Literacy and a Popular Medium: The Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen

Literacy and a Popular Medium: The Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen

H. Eric Branscomb

One of the most prevalent types of collections’ to be found in post-1960 American culture is the rock albumz, an aggregate of usually eight to twelve discrete songs. Generally, the songs on a contemporary rock album are included hecause they are likely to be commercially successful in a different context (i.e., being released singly) or because they happen to be, currently, the entire repertoire of the recording artist or because of atmospheric or musical or concrete reasons (K-Tel presents “Silly Songs of the Sixties”!). From a cognitive point of view, albums like these are not centered, i.e., they have no superordinating theme) or concept to which all the songs are related. Yet, occasionally a recording artist appears who, influenced by the literate thought patterns in the culture around him or her, tries to assemble an album of thematically-related, superordinated songs. Since his fifth album, The River (1980), Bruce Springsteen has been such an artist. The lyrics of individual songs in each of his albums since The River cohere into an array of verbal statements and images that are truly centered upon a single concept or idea, thematically related like paragraphs in an essay or chapters in a book, making Springsteen perhaps the single most influential purveyor of literacy in what is often considered the non-literate culture of youth and rock music.

The Album-Composing Process The current technology of sophisticated recorders and mixers available to

record makers allows permanent draft-copies of the musical work to be made (as writing made possible permanent copies of words) and these copies may be manipulated: revised, in other words. No longer does the recording artist enter a studio, record essentially “one-draft’’ live performances, then package and distribute them as albums or individual songs.

Using the technology to its fullest, Springsteen has generally taken two years to produce each of his albums, despite his best efforts to speed up the process. He recorded the songs that would become Nebraska in his own house on a small cassette recorder, hoping to demonstrate the album to the band and

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thus compress the time his band would normally take to learn the songs. Even with this intended shortcut, the album still took two years. (Ironically, as Marsh has described after two years of arduous work, the album that was released was just a cleaned-up version of that original guitar and harmonica solo living-room tape.)

For an album of ten songs, for example, he may compose and try out up to 75 different songs before the final selections are made. The producer of most of Springsteen’s albums, Chuck Plotkin, has noted,

It’s not like producing somebody else’s records, where ...y ou just cut whatever damn songs the artist can mine up with. Most people write eight or nine acceptable songs and that’s your aibum. But with Bruce, there is no song that isn’t dispensable, in and of itself. And what you’re always looking for is, “What are we up to with this? What is he saying? What’s the guy on about this year? W h connects these things?” (Marsh 173; second emphasis added)

For example, “Darlington County,” which appeared on the Born in the U.S.A. album, was originally written and then ultimately rejected for the Darkness on the Edge of Town album six years earlier. During the Born in the U.S.A. sessions, the production crew and the band members had forgotten all about it- Springsteen remembered it and realized that it fit the theme of Born in the U.S.A. and worked it into the album (Marsh 118).

Even “Born in the U.S.A.” itself was originally recorded, with radically different tempos and musical treatments, for Nebraska, but it just didn’t fit the evolving theme of Nebraska, and thus was temporarily discarded, only to resurface immediately as the central song for an entire new album. Given the abundance of material to choose from, for Springsteen the task of putting out an album becomes choosing songs that work together rather than simply getting acceptable recordings of eight or ten available songs, as it is with most recording artists.

For Nebraska, at least, Springsteen wrote the lyrics down before recording them with music. It’s difficult to say if this is common, either with him or among popular music songwriten in general. But in Springsteen’s own words, “I wrote ’em [the Nebraska songs] real fast. Two months, the whole record, and for me that’s real quick. I just sat at my desk ....” (Marsh 100). This gives him the advantage of the written word-literacy, in other words. Substantial revision before recording is possible, both within the individual songs and among the songs, facilitating the task of selecting appropriate songs and shaping them so they fit together. This type of creation is nearly impossible in on-the-fly oral peiformances. Evidence of Springsteen’s composing habits is scarce, but it seems reasonable that if he composed the words to Nebraska on paper before recording, in all likelihood he has composed all of his mature albums this way.

