Raymond J. de Souza: Bruce Springsteen’s lifetime of cultural protest

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America is angry, and many are angry at their government and their unpopular president. Springsteen is angry, too, and has been for a very long time, about a great many things, but he has not lost his faith. Thus he is not wholly given over to anger. There is hope; there is joy. The anger does not completely obscure the good that remains.

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No one else has a set list more suitable for this moment, known well by those who have followed him for a lifetime. He played “Streets of Minneapolis,” about the police killings this year, and also “American Skin (41 Shots).” He wrote the latter after the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by four New York cops who mistook him for a rapist, and then thought he was reaching for a gun when he tried to get his ID.

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The tough-on-crime ideologues, always ready to excuse lethal police incompetence, blasted Springsteen for the song, with Mayor Rudy Giuliani telling him not to perform it in New York. Springsteen, insisting the song was not anti-police but anti-brutality, sang it 10 consecutive nights to sellouts at Madison Square Garden in 2000.

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Twenty-six years later — a lifetime for the younger fans in attendance — it was chilling and strangely comforting to hear it again, Diallo’s killing having had so many echoes in the intervening quarter century.

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“Land of Hope and Dreams” was written at the same time, a folk gospel song about “this train” headed to where “tomorrow there’ll be sunshine and all this darkness past … where sunlight streams meet me in a land of hope and dreams.…

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“All aboard … this train carries saints and sinners/losers and winners/whores and gamblers/lost souls and broken-hearted/thieves and sweet souls/fools and kings,” Springsteen sings, promising that, “Dreams will not be thwarted, faith will be rewarded.”

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When the Big Man of the E Street Band, saxophonist Clarence Clemons, had a stroke in 2011, Springsteen was at the deathbed of his close collaborator and friend, playing that “hymn” for him as he died.

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Springsteen talks politics on this tour, but his concerts are not much on talking. After a lifetime, he trusts that his fans know about Clarence’s death, about what his anthems really mean, about how a true patriot must denounce corruption in a land that he loves, about how music has a dual vocation to celebrate a culture and to be a vehicle of cultural protest.

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Springsteen ends this tour with “Chimes of Freedom,” the Bob Dylan song that he calls “one of the greatest songs about human freedom ever written.” Like most Dylan songs, it is much better when other people sing it.

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In 1988, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Springsteen sang it on a European tour — including a stop in East Berlin, where he played the largest concert of his career, with some 160,000 tickets, but there were likely many more who crammed in.

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The Communists restricted what could be said, but Springsteen did say a few lines in phonetic German: “I am not for or against a government. I’ve come to play rock and roll for you, in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down.”

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The people knew which “barrier” needed to be torn down; it happened the next year. Then he sang “Chimes of Freedom.” The music said what the tyrants did not want to hear.

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That he would sing in Washington and Philadelphia this week what he sang in East Berlin in 1988 will rankle some, as he rankled Giuliani in 2000. And those who have followed him for a lifetime will thank him for it.

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National Post

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