches fire, turns passionate, burning: "⟦Q2⟧" Dialectical debts taken on by a man who knows he can't pay them off, because sooner or later the past – allegorized by the backing vocals that fade like echoes into the void and by a mournful mandolin underneath – comes back to his door, whether to knock or break it down: "⟦Q3⟧"

Ending up on the losing side is the terror of every man in the West, since, in our ultra-competitive so-called developed societies, "the world is divided into winners and losers, and you'd better be careful not to end up on the wrong side." Making men believe that defeat can truly be avoided is the great deception on which the West rests. The deception of being able to win, to pile up success, business, self-assertion, on pain of the disgrace of being seen as someone who didn't make it. Atlantic City – a city that, at a certain point in its history, in order to revive a battered economy, bet on gambling and built row after row of casinos – is in this sense a place-name risen to the symbol of a corrupt system that flatters you with empty promises of wealth and then – once you're no longer of use to it – leaves you out in the street with your despair. All of "Nebraska", then, through its murky stories, is one long ballad of disillusionment that plants a doubt. Perhaps on this side of the world the object of the game is always the same: to lose. At most, we can only choose how to play. Bust our ass for a lifetime, pick up a rifle, or bash our head against fate in a hotel room in Atlantic City.