Counter-Currents
This Gun’s For Hire (Even if He’s Just Groping in the Dark)
Spencer J. Quinn1,989 words
Bruce Springsteen performing on stage. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
This past Thursday, rock n’ roll icon Bruce Springsteen gave a solo acoustic performance during a Kamala Harris rally in Georgia. He famously did the same for Barack Obama back in 2008, and has been up front and consistent about his lefty politics ever since. Sixteen years takes a mighty toll on a man, however, and the energetic performer who belted out the hits for Obama didn’t exactly show up in 2024. He seemed tired, haggard, old. Not that he can help it, of course.
His selections were “The Promised Land,” from 1978’s Darkness of the Edge of Town, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” from 2012’s Wrecking Ball, and “Dancing in the Dark,” from 1984’s Born in the USA, which is one of his biggest hits. The overall quality of his performances was spotty, and his song selections were questionable for a political rally. But what’s most interesting was the brief speech he gave in which he laid out his reasons for supporting Kamala Harris:
I’m Bruce Springsteen and I’m here today to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for president and vice president of the United States. And to oppose, to oppose Donald Trump and JD Vance. Now here’s why. I want a president who reveres the Constitution, who does not threaten, but wants to protect and guide our great democracy, who believes in the rule of law and peaceful transfer of power, who will fight for a woman’s right to choose, and who wants to create a middle class economy that will serve all our citizens. There is only one candidate in this election who holds those principles dear: Kamala Harris. She’s running to be the 47th president of the United States. Donald Trump is running to be an American tyrant. He does not understand this country, its history, or what it means to be deeply American. And that’s why on November 5th I’m casting my vote for Kamal Harris and Tim Walz.
Well, that’s some pretty thin gruel. Was that really the best the Boss could come up with? And what the heck is a “middle class economy,” anyway? The only concrete, defensible reason Springsteen listed for voting for Harris was support for abortion. Yes, if a person makes terminating fetuses his or her number one political priority, then by all means that person should vote for Kamala Harris. Same if a person gets jazzed about illegal immigration, defunding the police, rioting in cities, transgenderism, and high inflation. Harris is the undisputed champ when it comes to stupid stuff like this.
The rest of Springsteen’s speech was basic lefty boiler plate bitch. Nothing specific, no evidence. Just feelz and smearz coming from someone with a guitar-sized chip on his shoulder. And this is strange, given Trump’s (and Vance’s) undeniable appeal to the working-class people Springsteen has made a billion dollars singing about. It makes me wonder what Springsteen thinks of the Teamsters Union’s refusal to endorse Kamala Harris and the general support for Donald Trump among its members. The International Union of Firefighters also refused to endorse Harris, while many police unions openly favor Trump. Working people everywhere in America are undeniably trending Trump.
Regardless, what I find most interesting is the one reason Springsteen didn’t mention: US involvement in foreign wars. As of October 2024, the United States has given Israel $17.9 billion in military aid to prosecute its ongoing war against the Palestinians. This includes at least 100 military aid transfers. Further, the United States under Biden has been making sure Iran keeps getting enriched to the tune of billions. Since Iran is a major backer of the enemies of Israel, including Hamas, it seems that the Biden administration might be playing both sides of the conflict in order to prolong it. Not for nothing people say that “War is a Racket.” Then, of course, there’s the $175 billion the United States has given Ukraine to keep its two-and-a-half-year-long war against Russia going. All of this has happened on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ watch. Does Bruce Springsteen, who sang about the tragedy of war in songs such as “Born in the USA” approve of all this?
President Trump, for all his faults, did not engage in this kind of warmongering. He presided over a relatively stable and peaceful four years. In fact, with typical Trumpian swagger, he has recently announced that he will contact both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky on election night to start brokering a peace deal. Is this something that Springsteen would actually oppose?
