Lately Bruce Springsteen has been talked about quite a lot in social media. The reason for this is not so much his music, but a statement he made about Donald Trump and the current political situation in the US. As a response Trump expressed his own criticism about Springsteen, offering the Internet a field day in all the comment sections. My favorite type of comment I saw repeated numerous times was something along the lines of I've never been a fan of Bruce Springsteen ... until now!
This made me think back and consider my own opinion on this musician, only to realize that I'd been barely familiar with his music, if at all. He became famous way before I started listening to music, but didn't go back far enough to fall into the category of the "1960's-revolution" like Jimmy Hendrix or Jefferson Airplane, which I had been highly interested in. All I knew about The Boss, as he was referred to by his fans, was that his music resonated well with the everyday lives of working-class folks, and that he liked to appear on stage in sleeveless shirts. But it actually took my dad to take an interest in him before I would even listen to one of his songs.
Music for Mid-Life?
I guess it was around the turn of the millennium when my dad became super enthusiastic about Bruce Springsteen. He must have been in his late forties (ironically my age at the present) while I was in my early twenties, and on a road trip we were taking together he only wanted to listen to Springsteen. I didn't mind, though I mockingly asked him if it was his midlife crisis that turned him into a Boss fan. "Where do you see a crisis?" he countered. "Besides, you can only tell what mid-life is once you've reached the end, and we're not quite there yet."
I laughed, but still I thought it was strange that Bruce Springsteen would resonate so well with my dad, coming from a European white-collar background. I even pointed this out about the song Glory Days that he never once played baseball, or even watched a baseball game in his entire life. "Of course not," he replied, "but that doesn't mean I didn't have any glory days to look back at." Then he proceeded telling me about working on an ambulance crew back when he was in medical school, in the Hungarian town of Szeged in the 1970's. Oh yeah, those were his glory days...
Covering Dylan and Playing with the Stones
As a result of Springsteen and Trump exchanging criticisms, social media is full of stories about The Boss, making it seem like they all happened just yesterday. The one where he made a surprise appearance with The Rolling Stones happened in 2014 at their 50-year-anniversary concert. Another similar post takes us back to 1997, when he performed at the Kennedy Center, with an impressive cover of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'. Clearly, the re-ignition of this old protest song would have been a fitting response to Trump's reaction of his statements, but actually it is almost 30 years old. Nevertheless, I probably would never have heard it, hadn't it been for these recent events. So let me go ahead and share it with you here:
The Best of the Boss: Dark and Gloomy Americana
Okay, so like I said, my knowledge of Bruce Springsteen is rather limited. But after looking into his most famous songs there was one that stuck out among the rest, and struck me to the ground, titled This Hard Land. The simple guitar chords and the crying sound of the harmonica sets a melancholy scene, again something reminiscent of Bob Dylan. But then the lyrics come in and hit with full force:
Hey there mister can you tell me
What happened to the seeds I’ve sown
Can you give me a reason, sir, as to why they’ve never grown
They’ve just blown around from town to town
Back out on these fields
Where they fall from my hand
Back into the dirt of this hard land
No matter if you take the seeds in this song literally as failed agriculture, or apply them as symbols for children turned out wrong, or business gone bankrupt, the effect is nothing too positive. And this is just the start. It all goes downhill from here. Scarecrows lying face-down in the dirt, the wind slamming the back porch door (which typically would have a torn mosquito screen on it), all the way to the Bar-M choppers sweeping low across the plains, the overall image is nothing short of apocalyptic. Though honestly I have no idea what a Bar-M chopper is, the image that comes to mind is some military weaponry, like those helicopters from footage of the Vietnam war. The fact that they are used on the plains of the American heartland suggests some looming domestic conflict, which nowadays seems closer than ever to the realm of the possible. This is reason enough to add this song as the third one for today's challenge:
Weekly ThreeTuneTuesday Challenge
This post is part of the #ThreeTuneTuesday challenge, brought to us by @ablaze. Go ahead and check out the three tunes participants share each week, or go to one of the prompt posts, though it does not always come out every week. To see more of my Music related posts, please visit my Monday Music post collection.