When the Boss Went Moral

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http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=when_the_boss_went_moral

When the Boss Went Moral

Bruce Springsteen's lost album reveals the young musician rejecting easy pop in favor of asking impossibly big questions about life and liberty in America.

Jessica Hopper | November 19, 2010 | web only


Bruce Springsteen in concert at New York's Madison Square Garden, Aug. 21, 1978 (AP Photo)


What is pop music for, if not escape? Its aim is to lift us out of our everyday, our workday, to stoke and coalesce our fantasies about romance or some alternate life, away from the place into which we seem to have detoured. In 1977, when Bruce Springsteen began work on what would become his landmark album, Darkness on The Edge of Town, it was that idea of pop with which he was working. Informed by Elvis, Orbison, and the Brill Building songwriters, Springsteen was penning grand, lovelorn tunes that were easy to relate to.

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Darkness was an attempt to ask impossibly big questions about life and liberty in America, what it means to be a man, the value of work in a capitalist system, and, as Springsteen explained later, dealing with sin in a good life. He spent five months in the studio with the E Street Band, grinding and honing and glutting, working out the hungry ghosts of his Catholic boyhood, until he found a way to contain them in Darkness' anxious and blazing sides. He refused the gleaming pop tracks and lovelorn balladry that make up The Promise -- he turned "Because The Night" over to Patti Smith -- because he knew they were hits and that they would define him, and that was not what he wanted to be defined by.

Springsteen wanted to be taken in absolute earnest. Whether he were seeking to be rock's beleaguered blue-collar conscience or just wanted to be more than the standard-issue rock star is debatable, but it's safe to assume one doesn't spend years laboring over allegorical language illuminating the spiritual longing of the American underclass if you aren't fully convinced of your own powers. Whether Springsteen was interested in being rock's great moralist is beside the point -- Darkness is what earned him the job.

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The album's emotional truth mirrors its political one. The Carter era in which Darkness was born was a time when we couldn't buy the lie anymore -- a long, bad war had made that impossible. Song after song is about longing, lost innocence, and consequence. "Racing In The Streets" wafts with reckoning; the tale of good people betraying their better natures and each other, wanting to wash the sin off their hands. Darkness is the album that established Springsteen as the musician who captured the American dilemma; it is the work of someone striving to be that exemplar city on the hill, forever falling shy of its mark.

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