The following rather provocative short is an excerpt from my book Jigs & Tales of Bawdry, the ebook version of which will be FREE on Amazon from Wednesday, May 3, through Sunday, May 7. Download your copy today and please remember to rate and review the book on Amazon, Goodreads, and BookBub.
I detest Bruce Springsteen. His blue-collar shtick has always seemed like a sham to me, and his Americanized brand of kitsch is valuable only as an emetic. In an unguarded moment, one might sympathize with the youthful romanticism of Born to Run, but how could one ever condone the Fourth-of-July sentimentality of Born in the U.S.A.? I admit that the title track of the latter at least expresses some ambivalence about the War in Indochina, but the overall effect of this record is the same as that produced by the most vulgar type of patriotic propaganda. I refuse to take seriously an album whose cover showcases the artist’s buttocks as he stands before the star-spangled banner in a t-shirt and Levi’s with a dirty red cap in his back pocket.
I have a particular dislike for the song whose title I have facetiously appropriated for this sketch. As a lifelong misfit of questionable popularity myself, I cringe at the nostalgia the self-styled “Boss” has for the high school culture of the heartland and small-town America. I utterly reject the red-white-and-blue bullshit of his vision, and I feel no connection whatsoever to the downhome folks of whom he sings: the disillusioned jock in the first verse, the formerly hot girl who is now a single mom in the second. I remain unmoved as these stereotypical caricatures laugh and cry over their beer with the prosaic minstrel from Asbury Park, New Jersey.
The video for this wretched song, which somehow popped up in my YouTube playlist last week, is also insipid. Springsteen himself is featured in the role of the erstwhile baseball star who never fulfilled his promise. We see him operating some kind of forklift during the working day, but after punching the clock he goes to the local sandlot to throw fastballs against a backstop. We are made to understand that he is pitching in imaginary big-league games, delusional contests which are played out only in his mind. This is thought by some, I suppose, to be representative of an exceptionally American kind of pathos, and it is probably what inspires Robert Christgau and his ilk to call Springsteen “the new Bob Dylan” and praise him to the skies for singing “real songs about real Americans.” When I read such nonsense, I am perversely reminded of the Nazi who said he reached for his revolver every time he heard the word “culture.”
Nevertheless, I must confess that this video, like the Proustian madeleine dunked in a cup of tea, triggered an involuntary memory in me, and without warning I found myself transported to a baseball diamond of yore, reliving a moment of dubious triumph that occurred more than thirty years ago.
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