Born in the U.S.A. was also the product of more than two years of work

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recording, selecting, and piecing together. The album began almost simultaneously with Nebraska. Of the original demo rape of Nebraska, Marsh notes, “Also on the demo tape were Nebraska-style songs ‘Downbound Train,’ ‘Born in the USA,’ ‘Working on the Highway’ (104). But within the context of the evolving Nebraska, these three songs sounded alien. Yet, they seemed to form a core of their own-a different vision, in some ways more optimistic (it would have been hard to be less optimistic!) than Nebraska, achieving a brand of hopefulness based on community. It seemed obvious even as the Nebraska sessions proceeded that these three alien songs would anchor the next Springsteen album, though at the time the only awareness of the new album was that it would be an upbeat rock and roll album to counter the bleak, downbeat, folk album Nebraska. The hard-eamed regaining of moral balance in the midst of a crumbling America, the focus of Born in the USA., was far from the mind of Springsteen as he wrapped up work on Nebraska and began contemplating Born in the U.S.A.

When he had completed preliminary work on the Born in the U.S.A. album and had recorded a demo version of it, he was dissatisfied. “We have a lot of material, why don’t we have a record?’ he asked (Marsh 169). The answer was that the songs selected for this early version didn’t fit-most of the ones from the Nebraska sessions had been eliminated, for one reason or another, and the album didn’t hold together. It had lost its center. Only when that center was regained, after months of sifting through the recorded material and trying to make songs fit, did Born in the U.S.A. come together. Even then, after CBS [Springsteen’s recording company] had a supposedly final version ready to reproduce for distribution, Springsteen, at [guitarist Steven] Van Zandt’s urging, added “No Surrender” to the album, first song, side two. The ironic comparison of adolescents’ vows to each other with “Soldiers on a winter’s night with a vow to defend” echoes throughout the album as a reminder of what growing up in the Vietnam War era ultimately would mean to those innocents. Organically, the song was essential.

Jon Landau, privy to Springsteen’s recording habits, summarizes: “...the process now is the creation of this huge mass of material and then the incredible complexity involved in sifting through it and ordering it and fially creating an album” (Marsh 174). Marsh adds, “The way he makes records, those two steps-selection and sequencing-are the essence of the job” (173).

Literate Thought Patterns Selecting and sequencing items into a hierarchical aggregate is characteristic

of literacy. As researchers such as Ong, Farrell, Havelock, and Goody and Watt have shown, the fact of literacy, on a social scale, carries with it strong cognitive implications for members of a culture. ‘Thinking in a highly oral culture is different


from thinking in a literate culture” writes Farrell(31) in summary of Ong. In an oml cdture such as pre-Platonic Greece, narratives are linked in chains of events related to each other only locally, A to B and B toC, but the relationshipbetween A andC is tenuous at best. In a literate culture, however, extended verbal structures are more like spoked wheels, all elements centering upon one hub.

Cognitive Development and Conceptual Unily Lev Vygotsky, one of the most influential researchers in the field of

cognitive psychology, studied how children form mental relationships between disparate objects, pioneering a field that has since come to be known as “concept formation.” Given a long, green, rectangular block and told that it is a “bik,” for example, how does the human mind identify another block that is also a “bik”? Vygotsky discovered a discernible pattern in the stages of growth a child goes through in learning to form concepts, from almost random collections of blocks which he called “heaps” through “collections” and “chains” and “pseudo-concepts” to “true concepts,” similar to what Piaget would later call “formal operations,” true language-based mental manipulations that may be performed entirely in the absence of the objects being referenced.

Using Vygotsky’s results, Arthur Applebee has found the same sequence of growth stages in the stories children narrate, from apparently random and unrelated bits of information through cognitively complex stories in which each narrative element relates to a central theme as well as to each of the other elements. Applebee also discovered that once formed, an entire narrative could be considered a single “chunk” of information and could then itself be related to other narrative chunks in ever-more-sophisticated aggregates of narratives.

