Reblogged secondbeatsongs
wyatever. go my springsteen
Rollin' out with the boys
Bruce Springsteen dances with a fan at Rosemont Horizon, Rosemont, IL, September 8th, 1981. 📷Anthony Suau. (via)
Today is 5/10, so on vinyl instagram we’re featuring albums we’d rank as a 5/10. Well the only reason I’m going to own an album I think is merely okay is if it’s by an artist I’m completely obsessed with, because their mediocre albums still call out to me to be played. Thus, here’s one of Bruce’s okayest albums. It was the third I heard, newly released when I started listening to him, so I do have a certain emotional attachment to it, but meh, it’s not among his best.
Now, those memories come back to haunt me They haunt me like a curse...
Bruce Springsteen • The River The River Tour, Tempe 1980
Source: youtube.com
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at the Panzer Gym, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, May 4, 1974 (via) 📷 Scott Winter
So I made a joke a few days ago about not expecting a Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen protest song in 2026, but the fact that he did it is really important. This is because, to a large amount of Boomers - specifically in the Midwest and South - The Boss is the de facto morally correct songwriter, his works not focusing on sex and drugs and rock and roll but instead on issues themes can better relate to like poverty (The River, Atlantic City, Born to Run) and the feeling that life has passed you by (Glory Days). Thus, the Boss throwing in with the protests across the country signals, to his boomer fanbase, that the protests are morally right.
He does this mostly by framing the protests as a conflict between freedom-loving protestors and jackbooted thugs over the soul of America and by painting ICE's victims as martyrs who were killed for no reason and whose names must not be forgotten. Then he pairs the idea of fighting for the soul of America and these newfound martyrs with protecting immigrants and continuing resistance (the refrain of the song is "We'll make our stand for this land/And the strangers in our midst").
This song is also the most overtly political and contemporary of his works. While his most famous song, "Born in the USA," is a critique of how the US military exploited the working class by shipping them off to Vietnam and left them broken and abandoned after their return told through the eyes of a victim of this exploitation, its catchy refrain was enough to give Conservatives a chance to claim the song as patriotic, but his new anthem, "Streets of Minneapolis," does not and is, instead, nakedly and starky about what its about.
Also, it fucking slaps (and every protest movement needs an anthem) and it's making a bunch of Conservatives pissed off cuz they assumed he was on their side