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Last week when Nebraska Lincoln Journal Star reported that Bruce Springsteen was spotted in town with a film crew, my heart leaped to the best screenplay: Maybe he was working on a documentary for a 1982 re-release Nebraska, which is due for the processing of the archive excavation cabinet. This beloved solo album had Springsteen mixing images from his 1950s childhood with stark portrayals of the economic divide in Ronald Reagan’s America, leaving with a haunting series of vignettes that seem increasingly relevant today. . Nebraska arrived during a fertile time in Springsteen’s career, as he re-enacted his eventual commercial breakthrough, 1984 Born in the United States The previews are legendary – including a supposedly electric version with his staunch E Street Band – and there are also mountains of unreleased songs from this era, like the one titled “The Klansman,” which clarifies his confrontational and notoriously misunderstood position on American patriotism. . So I optimistically imagined him visiting the album’s namesake state to shed some light on it all, offering new insight into an artistic peak.
Instead, he was filming a Jeep commercial, called “The Middle,” for the Super Bowl. This is the 71-year-old’s very first commercial appearance, his very first product approval and, apparently, a project he’s been a significant part of, creatively. In the brooding two-minute pub, Springsteen visits a humble church in the geographic center of the country. Alone, he meditates on what makes us Americans by riding in a Jeep and delivering a message of hope to a country that in his vision has strayed from its original promise. “We can get to the top of the mountain, through the desert,” he said in a gritty voiceover, searching for gravitas. “And we will cross that divide.” At the end, a message on the screen is addressed to “United States of America”.
Now, if you’ve never been receptive to Springsteen’s patented mark of rock’n’roll transcendence, or if you’re skeptical of the working-class fixations that helped make him one of the world’s most successful musicians. famous people around the world, then this ad will not be. convince you otherwise. In fact, maybe that’s how you got always I saw him: Here he preaches a vague message of oneness while standing away from any real human being. He’s talking about a promised land that may never have existed. It looks incredibly well-maintained even though it wants you to think it’s aged and worn out from years of manual labor. He’s selling you a car.
And even for someone like me, who sees their work as a complex and empathetic portrayal of American life, the message is blurry – and worse yet, not quite their own. For one thing, Springsteen himself never really looked for common ground, and the political perspective in his lyrics never wavered. Bitter class struggles described in the 1978s Darkness on the Edge of Town through the bubbling indictment of the 2007 Iraq war Magic, he’s shown us, time and time again, exactly where he is.
Not to mention that he fought for decades against being co-opted by companies and politicians trying to align with his hard-earned integrity. When powerful people once tried to gloat over the red-white-blue sticker of a “Born in the USA” chorus while glossing over its damning verses, Springsteen was adamant that it didn’t. In the mid-1980s, he reportedly turned down a $ 15 million offer from Chrysler to authorize the coup, and he fended off President Reagan, who shouted it out during a campaign stoppage in New Jersey. “The president was mentioning my name the other day, and I wondered what his favorite album must be,” Springsteen told a concert audience at the time. “I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. ”Although he tried to laugh at such advances at the time, Springsteen was shocked: for the first time in his career, his work fell out of his control.
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