American dream ruined, says Springsteen
Paris – Bruce Springsteen is a man used to being misunderstood. Witness Born In The USA, his 1980s anthem about a disenchanted Vietnam vet coming home to no work and no prospects, which was widely interpreted as a chest-beating ode to patriotism.
But yesterday the man they call ‘‘The Boss’’ ensured that there was no mistaking the core argument of Wrecking Ball, his latest album – that the financial crisis and rising social inequality have ruined the American dream.
‘‘We’ve destroyed the idea of an equal playing field,’’ he announced. ‘‘And there’s a critical mass where society collapses. You can’t have a society as fractionalised as that.’’
Springsteen, 62, speaking in Paris as journalists were granted a ‘‘first listen’’ of his new album, went on to compare the 2008 banking crisis to theft, and endorsed the Occupy protest movement that sprang up in New York, London and elsewhere in response.
‘‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. It’s given me a very active spiritual life – and made it very difficult sexually.’’ Bruce Springsteen
He explained how the album began when he wrote We Take Care of Our Own, a critique on US domestic policy that opens the album.
‘‘The first half of the album is angry,’’ Springsteen said. ‘‘After 2008 we had a huge financial crisis and there was really no accountability. People just lost their homes. Nobody went to jail, nobody was responsible, and prior to Occupy Wall Street there was no pushback, no voice saying this is outrageous. A basic theft has occurred that ignores what the American idea is about,’’ he said, ‘‘a disregard of history, of community, just ‘What can I get today?’. It’s a fault line, a crack that has left the American system wide open.’’
Wrecking Ball welds folk melodies with a big rock sound. It also echoes the early protest writing of Bob Dylan, whom Springsteen cited as a primary influence.
One song, Easy Money, describes an average man’s response to the crisis. ‘‘It’s about a guy going out on a robbing spree. He’s imitating the guys in Wall Street in the only way he knows how.’’
Speaking at the Theatre Marigny, not far from the designer stores and luxury hotels around the Champs-elysees, Springsteen credited the Occupy Wall Street movement with changing the political conversation in America: ‘‘Now you’ve got Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a vulture capitalist. That would not have happened before.’’
But he claimed his biggest inspiration came not from the political landscape but his Catholic up- bringing in working-class New Jersey. ‘‘Once a Catholic, always a Catholic,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s given me a very active spiritual life – and made it very difficult sexually.’’
Did Springsteen feel the burden that Dylan once did, of being the moral voice of a generation? ‘‘Oh, I’m terribly burdened in my big house,’’ he answered, sarcastically. ‘‘It’s a rough life, the rock life . . . No, it’s a joy. I’ve got an audience that come to dance and enjoy themselves. It’s pretty much a charmed life.’’
Springsteen rejected suggestions that he was a political figure of significance, saying artists worked best when they were far from the seat of power. On his calling in life, he concluded: ‘‘My job is to do for you what Bob Dylan did for me, to kick open the door to your mind . . . To reach for something higher than yourself and grovel around for something lower too. That’s the job description: to be paid for something that can’t be bought.