WASHINGTON – Even as his fame and wealth have soared over the decades, Bruce Springsteen has retained the voice of the working class’ balladeer, often weighing in on politics — most notably when he was a regular presence on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
This month, though, his music and public statements have ended up as particularly pointed and contentious.
At a concert in Manchester, England, Springsteen denounced President Donald Trump’s politics, calling him an “unfit president” leading a “rogue government” of people who have “no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.”
“The America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration,” Springsteen said in words that he included on a digital EP he released a few days later. (A few more days later, he began another gig with the nonpolitical but saliently titled track “No Surrender.”)
Trump shot back and called Springsteen highly overrated. “Never liked him, never liked his music or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — just a pushy, obnoxious JERK,” he wrote on social media.
For decades, Springsteen has salted his songs with social and political commentary, and it’s hardly surprising: One of his self-described musical heroes, the activist folk singer Woody Guthrie, played a guitar upon which was written, “This machine kills fascists.”
Here is a look at some Springsteen lyrics that ventured into current events and the plights of people caught up in them.
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‘Born in the USA’
LYRIC: Down in the shadow of the penitentiary, out by the gas fires of the refinery: I’m 10 years burnin’ down the road; nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 1984, “Born in the USA”
BACKSTORY: Springsteen’s most misinterpreted song — misread by Ronald Reagan and many politicians after him — tells the tale of a Vietnam vet who lost his brother in the war and came home to no job prospects and a bleak future. The driving, catchy chorus — composed primarily of the words from the song’s title, which made misunderstanding it easier — turned it into an anthem, albeit one that was not a burst of patriotism but a bitter description of veterans’ circumstances.
‘My Hometown’
LYRIC: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores/Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 1984, “Born in the USA”
BACKSTORY: As he moved into his second decade of fame, Springsteen started touching on themes of economic distress more. “My Hometown” is about a 35-year-old man remembering how he used to ride proudly around his town with his father when he was little. But now, he laments, “they’re closin’ down the textile mill across the railroad track. Foreman says, ‘These jobs are goin’, boys, and they ain’t comin’ back.’”
‘American Skin (41 Shots)’
LYRIC: “No secret, my friend — you can get killed just for living in your American skin.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 2001, “Live in New York City.”
BACKSTORY: A song written about the 1999 police killing of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo, who was standing in front of his apartment building in the Bronx when he was peppered with 41 bullets — 19 of which went into his body. The case captivated and divided New York City, and the song’s release alienated Springsteen from some of his fan base, which included cops (whose lives he had sometimes chronicled in earlier songs like “Highway Patrolman”).
‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’
LYRIC: “Shelter line stretchin’ ‘round the corner. Welcome to the new world order. Families sleepin’ in their cars in the southwest — no home, no job, no peace, no rest.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 1995, “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
BACKSTORY: Keying in on the ethos and tone of Steinbeck’s Depression-era classic “The Grapes of Wrath,” Springsteen chronicles modern-day people at the fringes of society trying to get by on the road. “The highway is alive tonight,” he says, “but nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes.”
‘The Line’
LYRIC: “At night they come across the levy in the searchlight’s dusty glow. We’d rush ‘em in our Broncos and force ’em back down into the river below.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 1995, “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
BACKSTORY: The tale of a lonely, widowed border patrol agent who falls for one of the illegal immigrants caught crossing the border. It leads him to confront his hypocrisy and leave the job, still searching for the woman he met fleetingly. Its companion song on the album, “Across the Border,” was written from the perspective of a Mexican man dreaming of America (“For you I’ll build a house high upon a grassy hill, somewhere across the border”).
‘The Rising’
LYRIC: “Lost track of how far I’ve gone — how far I’ve gone, how high I’ve climbed. On my back’s a 60-pound stone; on my shoulder a half-mile line.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 2002, “The Rising”
BACKSTORY: Barely a year after “American Skin,” Springsteen turned back to first responders in the wake of 9/11, venerating them with a song that tells of a firefighter ascending the steps of one of the Twin Towers to save people — and, presumably dying along the way. He sings of a “sky of blackness and sorrow, sky of love, sky of tears, sky of glory and sadness, sky of mercy, sky of fear.” He takes no political position but — in his typical way — shows one of history’s most political events through the lens of a regular person caught up in it.
‘Jack of All Trades’
LYRIC: “The banker man grows fat, working man grows thin. It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 2012, “Wrecking Ball”
BACKSTORY: A lament from an underemployed American man who can’t get more than odd jobs after the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The work he does as a handyman sends him toward hopelessness, and he feels a lack of dignity. “You lose what you’ve got and you learn to make do. You take the old, you make it new,” the protagonist sings. But, he also allows, “If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ’em on sight.”
‘Death to My Hometown’
LYRIC: “Send the robber barons straight to hell — the greedy thieves who came around and ate the flesh of everything they found. Whose crimes have gone unpunished now, who walk the streets as free men now.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 2012, “Wrecking Ball”
BACKSTORY: Springsteen revisits the theme of a dying hometown, this time with more aggressiveness than lament, keying in on the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It functioned as a protest song and a rallying cry against greed and its carriers. The same album featured the song “Wrecking Ball,” a defiant challenge to people who would tear down beloved parts of northern New Jersey in the name of “progress.”
‘Galveston Bay’
LYRIC: “Billy sat in front of his TV as the South fell and the communists rolled into Saigon. He and his friends watched as the refugees came, settled on the same streets and worked the coast they’d grew up on.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 1995, “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
BACKSTORY: An almost biblical parable about pain and old hatreds. A veteran in Galveston Bay, who’d fought in Vietnam, watches as an immigrant Vietnamese shrimper protects himself and sets out to kill him one night — but it ends with unexpected results and quiet hope.
’57 Channels (and Nothin’ On)’
LYRIC: “So I bought a .44 Magnum, it was solid steel cast. And in the blessed name of Elvis, well, I just let it blast ‘til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet. And they busted me for disturbin’ the almighty peace.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 1992, “Human Touch”
BACKSTORY: An expression of sardonic rage at the emptiness and hopelessness that the unremitting feed of cable TV had brought to the world. This is less political and more social, though it reflected some of the disillusionment of the age about the brain rot of popular culture. It came months before Michael Douglas’ anger-management-failure movie “Falling Down” depicted an enraged man losing it and tearing a swath through Los Angeles because of the stresses of modern culture.
‘Livin’ in the Future’
LYRIC: “My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon. The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run.”
YEAR/ALBUM: 2007, “Magic”
BACKSTORY: A twist on the old-fashioned warning song, written from the vantage point of the future. (“We’re livin’ in the future, and none of this has happened yet.”) This was a commentary on a post-9/11 America that — as the song suggests — is headed in a bad direction. Oblique but devastating, particularly with such somber words against an upbeat melody reminiscent of his early work, it suggested there was still time to correct course. Which touches on a frequent Springsteen theme: possibility amid the hardship and challenge.
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Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation for The Associated Press, has written about American culture since 1990.
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