Applebee’s principles of related stories may be applied to other aggregates of verbal constructions. For Vygotsky’s blocks, then, we may imagine substituting aggregates of chunked verbal constructions such as paragraphs, poems, short stories, essays, or songs. If there is no logical relationship between the separate elements, then the aggregate corresponds to Vygotsky’s “heap.” If the items in the aggregate relate to each other sequentially but possess no overall central conceptual unity, they are “chains”; if they are related in concrete but shifting ways to a central object, they are “associations,” in Vygotsky’s model. The most cognitively-advanced stage, “true concepts,” occurs if each item is perfeclly and completely subordinated to an abstract, verbally-named superordination.

Perhaps the most accessible example of this is the basic if simplistic model of the essay taught in college freshman composition courses. Though it lacks the flexibility, complexity, and personality of real essays, as an elemen- model it illustrates the essence of literate thought patterns: a main


superordinating idea (often called a “thesis statement”) introduced in the beginning, a series of paragraphs all relating to that main idea, and a conclusion that recapitulates the superordinate idea and brings the essay full circle to closure. Without the medium of print which allows the possibility of reconsideration and revision, this particular centered thought pattern is unavailable to members of an oral-based culture (Ong, Rhetoric).

Central Songsflitle Songs In a strictly linear medium, the notion of centrality is problematic. The

image of a spoked wheel simply is not satisfactory, when applied literally. What is the “center” of a movie such as Cabaret: a single phrase, “divine decadence”? What is the “center” of a novel such as Moby Dick? The opening lines: “Call me Ishmael”? The exposition cum poetry of the whale lore “extracts” which precede the novel proper? The “Cetology” chapter? The chase? The death of Ahab? The salvation of Ishmael by a coffin? What is the center of Macbeth? Or more pertinent to this discussion, what is the center of a collection of poems such as, say, Leaves of Grass or Spoon River Anthology?

More likely the center is a construct formed in the minds of its audience, a “ m e concept,” in Vygotskyan terms. And, if Vygotsky’s research is accurate. this concept can only be formed when mediated by language, by using the concept’s “name,” a word.

Perhaps, when considering linear media, the closest imaginable analogue for the spoked wheel image could be recurrent flashbacks in movies or novels, or a CD player programmed to return to the central song after each song-a sequence such as “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Cover Me,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Darlington County,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” “Working on the Highway,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” etc. Issues of length and heavyhandedness aside, such a sequence could only lead to irritation and boredom.

It seems reasonable to postulate three points of centrality in a linear medium-three places where verbally or conceptually or imagistically central material may be placed to anchor an audience’s response. Most effective, as rhetorical theory from classical times on confirms, are openings and endings. With the central idea placed first, the audience’s reaction to everything that follows is colored by first impressions; with the central idea placed last, audience’s disparate responses may be summarized and converged into a conceptual unity. The third locus would be near the physical [read “temporal”] center: halfway through the work, to gather loose conceptual strands together and anchor the rest of the collection.

An analysis of Springsteen’s albums from The River on reveals some interesting interplays between the title songs, other central songs which I will


call “anchor” songs, and the three points of rhetorical and cognitive significance. In The River, for example, the title song instantiates the theme with the narrative of the too-young bride and groom whose world closes in on them quickly after marriage, a baby, and unemployment. It appears in the physical center of the album, as the final song on side one of the cassette (the final song on side two of the four-sided record). “Nebraska” is the first song on its namesake album, as is “Born in the U.S.A.” “Tunnel of Love” is the physically-central song on its album, the first song on side two.

With the exception of his first two near-juvenilian albums Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle (both 1973), all of Springsteen’s albums are named after one of the songs on the album. His album-naming process is almost as complex as that of selecting which songs will appear on the album. Of Nebraska, Marsh writes that Springsteen “ ... debated about what to call it .... About half the song titles were considered .... But in the end, it was the first song, which was also the first one that [Springsteen] had recorded, that set the mood and told the story. So the album became Nebraska” (141). It’s clear that Springsteen’s criteria for album names are not specifically geared toward commercial packaging. He docs not follow the standard Madison Avenue practice of naming the album after the single song that is most likely to be a successful single release. (In fact, none of the songs from Nebraska were released singly, so tight are the interrclationships among the songs on that album. A song written and first recorded during the Nebraska sessions, “Pink Cadillac,” was not included, even though when re- recorded and later released as a single it became one of his most popular single songs to date.) Instead, the song that “sets the mood” either musically or poetically or both, the song that ‘‘tells the story” of the album, becomes the song that names the album, fixing the album’s identity from the start.

