Still Living In “Nebraska”
A stark portrait of a forgotten people, painted in rust on a crumbling canvas, Nebraska — Bruce Springsteen’s seminal acoustic album — told the stories of a left-behind working class, scratching and clawing in a cold, darkening world. As I listened to its quiet, twang and gravel tracks on the subway today, I looked around and realized that, while the album was recorded nearly 30 years ago, it was a lament for modern times as well.
In his second, and deeper, foray into the minds and cries of the struggling heart of America, Springsteen lays bare the struggles of we might call — in arrogance and pride and denial — Middle America. He sings of the pain and desperation of economic hardship, the wayward paths it opens up and the bleak uncertainty it inspires. While our TVs are bigger, our computers more powerful and our billboards glossier, in many ways, it’s three decades later and nothing has changed.
Take, first, the disillusioned song “Atlantic City”, a song of south Jersey sisyphus.
Well I got a job and tried to put my money away
But I got debts that no honest man can pay
Like our mortgage and savings crisis today. But it gets worse. Hope fades:
Now I been lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find
Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line
Well I’m tired of comin’ out on the losin’ end
Winners and losers. A distinct line. Even more so than in 1981, there is a great chasm in our country, the one percent in their Wall Street ivory towers and the rest whose modest homes and fortunes are so often slipping into that ever-widening fiscal and cultural gap. Though terribly misguided — and entirely counter to their interests — the Tea Party is a reaction to this inequity, this seemingly permanent feeling of losing.
It’s a perfect segue to Springsteen’s next song, “Mansion on the Hill”. An actual physical embodiment of the separation between the gilded few and the striving most, the narrator grows up dreaming of a place he can never reach.
There’s place out on the edge of town sir
Risin’ above the factories and the fields
Now ever since I was a child I can remember that mansion on the hill
In the day you can see the children playing
On the road that leads to those gates of hardened steel
Steel gates that completely surround sir the mansion on the hill
As victims of the recession — not to mention predatory loans and foreclosure-happy banks — lose their homes, we look up to that hill, gated and exclusive, its lights glimmering down on darkening horizons.
There is little hope, it seems, in waiting for old jobs and dreams to return; the economy is changing, experiencing “creative destruction”, a dangerous jargon to those caught in the gears of the bulldozing machine. Nowhere is this more true than our manufacturing sector. Says “Johnny 99”:
Well they closed down the auto plant in Mahwah late that month
Ralph went out lookin’ for a job but he couldn’t find none
He came home too drunk from mixin’
Tanqueray and wine
He got a gun shot a night clerk now they call ‘m Johnny 99
Now, in no situation is violence permissible, but the rates of crime is so tied to those of unemployment. If Springsteen saw dying factories in ‘81, he’d behold a vast graveyard now — unless he was witnessing their rebirth on the backs of cheaper labor.
There are more harrowing examples to be found in each track, but the point is already clear: we may now be listening to the record on iPods, but the core issues within the songs have seen little progress. Thirty years later, more factories are shuttering, more jobs are disappearing, more dreams are fading.
I often wonder how we can, as a nation, so comfortably advance through the generations as more and more of our neighbors get left in the dust. Springsteen wasn’t the first to point out these problems, of course, but his words still ring out as gasping cries for help all these years later.
