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During Sunday night’s Super Bowl, sleazy, paper-voiced Bruce Springsteen took part in what Boss-ologists said was his first TV commercial: a two-minute Jeep spot, called “The Middle,” in which the singer Inspired by the long-awaited end of the Trump era, he is poetic about the philosophical importance of the medium as it revolves around a small Kansas town that sits at the geographic center of the continental United States.
“It’s no secret,” he said over the plaintive whine of a steel guitar. “The middle has been a difficult place to reach lately – between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear. Then, as we see him running his hands through the frozen earth of the heart, he tells us, “We just have to remember that the soil we are on is common ground.
Springsteen’s high-flying height wasn’t the only move toward unity during a closely watched sports extravaganza that took place a month and a day after pro-Trump extremists took over the Capitol.
Before the match, in an unlikely couple arranged by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company, the national anthem was performed by country star Eric Church and R&B singer Jazmine Sullivan – a duo that Church (including one of the biggest hits is called “Springsteen”) recently told me he had accepted as a direct response to the Capitol riot.
“I’ve avoided it forever,” he said of the notoriously hard-to-sing anthem. Yet looking at the events of January 6 made him reconsider, “With what’s going on in America, this seems like an important moment for a patriotic moment. An important moment for unity. The fact that I’m a Caucasian country singer and an African American R&B singer – I think the country needs it.
Yet the reaction to both the Springsteen commercial and Church and Sullivan’s “Star-Spangled Banner” – in a show, it must be remembered, presented by a league that essentially blacklisted Colin Kaepernick because that he knelt during the hymn – raises complicated questions about exactly what this vaunted unit looks like and precisely who it calls for the job.
As with any wealthy celebrity urging Americans to tackle the issues that the celebrity is largely protected from, the boss’s plea sparked the expected peek on social media. Some conservative pundits have pointed out that Springsteen, an enthusiastic Democratic activist who backed Joe Biden in the murderous 2020 election, called for a truce only after his boyfriend defeated Trump; many progressives have been disappointed that he is shilling for a polluting auto company.
More interesting were the tweets I saw in response to Church and Sullivan’s performance, many of which came down to: Why did a black woman as talented as Sullivan have to share her big time with a white man?
“Now they know damn well that they should have let Jazmine Sullivan sing the national anthem by herself,” wrote Shea Couleé, a former candidate for “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
The practical answer is that Sullivan, a magnificent singer and storyteller, just doesn’t have the widespread recognition that the NFL has historically sought in a solo artist. (So, by the way, does Church.) In recent years, the hymn has been sung by people like Lady Gaga, Pink, and Gladys Knight; together, as Roc Nation clearly understood, Sullivan and Church represented an intriguing draw to compete with these familiar names.
But the exasperation just over asking Sullivan, like so many black women before her, to accommodate someone else got me thinking about the reaction to a country music controversy that was almost certainly in. Church’s spirit as he implemented his vision of racial reconciliation on Sunday. : Morgan Wallen’s use of the N word as filmed last week and published by TMZ.
As an industry, Nashville has been exceptionally quick in condemning Wallen’s behavior, which took place down his driveway as he walked home “after a loud night out with friends,” as TMZ put it. His label announced that he had “suspended” the singer’s contract (whatever that meant), while the radio conglomerates said they were removing Wallen’s music and the commercial groups said they would kick him out. any consideration for rewards.
Still, many fans quickly rallied alongside Wallen on social media – and not just there. On Sunday, Billboard reported that sales and streams of the singer’s album “Dangerous” increased 14% over the previous seven days, enough to keep the LP atop the Billboard 200 chart for a fourth straight week.
Attitudes varied among those who expressed support for Wallen. Some have said he made a mistake out of his character and deserved a second chance, as Rakiyah Marshall, a Nashville executive romantically involved with label CEO Wallen, argued in a widely discussed post on Instagram.
“I’m not giving up on her,” wrote Marshall, who is Black, alongside a photo of herself with her arm around Wallen’s neck. “Hope the world can see the person I know in this photo.”
Others, however, identified the singer as the latest victim of the so-called cancellation culture and wondered (or pretended to wonder) why he was not allowed to use the N word when countless rappers are.
I don’t equate Wallen fans going up or down willing to follow him anywhere with Sullivan fans who view Church’s well-meaning Super Bowl involvement as another product of white privilege. But as embodiments of racist and anti-racist thought, respectively, the two flank a supposed moral center that feels increasingly inadequate for those outside the liberal ’60s bubble that Springsteen occupies (and the President Biden).
Could anyone watch this Jeep commercial and be genuinely moved – not by its radical aesthetics but by its childish political proposition?
The most distressed of Wallen fans don’t want to live in the middle of Springsteen because it’s a place where old hierarchies are called into question and you can’t say whatever you want without consequence. And few Sullivan fans are rushing to make it happen because it is to be expected that it will forgive too much in the name of Unity.
Of course, Springsteen’s American Utopia is something to aspire to – something you might even fool yourself a little bit as you listen to Sullivan use his miraculous voice to celebrate a country that for centuries has made the world famous. life more difficult than it should be. Black people.
But at a time when Trump’s sidekicks in government are saying it’s already time to end the insurgency, it’s disappointing that the great rock champion of the dispossessed can’t see that progress requires more work on the part. from some than from others.
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