But in addition to the title song, which sets the mood and tells the story, often another song, which I have called the “anchor” song, serves as a conceptual center to the album, either verbalizing directly the theme or providing its single most powerful and striking image. When the anchor song is not the title song, it occupies another of the prominent slots in the album. “The Ties That Bind” opens The River; “My Hometown” concludes Born in the U.S.A. ” Though the narrative of “Nebraska” tells the story, the single most striking visual image is the man and his dead dog in “Reason to Believe,” which concludes Nebraska. Tunnel of Love provides an interesting counterpoint between the title song, which functions also as the anchor song, and the songs occupying the first and last position, the opening tone-setter and the concluding recapitulation. Both “Ain’t Got You,” the opening song, and “Valentine’s Day,” the closing song, are songs of loss, wistfulness about what was but is no longer,


and fear engendered by loneliness. This contrasts with the more optimistic words of “Tunnel of Love,” which suggest that though love is irrational and mysterious, the possibility of learning to live with it does exist.

“Anchor” Songs Beginning with The River, all of Springsteen’s albums contain what may

be termed “conceptual anchor” songs, songs which either expositorily or poetically (i.e., imagistically) contain the central idea of the album. All other songs in the album continuously return to the concepts and images of these songs, as variations on the theme, as instantiations of the theme, as expansions of the theme, or sometimes even as counterpoints to the theme. The anchor of The River is “The Ties That Bind,” with “bind” capturing in one word two meanings: to restrict and to connect. Of the remaining nineteen songs on the album, all except “Cadillac Ranch,” as detailed below, provide some additional insight into the near-paradox of ties that bind, relationships that simultaneously empower and constrict one’s freedom to act, to believe, to self-create.

In Nebraska, the title song sets the tone and provides imagistically the central theme-a hopelessness and desperation brought about by loneliness, isolation, and alienation. “Reason to Believe” in this context provides a wry and cynical conclusion and reaffmation, despite the apparent hopefulness its title promises: in this world, only fools have reason to believe. It thus functions as another anchor for the album’s meaning.

Born in the U.S.A. deals more locally, more concretcly, more specifically with the crumbling of American society-its treatment of returning Vietnam ‘veterans, its incessant need to dwell on past glories, its unemployment and callous treatment of the unemployed, the loss of family roots that give meaning lo one’s existence. The title song, which is placed first on the album, anchors the whole album, and the final song “My Hometown” recapitulates, with different images and a different narrative, the theme of the decay of American culture. Marsh writes, “And yet the best way to understand the development of the central theme of Born in the U.S.A. is ...to focus inward at just “Born in the U.S.A.” and “My Hometown .... The whole story is those two songs” (199).

In Tunnel o f b v e , the anchor to the whole album is the title song with its images of the manic distortions of love, in all its dimensions (“There’s a crazy mirror showing us both in 5-D”), and the image of love as a frightening, dark, and exhilarating funhouse ride dominates the album. In his neatest assemblage to date, Springsteen focuses singlemindedly on love, the possibilities and impossibilities, the difficulties and joys, of meaningful relationships between adults. Perhaps Springsteen’s own personal problems, his well publicized marriage and adultery and divorce, account for the intense focus and


engagement of the lyrics of these songs. Perceptive listeners could detect emotional questions about love in the album and could predict the marital problems before they became public knowledge.

