Commentary
on Springsteen’s "Nebraska"
By Kevin
Meisel
The first time I
heard Springsteen’s "Nebraska" record,
I was living in a one room tenement in a neglected
part of Detroit City, former murder capital of the
USA. I was studying fine arts, and intending on being
a painter. I was poor and lonesome as a crippled
timber wolf. I was, like the characters on that
record, emaciated and self preoccupied. I was a
painter. With the opening harmonica moan; a moan that
still gives me shivers years later, my romance with
painting abated until, like a love that has outworn
itself with a slow waning of Eros, the brush and I
drifted apart. My paramour became the guitar, and I
fell in love again, this time with song. I died and
was reborn. This is, I am aware, a melodrama. It is
nonetheless true though, despite its being
imperfectly so. Personally, the slow transition from
painting to music underscored a kind of death and
rebirth for me which echoed a theme so entwined in
the spirit of the record I was listening to at the
time. Nebraska, the record Springsteen released after
the triumph of "The River," with its top
ten hit, "Hungry Heart", is a long
exhalation of sociopolitical, and deeply suppressed
psychological malaise, angst and desire. Yet, at its
end, one is left with a reciprocal inhalation that
signals a new life of sorts; a hesitating sense of
hope. Nebraska’s characters carry the burden of
their own demise and reactive rebellion like an
albatross of guilt and shame around their necks. Yet,
somehow, they persist. I think therein lays the
humanity of a series of songs that narrate the
tragedy of such de-humanization.
Despite the
favorable reviews at the time of its release, this
record was hard to take by many Springsteen devotees.
In fact, the difficulty of this record remains a
pause for distraction with even his more adult fan
base. Recently, seeing Bruce and the E Streeters in
their glory days concert, I was taken at the sight of
droves of fans leaving their seats for pretzels and
beers when the timbre of the concert quieted from the
anthemic troubadour tunes to give way to the intimacy
of "Mansion On The Hill." Around me, there
was a bustling to defend away from this moment; to
ward off the inevitable crash of the cellabratory
into sobriety and hard reflection. Springsteen has
always, unlike say, Lou Reed, been compassionate
about his audience. He’d clearly prepared us for
Nebraska with the dark undertones of "The
River," and "Darkness On The Edge Of
Town." If we were hit too hard with Nebraska,
it’s because we weren’t really listening,
or more likely we were listening selectively.
And, artist that he is, Springsteen has chosen not
to listen to himself selectively. Rather, he is an
artist who affirms his complexity and gives allowance
for that complexity in his work. To have allowed the
horrible beauty of that record to emerge at that
particular time in his career must have been
profoundly liberating. The silence of Nebraska
sounded like thunder because at its core, there is an
interminable, unavoidable inevitability of death and
rebirth that eclipses any other metaphors worth
writing about. The power of this metaphor works into
us so deeply because death and rebirth are not
metaphors, but unfathomable truths at the core of who
we are. The artistry of that brutally beautiful
recording lies in its synthesis of death and rebirth,
which is life itself. The life of
characterization continually leaps forth in a
suppressed, yet rivetting intensity to reveal, time
and time again, the necessity of acceptance and
aquiessance to the tenets of living this life that we
live.
How Springsteen
achieved such an alchemy of truth on this record is
something almost unexplainable to me, but has been
well worth my pondering. It begins with the almost
impossible recognition that the record is a bunch of
demo tapes. It’s as if the thing was destined to
come out in a greasy brown paper packaging. This is
almost archetypal in and of itself. The grandest of
truths so often come disguised in the garb of humble
imperfection, like messiahs being born to poor folks,
in a manger. Try as he may, he couldn’t
replicate in the big studio what he’d done in
his room with himself, his guitar, a four-track
Tascam and his loyalty to truth. Maybe this
particular set of truths refused the glibness of
presentation. Then again, maybe in the world of
mortals the truth is most impactful when revealed
imperfectly. Perhaps, in this way it is more
apprehensible to us in our own imperfection. Indeed,
the truths that make up Nebraska both inform and defy
presentation because by their very nature they are
both creative and disturbing to the status quo of
form and protocol. The only protocol for that record
was aloneness, and it was required of Springsteen. As
an artist, I don’t think he’s been the same
since releasing it. Nebraska was his baptism into
maturity, after which even "Born To Run"
can only be heard with the bittersweet nostalgia of
youth. Nebraska eclipsed all possibility of fantasy.
It stripped away pretense and assumptions. It is,
unlike Ginsberg’s "Howl," which is
audible in the end, a howl that is retrograde. More
like Edvard Munch’s famous painting entitled
"The Scream," only without the expressive
excess. In fact, what makes this record so compelling
is Springsteen seems to achieve his expressiveness by
inverting emotionality into a kind of flatness and
suppression. This invertedness is
largely heard in the record’s main vocals. Yet,
Springsteen seems to allow the complexities of the
character’s reactions to themselves a
place of emergence in the background of the songs or
in the instrumentation. Perhaps, like the Munch
painting, the characters inhabiting Nebraska
experience their suppressed feelings in us and our
reactions. Yet, the truths of these songs are allowed
to emerge with a realism and complexity not so
evident in Munch’s singular expressionism, and
in so much of the punk and post-punk popular around
the time Nebraska came out. I have pondered this too.
