Springsteen's Nebraska

Hard Times in the Heartland
Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska
L.A. Weekly, October 15, 1982

B	ruce Springsteen's Nebraska, in which the great rock & roll emancipator takes a long hard look into the "great void," tells ten stories of the fate of hope in the face of hopelessness, and

of the need for meaning in a world of violent caprice and endemic injustice. Recorded at home on a four-track cassette machine, it is arguably Springsteen's best work, certainly his most artless, a solo outing across terrain deadly and cruel. The Boss has met darkness before, but generally he's come out swinging: "Badlands" and "Promised Land" and "Ties That Bind" and even "Born to Run" (and a dozen others) are battle cries in a war on nothingness. But on Nebraska the Boss disappears into characters whose victories, if and when they come, are small -- quiet acts of love and faith that enable each to live and to continue to live with himself, acts unremarkable yet, in the context of such palpable despair, heroic. "Man turns his back on his family, well, he just ain't no good," figures officer Joe Roberts (in "Highway Patrolman"), and in that moral equation and his living to it, he scores a point against the darkness.
An auto worker is laid off, can't find work, gets in debt, gets drunk, shoots a clerk during a robbery, gets prison for life, asks for death. A guy knocks off work, travels the New Jersey turnpike through the night to see a girl. Another rides the same turnpike in a (stolen?) car, praying the state troopers leave him alone, for their sake ("Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife") as well as his. A son dreams a powerful dream of finding again his father's love and, waking, resolves to find him but cannot. A working-class family buys a "brand new used car"; the son yearns for the money that might lift them for a humiliating hand-me-down life on "dirty streets," while his kid sister, oblivious, happily licks an ice cream and honks the car horn. A highway patrolman chases his murderer brother to the Canadian border, pulls "over to the side of the highway and [watches] his taillights disappear."
Springsteen sings these stories against acoustic guitar, punctuating verses with mournful harmonica or dark vocal wails. The language throughout is unaffected, uncluttered, pared of metaphor -- a world away from the dense clusters of baroque verbiage that mark (and often mar) much of Springsteen's work through Born to Run (precisely the stuff that got him pegged "the new Dylan"). There's none of the cocky street poet here; we hear instead the voice of a gas jockey, a highway patrolman, the flat, dull tones of a witless murderer. Each tells his story, creating through small detail a whole world beyond the events related. The Tanqueray and wine that sets of Johnny 99, the Club Tip Top where an off-duty cop nabs him from behind, the farm deferment that keeps Joe Roberts out of the army, Caril Fugate's baton, the Bob's Big Boy where the kid from the gas station meets his Wanda, and the Texaco map they use to wipe fingers greasy from fried chicken together constitute a sort of poetry of the incidental. And the musical referents out of which Nebraska is fashioned -- bits of folk song, hymns, Hank Williams and Chuck Berry -- are beautifully apt, as natural to these characters as the words they choose to tell their tales, and serving as subtext to the piece each has to speak.

S	ome critics are choosing to view Nebraska as Springsteen's response to the Age of Reagan (and Springsteen as a Woody Guthrie of the new depression), but that is too limited a reading

Hard times are an old affliction, and even though the men and women who inhabit Nebraska's badlands are all thus afflicted, they differ markedly in their symptoms. Some go under, but others do not. Of the album's three murderers, only Johnny 99 kills out of socioeconomic despair; the title song's Charles Starkweather-based narrator kills for "fun" and Frank Roberts (in "Highway Patrolman") just "ain't no good." The tenor of the times may well have driven Springsteen to make this album, but as a political tract, Nebraska is awfully ambiguous.
If there's a message here, it is not, it seems to me, that we ought to get Reagan out of the White House and 11 million people into jobs (not that it's a bad idea), but that the harder the world comes down, the greater is the need for faith. That while moral codes and belief systems might appear absurd luxuries to a man with an empty belly, they are all that holds off a greater emptiness. ("Listen to my last prayer," Springsteen sings on "State Trooper" and again on "Open All Night," "deliver me from nowhere" -- and that's got nothing to do with class or politics or economics). And that, finally, the only meaning we have is the meaning we make, and that without meaning we are in the dark, lost, the dead waiting to die.
"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact." The measure of these players is the degree to which they can continue to dream and to hold faith in the cold light of certain loss. "But maybe everything that dies someday comes back." A man stands prodding a dead dog with a stick, "like if he stood there long enough that dog'd get up and run"; a woman is deserted, a groom left at the altar; somebody gets baptized, somebody gets buried. And "Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe" -- those words end the album. Decide for yourself whether that's foolish, or brave, or if at times you might not have to be one to be the other.¶

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