Lawren/Flickr. Some rights reserved.‘Some things hurt more, much more than cars and girls’, Prefab Sprout sang in 1988 with a dig at ‘Brucie’, as they called Springsteen in the song ‘Cars and Girls’. It was, and to some extent still is, a common view of Bruce Springsteen: he sings about cars and girls and not much else. In the 1980s, that image was boosted by Ronald Reagan’s reference to Springsteen’s music in the 1984 presidential campaign. This was the time of ‘Born in the U.S.A.’, which many – myself included – took as a flag-waving celebration of the US. Anyone who felt just a bit smarter than the average Joe had to be dismissive of that kind of intellectually shallow rock ’n’ roll.
Prefab Sprout object that “life’s no cruise with a cool chick”, but anyone who has cared to listen just a bit closer to Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics will know there’s a lot more to them than that. Indeed, ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ is an angry indictment of American jingoism and what happened to the vets returning from Vietnam. Prefab Sprout may describe Springsteen’s texts as ‘pretty streamers’, but Springsteen’s America is not great, even if he describes his characters and their milieux lovingly.
If there is anything that might be said to characterise Springsteen’s lyrics it is ambiguity. Prefab Sprout refer to Springsteen as a ‘dreamer’ who thinks that ‘heaven wait[s] all heavenly over the next horizon’. But Springsteen’s songs are about the gap between the dreams and the lives of ordinary folks, and the way in which the characters’ identities are dislocated by this gap.