Bruce Springsteen and the Conceptually UniJied Album According to Vygotsky, a “true concept” is a mental construct which

groups, in the mind of the thinker, apparently unrelated items, seeing similarities and abstract relationships. Thus, “bear” and “dog” and “cat” are grouped in the minds of English speakers under the conceptual (more abstract) term “animal.” “Animal” thus becomes the centering or hub of a series of more specific exemplars: bears and dogs and cats and countless other items. Verbal constructions themselves may also be centered conceptually: paragraphs in an essay, chapters in a book, acts in a play, series of novels. Given the close ties between rock music and the electronically-oral, postmodem culture, it’s rare for collections of songs to be centered verbally. The most familiar examples are collections of Christmas carols or assembled “Songs of the Sixties.” Sometimes albums may maintain a mood or atmosphere throughout, such as Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the icon of psychcdelia. But in the first case, the bonds between songs are concrete (all songs somehow connected to Christmas); and in the latter case, the connections are not verbal at all, or cannot be articulated verbally, remaining either atmospheric or musical. Most albums are not centered upon verbalizable themes: they are instead what Vygotsky would call “heaps”: songs put into an album simply because they were there.

Springsteen’s albums, however, verbalize the themes, making them more precisely defined than “songs about Christmas” or “mellow songs €or the young at heart.” This gives his albums the feel of literacy-both in esthetic, structural terms and in the values embodied in his songs. From his earliest albums (Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street ShufJle), through the albums of commercial success and maturing abilities as writer and musician (Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town), Springsteen has always been interested in the power of language (written down and revised before recording, and further revised during recording) to convey his ideas. In fact, in his early albums his enthusiasm over the mere textures of language-similar to the young Shakespeare’s in Love’s Labors Lost-almost causes “words and meaning to part company,” to borrow a phrase from Orwell. (Consider some of the lyrics to 1973’s “Blinded by the Light”: “Madman drummers and Indian bummers with a teenage diplomat.” Here the words are chosen more for their rhythms and near-psychedelic imagery than for their meaning.) But though “beginning with Darkness on the Edge of Town, the frustrations of trying to realize [the American] dream became [Springsteen’sl


central subject” (Marsh 133), the songs on Darkness do not show a ful l articulation of this particular concept of frustration‘. In fact, not until the next album (The River) does Springsteen produce what may be seen as a literate album by grouping a large number of songs around a truly “central subject.”

First, a caveat: Even in The River the unity of theme is not perfect-the song “Cadillac Ranch,” with its lighthearted lyrics about fancy cars and cultural icons such as stock-car racer Junior Johnson (fixed in the American psyche as Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero”) and Burt Reynolds in the movie Smokey and the Bandit, just doesn’t fit. Perhaps because Springsteen’s intentions to produce a fully unified album hadn’t materialized yet, perhaps because the lure of popular and commercial success overrode his vision, (or perhaps simply the idea of producing such a related collection hadn’t occurred to him consciously yet), the cognitive task of conceptually relating some twenty songs (rite River is a double album) was overwhelming. As he explores the theme of decisions, actions, and constraints on one growing into adulthood (a sympathetic and empathetic look at adulthood is almost never a part of any rock song), the thematically-unrelated but catchy, up-tempo song “Cadillac Ranch” appears as an isolated, unwelcome intrusion.

Yet, fu l ly 19 of the 20 songs explore some facet of the central, cuperordinating theme: the constraints one’s own decisions engender. “The River,” the title and central song of the album, images this, while the less poetic, more expository “Ties that Bind” articulates it. In “The River” the narrator gets his high-school age girlfriend pregnant, and “For [his] nineteenth birthday [he] got a union card and a wedding suit,” poignantly relegated through this one action to a life of dreariness and unhappiness. One action, one mistake, imd the world closes up on you. The river, once a fertile spot for young lovers to ride to, now is dry, and “Mary acts like she don’t care.” In “The Ties that Bind,” the n m t o r lectures his lover, who has shut down emotionally owing to a series of disappointing relationships:

You don’t want nothin’, don’t need no one by your side. You’re walkin’ tough, baby, but you’re walkin’ blind Now you can’t break the ties that bind.

Following The River, come, in chronological order, Nebraska (1982). Born in the U.S.A. (1984), and his most recent album to date, Tunnel of Love (1987). The major achievement of these albums from The River on has been the presence of a dominating theme, introduced in the central title song, and viewed, like a multifaceted diamond, from different perspectives. The concept is thus revealed in a fully articulated complexity through the other songs.