I ask because Springsteen ramped up his political activism back in the early 2000s to protest the Iraq War. I remember this keenly because I lost a friend over it. I was a big Springsteen fan and my friend wasn’t, and we often argued the merits of his music. Yet when Springsteen opposed the Iraq War (which I supported at the time) the tables turned, and I argued against the Boss and my friend began to support him. Eventually, it got too much for him, and we stopped talking. In hindsight however, I realize that, with all the shady stuff we now know about the 9-11 attacks, my friend and Springsteen had been correct, and I had been wrong. This is why I don’t hold it against Springsteen for his full-throated support of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Back then, the Republican Party was oozing with neocons, and the Democrats, maybe not quite so much. You could still draw a straight line from the Vietnam War protests to the Iraq War protests and claim with some justice that the Democrats were the party of peace.
You cannot do that in the age of Trump. His record and Biden’s speak for themselves—in opposite directions, of course. And Harris’ inability to articulate a foreign policy deviating from Biden’s indicates that if elected she will keep that revolving door of forever wars spinning. Consider also her inexplicable decision to campaign with the grossly unpopular neocon Liz Cheney. This did not go over well with anti-war progressives, to say nothing of the Young Turks. This tweet from Cenk Uygur says it all:
Basically, if Bruce Springsteen is onboard with a Kamala Harris presidency, then he must support these pointless foreign wars. This, of course, flies in the face of his anti-war stance from two decades ago. Maybe this belies a kind of American elitism on the part of the Boss. War is worth railing against only when Americans get killed and maimed on the battlefield. But when Palestinians, Ukrainians, or Russians get ripped apart by drones and artillery fire on America’s dime, then that’s okay. Either that, or the Democrats are paying him a lot of money.
Anyone with a shred of morality should find such hypocritical grandstanding repulsive.
As for Springsteen’s performance, it wasn’t as bad as many on the Right have been so gleefully claiming. The fault is more in the song selection than the actual performance. “Land of Hope and Dreams,” while not inappropriate lyrically for the occasion, suffers from regurgitated Springsteen tropes and trite turns of phrase like these:
Well, this train carries saints and sinners
Oh, this train carries losers and winners
This train carries whores and gamblers, yeah
This train carries lost souls.
It’s like he wasn’t even trying when he wrote this one. And you could tell by the way the audience was fidgeting behind him that they weren’t buying it. But at least it was somewhat optimistic. Not so “The Promised Land,” which has heart-wrenching lyrics such as:
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.
Is this what people really want to hear at a campaign rally? And it’s not like there was a band to drown out the lyrics and give people a beat they could groove to. No, Springsteen’s gloomy message came through loud and clear. Same with “Dancing in the Dark,” another downer made even more depressing not just by Springsteen’s mournful delivery, but by his greatly diminished power to deliver it.
Messages keep getting clearer
Radio’s on and I’m movin’ round the place
I check my look in the mirror
I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face.
Man, I ain’t getting’ nowhere
Just livin’ in a dump like this.
There’s something happening somewhere
Baby, I just know there is.
You can’t start a fire, you can’t start a fire without a spark
This gun’s for hire, even if we’re just dancing in the dark.
Groping in the dark is more like it. And the comments, at least on the National Desk YouTube page, were brutal. Note how none of the negative comments below had any down votes. To see Bruce Springsteen, a man I idolized as a kid, getting roasted like this is remarkable:
My favorite: “Now I know how bad Trump’s ear hurt.”
Springsteen would have been better off had he stuck with more rousing numbers like 2002’s “The Rising” and 2009’s “Working on Dream.” And there’s always the dusty favorite, “This land is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie, which never gets old in lefty circles. But instead, he decided to sabotage Kamala Harris’s rally with a generally subpar performance of a set of inappropriate songs. Who am I to object to that?
