Dissent and rock n roll on the far side of fifty
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 4 November
Two remarkable works of contemporary American art have lightened my load in recent weeks. Both are the products of dissident white men in their fifties, deeply versed in their song-writing craft, steeped in American musical traditions and at the same time driven by opposition to current American policies, foreign and domestic.
The new CDs from Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle also share a striking lyric coincidence. In “Radio Nowhere”, the dark rockin’ single from the Springsteen album, the singer cries out in shivering despair: “This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?” While in “Satellite Radio”, Earle wonders, “Is there anybody out there… on the satellite radio… is there anybody listening tonight?”
In fact, there are quite a few of us listening, attentively, to both men. In Springsteen’s case, listeners number in the tens of millions. Yet their sense of isolation, of marginalisation, is nonetheless real, and it’s something the two singers share with their audiences. It’s an old paradox of popular music: it enables people to pool their loneliness. Here the paradox acquires a political twist. In Bush’s America, where big lies are telecast 24/7, where war and repression are promoted in the name of peace and freedom, the sane and the compassionate call out to each other like ships in the darkness.
The new Springsteen album is riddled with references, direct and oblique, to the criminal disaster of the Iraq war. The mood here is angry, even pessimistic, with the “darkness on the edge of town” descending directly on Main Street USA. Many of the songs lament the loss of a more innocent and decent America, a theme summed up in “Long Walk Home” in which he recalls a distant era when:
That flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t
It’s gonna be a long walk home…
As ever with Springsteen, there are consolations – in the beat of a lover’s heart, in the rhythm of the music itself – but now these are presented as feint and fragile, overwhelmed by the blare of a public arena in which, the singer advises us, “Trust none of what you hear and less of what you see”.
Despite being singed by what he calls the “bitter fires of the devil’s arcade” (the war against terror), Springsteen retains the generous spirit and sense of responsibility to his audience that have long distinguished him among celebrity rock stars. Most admirably, he retains the capacity to grow, responding to the changes and crises in the larger world in heartfelt song.
While Springsteen feels himdelf in exile in his own land, his less celebrated contemporary, country rocker Steve Earle, has found refuge in New York City. His new CD, entitled “Washington Square Serenade”, kicks off with a song bidding farewell to Nashville, the “guitar town” celebrated in Earle’s first success, back in the mid 1980s. It’s been a halting, tortured, sometimes terrifying journey for Earle since those days, through drug addiction and prison and out the other side. In his forties, he released a string of powerful albums which won him a new audience, inside and outside North America. It’s a career trajectory in marked contrast to Springsteen’s, and it may help explain why Earle is able to view the contemporary US landscape with a mordant humour and detachment alien to Springsteen.
Earle celebrates his new-found New York home:
Livin’ in a city of immigrants
I don’t need to go travellin’
Open my door and the world walks in…
But he refuses to sentimentalise New York: he notes the impact of gentrification and class polarisation, the sharp contrast between the “penthouse view from the top of the food chain” and the struggle for survival “down here below”.
Earle’s politics have always been more explicitly left wing and more acerbic than Springsteen’s. It’s safe to say that he takes a sceptical view of the lost “America” that exercises such a powerful pull on Springsteen’s imagination. He’s also more musically adventurous, with excursions into reggae, techno, punk and grunge. Yet he shares with Springsteen an acute awareness that he is carrying on an American tradition, reaching back through early Dylan to Woody Gurthrie and the anonymous authors of “John Henry”. One of the stand-out tracks on the new CD is called “Steve’s Hammer (For Pete)”, a tribute to folk singer-activist Pete Seeger, recently celebrated by Springsteen in his extraordinary Seeger Sessions album. In this song, Earle vows that heavy as it may be he will not lay down the hammer of social justice (a reference to Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer”) until “there ain’t no hunger and there ain’t no pain…. the war is over and the union’s strong … the air don’t choke you and the ocean’s clean and kids don’t die for gasoline.”
Taken together, these two new albums provide abundant proof that for the singer-songwriter-rock n roller, there can be life on the far side of fifty, and it need have nothing to do with either nostalgia or trend-chasing. More importantly, they bear testimony to the persistence of dissent in the US and its continuing artistic fertility.