In Nebraska Springsteen centers on the discovery of the evil underbelly of


American life and the resulting moral confusion. The mood here is similar to the dark despair of the Jacobean period in England: Shakespeare’s dark period of raging tragic heroes and dark comedies, the passionless or even exuberant murders of Webster and Tourneur, the world-as-dungheap of Marston.

The central song is the title song, “Nebmka,‘’ inspired by the 1973 movie Badlands, about a character Kit Carmthers, a young tough completely devoid of expression, feeling, or articulation. Carmthers practically kidnaps a young girl and takes her on an interstate joy ride, randomly and without passion committing murder after murder along the way. But the movie was fiction, though based on fact. Springsteen wanted the facts. Marsh explains that Springsteen

also saw (on television) Terence [sic] Malik’s 1974 [sic] film Badlands, a barely fictionalized account of the 1958 spree during which Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate killed ten people in eight days across the barren landscape stretching from Lincoln, Nebraska to eastern Wyoming. The movie led him to Ninette Beaver’s book, C a d , the definitive Starkweather account. (97-98)

Marsh notes that Springsteen was greatly affected by the movie and the book, and while they themselves are probably not solely responsible for Springsteen’s dark period, the Carmthers/Srarkweather affair did come to represent for him the random and senseless evil and the loss of faith that he was sensing all around him. The character in “Reason to Believe” wonders why, “at the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe.” This is not an a f fwt ion of humanity’s strength and indomitable will and courage and faith in the face of tremendous adversity, but a cynical look at a species that despite all evidence to the contrary, absurdly insists on believing in something. The tone is set in the opening stanza: a man stands over his dog which has been killed on the highway, believing apparently that if be stands there long enough the dog will come back to life. In the context of Nebraska, this song cannot be romanticized-it is thorough hopelessness. In the world of Nebraska, love is mean, death a great void, justice a travesty, youth a passionless murdering zombie, and family loyalties destroyed by brothers unworthy of loyalty. “Mary Lou loved Johnny with a love mean and true.”

The tone of this album may be compared with the song “Badlands” on the Darkness on the Edge of Town album, an earlier song apparently inspired by the same movie. Here are the seeds both of the sacrifices one has to make, the central theme of The River, and hints of the overwhelming darkness that characterizes the next album, Nebraska. The speaker in “Badlands,” a romanticized re-interpretation of Carmthers in the movie, as if he were simply another restless soul born to run and self-create and not the sociopathic killer he is. tries heroically to escape the “trouble in the heartland” and his own personal


torment that smashes in his guts like a head-on collision, believing in love and faith and hope. But lying just below the surface of his belief in love and faith is the dark image of the badlands, the crossfire he doesn’t understand, the burned backs of the farm laborers, the poor who dream of being kings, the broken hearts. Here, as in The River, the “broken heart stand[s] for the price you’ve got to pay,” as a sacrifice that somehow gives meaning to rhe badlands existence.

In Nebraska, not even the sacrifices can validate this existence. No amount of romanticizing or philosophizing can cover the sordidness Springsteen perceives and conveys in these ten songs.

In Born in the U.S.A, by far Springsteen’s most commercially-successful album, the central theme is the decaying of American society and American values-human dignity, patriotism, the work ethic, the home-symbolized by America’s treatment of the returning Vietnam veterans. Born in the U.S.A. contains twelve songs, each taking a different look at the decay: the irony of the mistreated veteran’s lament “Born in the U.S.A.,” (which was almost hilariously misinterpreted by then-President Reagan as a patriotic anthem); the plea for shelter in ‘‘Cover Me” (“The whole world’s out there, just trying to score...”); “Darlington County,” about two hustling young men from New York who go to the South looking for work and women (“Our pa’s each own one of the World Trade Centers; for a kiss and a smile I’ll give mine all to you”); “Working on the Highway,” about a man with a highway construction job, who, believing “someday I’m gonna lead a better life than this,” runs away to Florida with his apparently underage girlfriend, and is arrested and ironically put on the highway construction prison chain gang.

All the songs are about blunted hopes, loss, broken dreams, wistful recalling of the good old days (in “Glory Days”). Though “Bobbie Jean,” with its lyrics of loss, is often seen as Springsteen’s goodbye anthem to guitarist and best friend Steve van Zandt, who had announced he was leaving the band to perform as a single act, it poignantly recalls a more general loss, the loss of friendship and understanding and comfort and security.