But still, there was something in this performance that harkened back to his days of greatness. “The Promised Land” may not be one of Springsteen’s very best songs—not due any fault of its own, but more to the Olympian heights reached by his greatest work. Still, it is a fine song with some striking imagery. And its interlude—beginning with Springsteen humming over piano and bass, and then accompanied by organ and followed by an intense guitar solo, all to crescendo with a blistering, almost triumphant, saxophone solo—is about as good as pop music can get. Go back and listen to it and tell me if I’m wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I53_zdtjPC0
By stripping the song down to guitar and harmonica during his recent performance, however, and by slowing it down considerably, Springsteen introduces something new to this old gem. Where the recorded version juxtaposes the optimism of its stirring chorus (“I believe in a promised land”) with the heartache and fatalism of its verses, here it’s all heartache and fatalism. Springsteen snarls through the chorus, and almost whispers the suicidal verses cited above as if kneeling in a confessional. And the way he spaced out the song’s most dramatic moment is frankly chilling:
There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain’t got the strength to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted
I believe that pretty much all of the best Springsteen songs are diamonds in the rough. That’s just his nature as a singer and songwriter. Yes, this particular performance is rougher than it needed to be. Perhaps there would have been less rough and more diamond had it been performed back in 2012. But the diamond is still there, which, for a 75-year-old man—and for all of us who love his music—is good thing.
But in 2024 Bruce Springsteen should probably start taking his own advice. He should “blow away the dreams” that the Democratic Party is still the party of peace and the working man—because they haven’t been that for a long time. Otherwise on election day, if the stunningly pro-Trump polls are any indication, he’ll be the one who’s “lost and brokenhearted.”
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36 comments
Sorry Spencer but Bruce is second only to the Beatles as being the most overrated rockers of all time.
I don’t understand Beatles hate. You might say that they were not technically impressive. No one was a virtuoso on their instrument. If you are someone who places a high value on that, OK, they were unexceptional on that front.
I place a high value on melody. I’ve always preferred British bands in large part because they have a better sense of melody. Americans have a better sense of rhythm but Brits are more melodic.
In terms of melody and harmony, The Beatles were S-tier. The only band that rivals them on that front was Queen.
In fact, you could say that The Beatles played a large role in making rock and roll less black. A lot of the early white rock and roll stars were larping as blacks and trying to emulate black soul singing or at least a watered down version of it. By taking rock and roll and making it more melodic and sing-songy, The Beatles took a black style of music and turned it into something distinctly white.
Blacks like to complain that “whites stole rock and roll from us”! I’m just like “Show me anything by a 1950s black rock and roll pioneer that sounds anything like The White Album or Dark Side of the Moon.
The Beatles have also influenced so many people who came after them, it might be hard to appreciate how radical some of their innovations were when they first introduced them.
For example, performers and songwriters used to be separate professions. Elvis never wrote a song in his life. The Beatles were the first rock band to not use outside songwriters and it’s been a tradition ever since that rock bands are expected to write their own material (although the occasional cover is acceptable).
With pop and solo artists, it’s different but if a rock band put out an album of songs that they didn’t write, people would dismiss them as “manufactured” and might start to question whether they even played on the album. That is a legacy of The Beatles.
They’re just four guys who won life’s lottery and did nothing but sappy love songs. They played the same chord over and over making their instruments nothing but props.
Every rock band plays the same chords over and over. There’s only so many chords you can play before you’re playing jazz.
Look, The Beatles constructed their instrumentation around their melodies which is trad. It was what white songwriters had been doing for generations.
The practice of having a guitar player write a riff or chord progression and then having a singer come up with something to sing over it is some newfangled hippy crap.
Not to be unduly offensive, but the Beatles very much didn’t play the same three chords again and again, that’s only even sometimes true of the Stones. Nowadays, most pop songs, in their choruses at least, even in the Great Miss Taylor Swift’s, we’re talking maybe 2 chords, that’s in the kind of drivel that gets played via department-store speakers to enhance your shopping experience. A few Beatles songs were pure 12-bar blues (I-iv-v) but usually it was only part of the song, a la “Please, Please Me” (the bridge) or “You Can’t Do That”…. only their “Tomorrow Never Knows” stuck mostly to one chord, but even that modulates a bit at points in the songs
“The Beatles took a black style of music and turned it into something distinctly white.”
