He felt, he later said, that he could build more credibility by remaining nonpartisan while saving his vision of progressivism for his music. tour, he raised money for and contributed to local charities, mostly food banks. He’d made it possible for the right wing to co-opt his music. But Springsteen used the iconography of the American flag often in the ‘80s, and as he began to realize, iconography isn’t part of the message, it is the message. In 1982, Springsteen released “Nebraska,” a stark, joyless album about hard times during late capitalism, about “debts no honest man can pay” and the “meanness in this world.” Music critic Greil Marcus, in his review, called it “the most complete and probably the most convincing statement of resistance and refusal that Ronald Reagan’s USA has elicited from any artist or politician.”ĭid the premonitions of doom in “ Cover Me” or the fantasy of “a better life than this” in “ Working on the Highway” constitute a cheerful affirmation? Did the dead pal in “Born in the U.S.A.” or the racial violence in “ My Hometown” comprise a message of hope? Of course not. Then again, people on the right heard conservative themes. Though he never declared himself a left-winger, people on the left found liberal themes in his songs. In grade school, when Springsteen asked his mother if the family were Democrat or Republican, she said: “We’re Democrats, ‘cause Democrats are for the working people.” For the most part, it was current events, not his parents, that began to form his politics.įor years, Springsteen had “demonstrated considerable unease whenever asked to speak politically,” Eric Alterman writes in his 2001 book “It Ain’t No Sin to Be Glad You’re Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen.” Although Springsteen had performed at a fundraiser for George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, he admired singers like Bob Dylan, James Brown and Curtis Mayfield, who were socially conscious but not expressly political. His parents didn’t talk about politics they were more concerned with whether they could pay their bills. He describes Freehold as “your typical small, provincial, racist” American town, an insular, ur-American hamlet of Memorial Day parades and VFW marches. In the book, Springsteen, 72, also explains the background of his political awakening. (The two share a podcast with the same name.) Springsteen saw how Black men were overrepresented in the Army and had fewer economic opportunities than white people, and he developed “a feeling that the system was fixed and prejudiced towards a lot of its citizens,” he tells Obama. There was “rioting in Freehold,” Springsteen recalls in “ Renegades: Born in the USA,” a new coffee table book that features a long conversation he and former President Obama had in summer 2020 about political awareness.

The previous year, civil rights protests in Newark, N.J., had spread 40 miles south to Freehold, Springsteen’s hometown. He didn’t want to join the Army, not only because it was far from the rock clubs of the Jersey Shore but also because he didn’t believe in the war. Springsteen was 19 and had dropped out of community college to focus on the two things he loved most: singing and playing the guitar. One day in 1968, Bruce Springsteen received a draft notice from the Army, summoning him to join the Vietnam War.

Bruce springsteen guitar rig