Springsteen refuses singularity. He always goes for
complexity, and disguises it with simplicity. His
songs on this record are essays on a kind of
inhibition and suppression, but he infuses this
predilection with an underbelly of reaction and
expressiveness. Listen for example, to the way in
which he solos his harmonica on "Mansion On The
Hill." Springsteen sings the song with an
inhibition of longing, which, in and of itself
reveals the character’s idiosyncrasy, and the
impoverished harmonica, almost overtly simplistic,
works to express the longing inexpressible to the
singer. The same dynamic is evident on "Used
Cars," where the singer’s anger is inverted
into depressed resignation. The harmonica grieves
in a wash of reverb, nearly inaccessible to the
singer. Listen to "Johnny 99" and the way
in which the narrator eventually surrenders from
third person to first person perspective. Listen to
the inhibited, out of breath surge of adrenaline
expressed in the singer’s worry as he pleads for
death rather than life. Then, listen to the vocal
shudders at the end of the song, the very shudders of
a life, in fact, pleading for itself. Listen to
"Atlantic City," a story of sad compromise.
Listen to the reporting of the narrative and
it’s philosophizing, but then hear those screams
in the well of that echobox. (Indeed, Sun
Studio’s worst nightmare in that vast echo-blast
of reverb).
With its
uncompromising paucity of presentation and adornment,
this record signals the end of naive innocence and
firmly places a price upon the kind of innocence
earned through experience and hardship. An innocence
that can only be born out of a serious reckoning with
the guilt and shame so native to our experience; an
innocence earned when one sees the perspective
of one’s life against the backdrop of life
itself, and death, and is humbled. Toward the
record’s end, the suppressed quality of
Springsteen’s lead vocal tracks begin to give
way to a kind of resignation and surrender. It’s
been coming since the bland and emotionless delivery
given to the title track, that chilling account of
sociopathy in the Starkweather murders. It actually
started there to begin with, in that haunt of a line
about "snapping my poor head back." Even a
psychopath can, perhaps in a brevity of
self-reflection, access the poverty of his situation.
The entire record seems to flow out from there,
across an impoverished landscape where "our sins
lie unatoned." Ultimately, Nebraska and its
songs are the stories of defiled characters who are
antithetical to themselves, and face the slow
desultory erosion of their own character. The record
begins with the ultimate erosion of character, the
psychopath, and finds its way through all of the
stages of character defilement. Witness the
well-intended speaker in "Atlantic City"
who, in the end compromises his better judgment. One
can see how the cumulative effect of such bargaining
leads to the paranoia of "State Trooper."
Springsteen makes this clear in the coldly
inferential line, "the only thing that I’ve
got’s been botherin’ me my whole
life." And again, witness the complexity in such
a simple, unadorned line. In "Highway
Patrolman", the paranoia is inverted as guilt
seeking to justify itself. The singer soothes himself
with a repetitious memory of better times to summon
the wherewithal to become Judas to his own civil
instincts. Better’n bein’ Judas to
one’s own. Yet, it can be no coincidence that
Springsteen uses the line, "Blood on
blood." This is an invocation of the sense of
mortality and finitude present here in these songs.
In such betrayals, it comes down to blood in the end.
Blood like the red print of lyrics and title. Red on
black, like the blood on the void into which a soul
is hurled. Yet, in the marveling of how, in the face
of impossible situations, we continue to find our
"reasons to believe", Springsteen seems to
comment on the very suppression of feeling and
aliveness that has informed the record. Does he seem
to say that perhaps there can be no lasting
suppression? Does he say that in the end the truth
and its complexities invariably are revealed as
reasons to prevail? Perhaps he means to say that
suppression in and of itself, while antithetical to
life, cannot subvert the truth. Perhaps it can only
defile the gracefulness of the truth when, finally,
it emerges.
What makes this
record great is that while it is an expression of the
frustration of suppression, sociopolitical and
otherwise, it is simultaneously a challenge to the
lure of suppression as a primary defense against the
angst of our times. The narratives lead eventually
out of the void into which our souls are hurled with
the recognition that the void contains a duality, and
not a singularity. The "lost souls callin’
long distance salvation" drive all night to get
back to a place of reckoning, only to find that
"No one by that name lives here anymore".
This recognition is the sobering and final assault on
the familiarity of self-preoccupation and narcissism
that will, when left unatoned, bind one to
unabiding singularity. The kind of singularity that
breeds mediocrity and complacency. Boredom, and
isolation. Reaction and violence. The kind of
singularity preserved in the horror of the Munch
painting, and the terrible suppression of conscience
in Nebraska’s title track. The horror of feeling
void of hope and reason to believe. Yet, this
recognition signals the collapse of defense, and it
is only in our lingering fears and illusions that we
will interpret this as death, singular and final. But
maybe this is the portal into rebirth and
possibility. Just maybe. I have always believed that
about Nebraska, and maybe it is only my wishful
thinking born of the record’s decimation of
hope. I don’t think so though, because that
record makes me cry to this day. And always, my tears
are full of life. To that end, this is a hopeful
record that never ceases to uplift me. Even the hiss
of tape, which hopefully will never be technically
removed from the recording, lulls me into its
momentum. And I am transported back to that tenement
when I listen, painting those plowed and depraved
fields I used to paint. All mud and oil, broke and
lonesome, but rich as the prodigal son of old,
returning to his father’s house. And alas, of
course, I will not find my father there. He is gone
also. No one is here by that name now, and for a
moment, I too will be nameless in that great void.
But if even for a second I can summon the grace of
one who has survived the inevitability of defilement,
then maybe I will find the trace of what I have
known. And, if I am exceedingly lucky, a trace of
what is knowable. Then, like those characters on
Nebraska, of which I am inevitably one, I too will
find my reasons to believe.