Even apparent puff pieces like “Dancing in the Dark,” the first single released from the album (often a sign that commercial success outweighs the litting in), and “I’m On Fire,” at first glance another of the thousands of simple songs about adolescent fervor for the opposite sex, ultimately fit. Norman Jewison’s powerful film In Country explicitly recognizes the significance of “I’m On Fire” within the context of the Vietnam veterans’ experiences and the search for meaning in the madness that has followed the end of that war. A 17- year-old girl, with giant posters of Springsteen on her bedroom walls, searches for the uuib about her father’s death in the war and ultimately finds her peace and her self in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington,


touching her father’s name in tbe wall. Throughout the movie, “I’m On Fire” plays as a backdrop, and a new awareness of the lines “Hey, little girl, is your daddy home?/ Did he go away and leave you all alone?’ is created.

The finale of Born in the U.S.A., “My Hometown,” is, as noted by Marsh (199), along with “Born in the U.S.A.” itself the key to understanding the album. The narrator remembers the time his father proudly used to drive him, when he was a child, around town, saying “This is your hometown”; now, age 35, married, after race riots, the closing of the town mills and the resultant unemployment, and a decision to leave, he takes one last drive through the boarded-up town, saying to his son, “This is your hometown.” And therein lies the core of the album-a vision of home lost, but unlike Nebraska , accompanied by a slight glimmer of hope. He is, after all, “heading south,” hoping for something.

In Springsteen’s most recent album, Tunnel of Love, the theme is not just love-probabiy 75 percent of all pop and rock songs deal with the same kind of adolescent romantic infatuation which passes for “love”-but the restrictions and constrictions, the responsibilities and hardships, the implications of love and what masquerades as love: love as a tunnel, dark, inviting, restricting, inexorably leading one direction with possibilities for choice abandoned at the entrance. Each of the songs on the album further examine and illuminate, like a discursive essay from a widely read and alert writer, an aspect of the image of love as a tunnel.

“Spare Parts,” simultaneously the most uptempo rock song, the most poetically suggestive, and the most ironic and complex song on the album, is the narrative of a young woman who bears the child of a cad who immediately and permanently deserts her, leaving her a young mother who ‘‘miss[esI the party lights.” She contemplates drowning the baby, and actually wades into the river with precisely that intention, but in a tense verse whose imagery ambiguously recalls baptism as much as attempted murder, “she lifted him in her arms and carried him home.” In a triumphant, ironic moment of survival and endurance, she pawns her unused engagement ring and wedding gown and “walk[s] out with some good cold cash.” Throughout the song rings the refrain, “Spare parts and broken hearts keep the world turning around.”

On first glance, the metaphor “spare parts” seems incongruous, misplaced almost mixed. But like the seemingly unrelated images of hired gunslinger and dancing in the dark which butt up against each other in Born in the U.S.A.’s “Dancing in the Dark,” it works at a lower, more primal level, the level of intuition and metaphor, a direct connection to that portion of the human psyche that the three juxtaposed quatrains of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, will address. Like a broken down automobile, a broken life may be rejuvenated by a trip to the junkyard for some used but serviceable spare parts. Not a pretty or romantic image,


but a tough and honest one. The refrain comes closest to symbolizing the vision of the mature Springsteen, first suggested in 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, examined in detail in The River, abandoned in the dark, desperate period of h’ebruska, questioned on a social scale in Born in the U.S.A., and reaffirmed strongly in Tunnel of Love: Life is tough, but the human spirit will improvise, survive, and eventually triumph. Despite heartbreak all around, people will piece together an existence out of spare parts.

