The Audacity of Bruce Springsteen

With his trademark look of severe yet not unwelcomed constipation, his trusty acoustic guitar in hand, working class diva Bruce Springsteen kicked off Barack Obama’s We Are One Inaugural Celebration concert at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18. Indeed, Bruce had much to celebrate. Just a week prior he scored himself a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song for the film The Wrestler, beating out the worthy likes of 16-year-old Miley Cyrus and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover girl Beyonce Knowles. Within the next two weeks, he’d be releasing a new album and headlining halftime festivities at Super Bowl XLIII. Most importantly, on this grand day, he was performing in front of his latest favorite Democrat, helping to usher in a historic new era of something or other (I always forget the required tag line, I just know something is really historic).

While I have no doubt Bruce eagerly slurps up Hope, Change and every other empty, saccharine platitude Obama unloads, I can’t help but notice the marketing angle here. Springsteen debuted Working on a Dream, the first song from the new album of the same name, at a November Obama rally. With its vapid, generic message of hope and something or other, the song seems like the perfect musical score for the feel-good Obama Movement. Given the current international Obama psychosis, aligning himself with The Great Man might actually sell more albums than twelve minutes at the Super Bowl, and help keep him relevant─for the moment, anyway─in a congenitally ADD culture.

Springsteen has had profitable alliances with social causes before. In the early 90s when the luster on his flannels began to fade (remember Human Touch and Lucky Town?), Springsteen didn’t emerge from the $2-And-Under cassette bin until he discovered his heartfelt concern for the gay community in 1994’s Streets of Philadelphia. In the 80s, when the likes of Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay were ridiculing gays before fawning, sold out arenas and very few celebrities dared taint their image by speaking up, Bruce’s energies were focused on love tunnels and dancing in the dark. But when gays went PC, Bruce went with them.

After producing a string of embarrassing albums to close out the 90s, Bruce again found himself dangerously close to utter irrelevance. This time he took a page out of Al Sharpton’s business plan and went after injustices in the black community. Inspired by the case of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who was shot at forty-one times and killed by four NYPD officers, Bruce produced the song American Skin (41 Shots) which decried the evils of racial profiling. The fortuitous timing of the song’s release coincided with a series of shows at Madison Square Garden, the production of the Live in New York City album, and an HBO special.

If one death can sell albums, surely three thousand deaths could move some product. Thus Springsteen weezed out his 9/11 album, The Rising, a predictable, hackneyed collection of mush expressing The Boss’s reaction to the tragedy. In fact, so powerful was this tripe that it prompted equally predictable New York Time’s writer A.O. Scott to dub Springsteen “the poet laureate of 9/11.” I suspect if Springsteen put out an album of belching and vomiting sounds (which he may have attempted with his The Ghost of Tom Joad effort), music critics would hail it as majestic and revolutionary. The Cult of Springsteen and the mythology of his greatness have never waned in the mainstream media. Sounds like a glorified community organizer I know.

TheSmokingGun.com took a bite out of Springsteen’s blue collar, common man’s common man branding when it published a concert rider from his 2002-2003 world tour. With its strict Beluga caviar and linen tablecloth requirements, the 22-page document made Springsteen look more like Diana Ross than Arlo Guthrie on the blue collar-to-diva continuum. The common man’s saxophone player, Clarence Clemons, required a whole roast chicken delivered to his dressing room in the middle of each show. That sax solo in Jungleland must make a man hungry.

Springsteen’s approximately 12 minutes at the Super Bowl will be very expensive ones, presumably too expensive to allow him time to curse the Vietnam War or extol the Glory of The Obama. With NBC charging $3 million for 30 seconds of advertising, Springsteen’s extended commercial is worth over $70 million. That should limit him to pimping just his art, not his politics. Though Springsteen isn’t releasing his set-list before the show, the 2000 extras making up his on-field audience who have been rehearsing their excitement and passionate fist pumps at a Tampa Bay high school may have some idea what’s in store February 1. Hopefully they’ve been pumping Born to Run, not Working on a Dream.