As Billy Roper has said, “Remember, you’ll find ‘Revolution‘ on their White album.”
Personally, I’ve always thought of the Beatles as pop rather than rock.
Stones > Beatles
A cogent exposition. Some musician, I can’t remember who, said the same thing as you, roughly and he said he recalls playing Drive my car over and over again thinking how strange it was and different from anything he ever heard before. Now it sounds like quintessential pop rock. I think I must like melody too because I prefer British bands for the same reason, but I never really understood the distinction until you articulated it.
There’s an apocryphal story where someone asked John Lennon if Ringo was the greatest drummer in the world. The reply, “He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles”… nodding to Paul’s skill as a multi instrumentalist for many genres of music. It’s fashionable to claim that Lennon was the innovator, but not backed by facts…. The atonal orchestral crescendos in “day in the life” or backward effects of “Tomorrow never knows” were Paul’s ideas.
That being said, the most important Beatle may have been producer George Martin. If we were to only have Beatles live recordings as their legacy, they wouldn’t be nearly so memorable.
Songwriting credits can be deceptive because it doesn’t mean they write every note you hear on the song. On paper, Roger Waters wrote all of Pink Floyd’s songs but David Gilmore’s solo work sounds a lot more like Pink Floyd than Water’s stuff.
Beatles are GOAT. Full stop. One is not a white nationalist if he doesn’t believe that.
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.
Wow, sounds like this was the real “Nazi” rally.
I have never understood Bruce Springsteen’s appeal. He has no sense of melody and all his songs sound the same.
There was a time when I enjoyed ‘Born to Run’. Then I didn’t. Never missed it. The ‘Springsteen machine’ was driven by jewish payola. When payola became less a factor, so did Springsteen. His music about dead-end Whites served their purposes.
Springsteen ducked the draft by claiming to be a homosexual. He admitted this to his biographer and in several interviews. He made his money writing songs that appealed to the White working class, but turned his back on his people once he got his. Screw him. I change the station if one of his songs come on.
I think he is gay. He wrote the song for that movie Philadelphia back in the early 90s, which was about a homosexual who contracted AIDS. I understand that as a declaration of loyalty, much like Boy George writing the music for Crying Game. Man, I did not see that coming—who would have thought Boy George was gay??!
I’m didn’t know that about his using that reason to avoid the draft. I do remember my Sunday school teacher making a disgusted comment about Springsteen again kissing the saxophonist at a recent concert. This was after one of the girls expressed that she had a crush on him. This was still a time when Christians led against the normalization of homosexuality.
I’m not being judgmental, I’m only saying he may not have lied about being homosexual.
According to Dave Marsh, who wrote an early biography, Springsteen claimed he was given a form at the draft center and that he checked off all the boxes including one that asked if he was “a homo.” For all we know there was also a question asking if he had flat feet that he said yes to. He just didn’t want to fight in Vietnam.
There was no box to check off that I recall. Prior to don’t-ask-don’t-tell, there was a formal interview process with a psychiatrist or MD who asked everyone enlisting about this subject ─ and your answer determined whether or not you were allowed to enlist. Blacks usually lied to the Man one way or another.
But the induction officials were wise about draft dodgers in those days, so one interview with a doctor would likely not be the end of it. Although the Draft was a bit before my time, evading conscription could theoretically mean jail.
Sometimes just showing up with an injury was enough to kick you out of the system. My 19 year old uncle accidentally banged his knee while riding his dirt bike before he was to officially report after being drafted during Vietnam, and then they just excused him. Nixon was winding down the number of conscripts at the time.
🙂
Never cared about this guy’s music and that’s how its going to stay. He’s a ‘fellow white’ anyway.
