Christie has attended more than 100 Springsteen concerts, but Springsteen refused to meet with him, because he was a Republican. There is no bigger Bruce fan than Chris Christie, who served two terms as governor of Springsteen’s home state. In our polarized, tribalized era, in which fans gravitate to entertainers who share their politics, it’s only natural that most Springsteen fans are Democrats. White college-educated voters share Springsteen’s politics: They voted for Clinton, 55-38. In 2016, they favored Trump over Clinton, 64 percent to 28 percent. (Reagan tried to co-opt Springsteen on the campaign trail, praising his “message of hope” to a New Jersey audience Springsteen responded, “I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must’ve been, you know? I don’t think it was the Nebraska album.”) In every presidential election since, whites without college educations - the folks who were born to run - have voted Republican. A week after “Born in the U.S.A.” was released as a single, Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a landslide. He probably assumed that all those out-of-work jamokes would gravitate to the party of FDR and JFK, just like his parents and grandparents. Springsteen has never been shy about sharing his liberal politics. It takes a heap of time to sing from A (aviator) to Z (zincographer).” No wonder this guy’s concerts run on to half-past never. Springsteen, wrote Hamper, “has made untold zillions hoppin’ to and fro in his house of hallucinations, always emerging on release date as either a construction worker ( The River), a garage mechanic ( I’m on Fire), a minor league batting instructor ( Glory Days), the kindred spirit of Charlie Starkweather ( Nebraska) or some other pockmarked casualty of Crud Corners. Hamper singled out Joel, Seger, Cougar, and Springsteen as “goddamn millionaires mewin’ all over the dial about how bad the grind was.” In his book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line, Flint autoworker Ben Hamper revealed that he and one of his linemates were writing a rock opera about life in the shop, because they were tired of hearing “these flimflam rock ‘n’ roll mongers pluggin’ up the airwaves with their detached meanderings of ‘da average man, man.’ When? Where? How? They should have all been forced to write songs about cocaine orgies and tax shelters and beluga caviar. (Indeed, Springsteen later released an album called The Ghost of Tom Joad, which includes his ode to Youngstown.)Įven then, some of Springsteen’s subjects were skeptical. Born in the U.S.A., which was released in 1984, transformed him from overachieving East Coast bar rocker to a sort of musical John Steinbeck, his fanfares for the common man doing for the recession what The Grapes of Wrath had done for the Depression. No one rode that wave higher than Springsteen. Billy Joel sang about livin’ here in Allentown, Bob Seger sang about makin’ Thunderbirds, Johnny Cougar gave us two American kids growin’ up in the heartland. Those factory layoffs inspired a uniquely ’80s musical genre: Heartland Rock, the soundtrack to deindustrialization. In the early ’80s, blue-collar workers started taking it on the chin. The Dads who worked at the refinery, the steel mill, and the textile mill were all Democrats, because they belonged to labor unions. It wasn’t like that when Bruce was growing up in Freehold, New Jersey, in the ’50s and ’60s. The white working-class characters who populate his lyrics voted for Donald Trump, but the white professionals who know all the words to his songs voted for Joe Biden. Springsteen is an upper-class musician (he lives on a 300-acre horse farm and his daughter is an Olympic equestrian) who sings about the lower class for the entertainment of the middle class. I just want to note that the people Springsteen sings about are very different from the people who attend his shows, and that the gap between his subjects and his audience says a lot about the social and political changes in this country since Springsteen began making music 50 years ago. I don’t want to cast doubt on Bruce Springsteen’s social conscience, or his concern for the downtrodden in our society.
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