Conclusion Bruce Springsteen has appropriated one of the dominant media of our

times-rock music-for the embodiment of his basically literate message to a residually-oral culture, the MTV and Terminator 2 world of 12-25 America. It is of course unfair to say he’s “appropriated” the medium, for he probably views himself primarily as a rock musician, who over the past decade has become increasingly more concerned with verbally articulating his vision. Yet the fact that he truly does have a vision, and uses language in addition to music to convey it, separates him from nearly any other contemporary rock musician. And it’s important to note that when one of his songs fails, a rare occurrence, but worth noting, it’s invariably because the words or “message” dominate and the music lacks the inspiration or commitment needed to carry it off. In each of his mature albums of the 1980’s with the exception of Born in the U.S.A., there is at least one song that doesn’t work: “A Cautious Man” on Tunnel of Love, for example, a didactic, uninspired work, with preachy lyrics, dull music, and a singularly uninteresting vocal treatment.

When the commitment is present, however, the music and lyrics fuse into a perfect match. “Dancing in the Dark” would be a superior rock song, even if it had insipid “Woolly Bully” lyrics. In the world of rock classics, who cares about the lyrics to “Light my Fire,” for example, or who even knows the lyrics to “Louie, Louie”?

Notes

’Here I use the term “collection” not in its precisely-limited Vygotskyan usage which occurs later in this essay, as a specific type of grouping of objects characteristic of a particular early stage of cognitive development, but in its more general meaning of any gathering of objects.

’I use the term “album” in its popular usage as a generic label for collections of songs in any format: record album, cassette, eight-track cassette, or CD. Springsteen is unusual in his insistence on maintaining the same sequence of songs, regardless of the format. For most other recording artists, frequently to balance out the quantity of music


on the two sides of a cassette and cut down on the dead time that results on one side or the other, the songs are packaged in a different sequence on the cassette version of the “album,” a clear indication of the interchangeability of the songs in the eyes of the recording artist and the production and management teams. It’s also interesting to note the almost hypertext feel of CD’s, with their user-programmable playing sequences, taking control of sequence away from the recording artist and giving it to the listener.

In this usage, then, an “album” is analogous to a poet’s collection of poems, a Greek trilogy, or a movie such as New York Stories: a group of discrete works gathered together under some rubric, with relationships that may range from none but the accidental or random (cf. Vygotsky’s “heaps”) to the conceptually unified (Vygotsky’s “true concept”). When guitarist and frequent Springsteen co-producer Steve Van Zandt first heard the demo tape of Nebraska. his immediate response was, “I love this. This is an album” (Marsh 113). In other words, the songs fit together, they cohered as a whole.

T h e word “theme” here should be taken in its verbal rather than its musical sense. ‘Douglas (487) cites an interview with Springsteen in the December 6, 1984,

Rolling Stone, which suggests that Springsteen himself sees Darkness on the Edge of Town as the first of his thematically-unified albums. Though the title song certainly suggests the possibility of abstracting a meaning from the entire album, and though I find evidence of an attempt at conceptual unity, I don’t find a perfect realization of a superordinate theme to the album. The River is, from my perspective, the first of his albums to achieve the goal of conceptual unity.

Works Cited Applebee, Arthur. The Child’s Concept of Story: Ages Two to Seventeen. Chicago: U of

Douglas, Ann. “BNCX Springsteen and Narrative Rock: The Art of Extended Urgency.”

Fmell, Thomas J. “Developing Literacy: Walter J. Ong and Basic Writing.” Journal of

Goody, Jack, and Ian Watt. ‘The Consequences of Literacy.” Literacy in Traditional

Havelock, Eric. Preface to Pluto. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P, 1963. Marsh, Dave. Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980’s. New York Pantheon, 1987. Ong, Walter J. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology. Ithaca: Come11 UP, 1971. -. Interfmes ofthe Word. Ithaca: ComeU UP, 1977. -. Oraliry and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich. Thought and Language. Trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and

Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge, MA. MIT, 1962. Vygotsky, L. S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes.

Trans. and Edd. Michael Cole, Vera John-Steiner, Sylvia Scribner, and Ellen Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1978.

Chicago P, 1978.

Dissent 32 (Fall 1985).

Basic Writing 2.1 (FaWinter 198 1).

Societies. Ed. Jack Goody. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP.

Eric Branscomb is Coordinator of Basic Writing, Salem State College, Salem, MA 01970.

Documents

Literacy and a Popular Medium: The Lyrics of Bruce Springsteen