Springsteen is not Jewish, if that’s what you mean. He is of Dutch, Italian and Irish descent, raised Catholic.
Thank you for correcting that. I was unaware. Still never cared about his music.
That might well be, but he is still a WINO – White in name only.
Springsteen is the typical aging celeb who formed his political views in the early 1970s and never updated them. This fake ‘voice of the working class’ billionaire has nothing to offer to the debate. I imagine many of his former fans can no longer stand him.
This will go down in music history as the Bruce Springsteen Botox Concert.
Springsteen doesn’t get it. Democrats are antiwhite. They don’t want to help the White working class. They want to destroy us. Bruce is a phony who totally doesn’t get that. (I think he’s part Woody Guthrie wannabe. Surprised his guitar strap doesn’t have the patch, This Machine Kills Fascists.)
No, but funny enough, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine played with the E street band for a while in the 2010s, and that idiot had “Arm the homeless” scrawled on his guitar. Check it out.
https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/tom-morello-talks-recording-performing-with-bruce-springsteen-591161
On a minor technical point, whilst there is an option to dislike comments in YouTube the number of such dislikes is not displayed. Presumably the dislike option is just there for the backroom data collectors with their fingers on the collective pulse.
The number used to be displayed, but too many of their friends were getting ratioed so they removed it…
I had a feeling that I would be in the minority here. The dissident right is hardly home territory for Springsteen. I could write a 3000-word essay defending his music, but that wouldn’t be in CC’s wheelhouse. It is also not exactly the hill I want to die on. So let the Boss bashing continue. It’s not like he doesn’t bring it on himself.
You are welcome to do that if you like. I never really got into Springsteen. I always enjoyed “Born to Run” if it came on the radio. I think “Because the Night” is a brilliant song as covered by Patti Smith and also 10,000 Maniacs. I liked his “sellout” hit, “Dancing in the Dark,” more than the stuff his superfans touted. But I was never moved to buy an album. In that, he is similar to groups like the Doobie Brothers and BTO: I always enjoyed them on the radio, but was never moved to buy their music.
There is this, which I thought was great:
https://counter-currents.com/2019/01/dancing-in-the-dark/
I believe he wrote the old Pointer Sisters song “Fire,” and “Hungry Heart” is great, so Springsteen obviously has talent. But the trite left-wing logorrhea is disgusting.
I’ve never been a fan of his but my sisters were. They like Jackson Browne too. I bought his Nebraska album and still have it. It’s the outlier of his catalog in my opinion. Now it’s difficult to see or hear him. Like Alec Baldwin. I used to enjoy a few of his movies but now I cringe when I see him. I know politics and Hollywood have been together for a long time but I’ve always wondered why they didn’t think twice about possibly alienating a large portion of their audiences? Well, no one ever said they were smart. 🙄
Music might be the most primal of art forms. It taps into an elemental part of the brain that is partly related to language, but more basic. Witness your baby, who does not yet know any words and cannot walk, shaking their hips to a tune.
While musicians are poets who tap into this basic element of human-ness, I enjoyed Jim Goad’s observation that many (and more) musicians are dumb. The moment a musician starts to wax about politics, it’s time to change to change the channel. When a young musician starts to talk about politics, you are trying to resist cutting your wrists.
Springsteen had a nice streak in the 70s to early 80s, and became worldwide famous and wealthy in 1975 with Born to Run, at age 25-26. So while he may be sympathetic to the working class in some of his lyrics, it is not something he has experienced personally for much of life. JS Bach and Beethoven were closer to working class than Springsteen! Beethoven, then in his late 40s, was once arrested for looking like a shabby homeless tramp peeking into windows. Aristocratic musicians can make contributions, but best to focus on human emotions and musical innovation rather than pretending to be someone else.
I grew up listening to the Beatles, then decided they weren’t cool, then returned to them full circle. When you see such old music admired by new generations of children, it’s reputation is cemented.
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