Last week, I attended a No Kings rally in Newark, New Jersey. Technically, it was the seventh leg of Bruce Springsteen\u2019s latest tour, a series of concerts that he told the audience he had not been expecting to mount. \u201cWe never planned this tour,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we came out because I needed to feel your hope, your strength, and I needed to hear your voices.\u201d<\/p>\n
It must be nice, when feeling a bit disconnected, to be able to assemble an arena\u2019s worth of worshipful acolytes singing along to the thoughts you had when you were 25. Some men seek out connection via OnlyFans, Bruce Springsteen connected with only 20,000 fans because the venues couldn\u2019t hold more. It\u2019s okay, he has earned that affirmation.<\/p>\n
What was driving Springsteen to get out on the road were the events weighing on so many of us. This winter Springsteen wrote about the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in a song titled \u201cStreets of Minneapolis.\u201d At the concert, pictures of the two were shown on the screens. Springsteen quoted Good\u2019s apparent last words, \u201cI\u2019m not mad at you,\u201d in one of his signature stretches of stage banter.<\/p>\n
Springsteen is often a subtle songwriter, but his assessments of institutional good and evil do not walk the same nuanced edge as his portraits of people in blue-collar jobs. And that\u2019s fine. Bob Dylan is the gimlet-eyed poet we have for that kind of songwriting. Springsteen seems to imagine himself more in the Woody Guthrie mold, where there is the clear dyad of the powerful versus the little guy.<\/p>\n
All of this said, the new song itself isn\u2019t very good. It has a dashed-off quality, possibly reflecting on the fact that, per Springsteen, he wrote it in about a day. A protest song derives its power not just from its sentiment but from lyrical specificity, and Springsteen does not show the rigor in \u201cStreets of Minneapolis\u201d that he has shown in so many of his earlier compositions. He rhymes \u201csinging through the bloody mist\u201d with \u201cand the stranger in our midst.\u201d He sings \u201cKing Trump\u2019s private army from the DHS \/ Guns belted to their coats \/ Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law \/ or so their story goes.\u201d I don\u2019t mind the slant rhymes of \u201ccoats\u201d with \u201cgoes,\u201d but law enforcement officers\u2019 guns were not belted to their coats. Is this meant to evoke Pinkertons, some sort of generalized nefariously cloaked figures, or, more likely, did he just need a rhyme for \u201cor so their story goes\u201d?<\/p>\n
Springsteen seems to sense that however important the sentiment, the composition doesn\u2019t quite meet the circumstance. Three times during the song\u2019s performance the arena lights flicked on as Springsteen goaded the crowd into chanting, \u201cICE OUT NOW!\u201d not trusting the power of the moment to take care of itself.<\/p>\n
But I forgive Bruce Springsteen. This one song was a misfire, especially when contrasted with his 2001 song \u201cAmerican Skin (41 Shots),\u201d which also concerns a tragic real-life police shooting and uses genuinely deft lyrics and musicality to elevate sentiment above the sloganeering of \u201cStreet of Minneapolis.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the song is heartfelt and imbued with that quality Springsteen has always exuded: earnestness. Springsteen is and always has been earnest. His fans, earnestly, love him back, some taking from Springsteen whatever elements of fist-pumping energy he gives off and leaving the politics for others.<\/p>\n
As the 76-year-old strutted and fretted his way across the Newark stage, I began to think about the Boss\u2019 politics versus those of younger generations.<\/p>\n
One example of a politicized, somewhat younger musician right there on the stage with him was 61-year-old Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. Morello, a Springsteen collaborator for over 20 years, is a committed leftist who sports a hammer and sickle on his \u201cArm the Homeless\u201d guitar. Springsteen never came close to striking me as adopting this sort of extreme political commitment. He always just seems like an FDR Democrat who is shaking his head at what his country has become. In fact, he and former Sen. Sherrod Brown, the politician I think he\u2019s most like, have a similar gravelly vocal quality and a soft spot for Youngstown, Ohio, with its blast furnace that \u201cmade the cannon balls\/ That helped the Union win the war<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n If Springsteen\u2019s catalog were an infrastructure bill it would bring down unemployment to the Fed\u2019s target of 2 percent.<\/p>\n The youngest generation of musicians includes Billie Eilish, who recently<\/a> invoked the trendy notion of America being built on stolen land. Springsteen has written about Native Americans often and with deep sensitivity. But he embraces the supposedly pass\u00e9 concept of the melting pot in the song, singing, in \u201cAmerican Land\u201d that \u201cThe McNicholases, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too\/ The blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews \u2026 Their hands that built the country we\u2019re always trying to keep down.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, and this is what I like about Springsteen and will miss about his generation of baby boomers. They were raised in what a Billie Eilish type might regard as the stew of propaganda of American exceptionalism. And while the Vietnam War opened Springsteen\u2019s and his cohorts\u2019 eyes, nothing could permanently undo the idea of America as the land of opportunity, or dislodge its place, to quote a song played at the Newark concert, as \u201cThe Promised Land.\u201d<\/p>\n The disappointment in not reaching our national ideals is, to baby boomers, a promise unmet, a dream that, though not currently coming true, is nonetheless not a lie. Still, Springsteen builds. He does so, in the figurative sense through his music, through the conscious construction of his backup band as a community, and through the connection with his fans. But I also mean that Springsteen has a commitment to building and to physical buildings. The people of Springsteen\u2019s generation believed in building. They believed in structures. Their landscape is one of edifices, their monuments were of the concrete and steel variety, not the conceptual or the electronic. This is why Springsteen has sung about: towers<\/a>, churches, jails, tunnels<\/a>, skylines<\/a>, reservoirs<\/a>, bridges<\/a>, trestles<\/a>, risings<\/a>, mansions<\/a> (of glory<\/a>, of fear<\/a>, on the hill<\/a>), sidewalks<\/a>, roads<\/a>, streets<\/a>, avenues<\/a>, boulevards<\/a>, girders<\/a>, promenades<\/a>, railroad tracks<\/a>, rafters<\/a>, and in at<\/a> least three different <\/a>songs, refineries<\/a>. If Springsteen\u2019s catalog were an infrastructure bill it would bring down unemployment to the Fed\u2019s target of 2 percent. This is a performer who has mentioned \u201chighways\u201d more often in song lyrics (406 times according<\/a> to SpringsteenLyrics.com) than there are highways in New Jersey (117 active state highways according to Wikipedia<\/a>).<\/p>\n The people who built our country, according to Springsteen, are to be praised for their industry rather than decried as despoilers or thieves of stolen land. Springsteen himself is a sometimes disappointed but never cynical citizen of an America that builds. He is a steady purveyor of a message that might not always be uplifting, but is always, sometimes literally, constructive. He is an artist whose function is not to convince you to tear it all down, but to craft the case that there is a reason to believe.\u00a0<\/p>\n Correction, April 29, 2026: This article has been updated to remove a reference to Springsteen\u2019s guitar, which was misidentified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, I attended a No Kings rally in Newark, New Jersey. 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