Originally published in Monthly Review
On his most recent album, Wrecking Ball, Bruce
Springsteen crafted a powerful statement of support for the working class, the
existence of which barely penetrates contemporary art or politics. This is not
an accident: the growing power of capital over public discourse has provided it
a forceful means through which to shape individual consciousness, and establish
an apolitical and at most technocratic understanding of power. Those at the
top, we are led to believe, are there because of their technical skills and
have risen by meritocratic means—the vast gulfs created by inequalities in
wealth, power, and privilege are ignored. In fact, gigantic
corporations—controlled by the 1% (or by the 0.1%)—dominate all forms of
production. Even in the cultural realm, the art and voices of the working class
are sidelined and squelched. Working people thus become invisible. As Occupy
has helped make clear, the 99%, though divided in all kinds of ways, share the
collective disappointment of being ruledby others, as opposed to ruling
themselves;of constantly producing and reproducing the bases of wealth and
power at the top of society, rather than fulfilling their own developmental
potential…. Power over surplus distribution—and thus nearly everything
else—is left to an unelected ownership class. The overwhelming majority of the
population is unable to locate itself in the “democratic consensus” or the
dominant culture.
In our ad-driven consumer age, it is a monumental struggle
to encourage sympathy and solidarity by bringing the stories and views of
working people to a mass audience. Indeed, one of the greatest successes of the
Occupy movement has been to force the idea into the national discourse that the
working class exists as such (we are the 99%), a notion that
is usually reserved for the radical fringe. On Wrecking Ball,
Springsteen channels and supports the proletarian discourse of the 99%, which
overcomes post-political, technocratic ideology and constructs a world sharply
divided between exploited and exploiters. He crosses over from his earlier
lament for a fallen America and the unfulfilled promise of the American dream
to rage at the “robber barons” who “ate the flesh off everything they’ve found”
and “whose crimes have gone unpunished,” calling on workers to stand united in
seeking social justice. In telling the seldom-heard stories of working people
and subjectivizing them as victims of the violence of capital, Wrecking
Ball represents an important salvo in the cultural struggle, providing
justification for and encouraging solidarity with the cause of the 99%.
In its review of the album, the popular music website Pitchfork chides
Springsteen for “rail[ing] against those up on ‘Banker’s Hill’ in the sort of
black-and-white terms that continue to plague and cleave his home country.” In
suggesting that those who have united as “the 99%” are merely troublemakers,
and that Occupy is actually a “plague” on society, Pitchfork—regarded
as a hip and liberal publication in the hegemonic discourse—paradoxically
adopts a position that would make Newt Gingrich blush. How is this possible? In
fact, the Pitchforkreview can be taken as a model to demonstrate
the shortcomings of the so-called “hipster” current. This social current, of
which Pitchfork is the ultimate expression, is the embodiment
of postmodern skepticism and relativism. Artistically, it is concerned solely
with exhibiting middle-class angst, while it presents liberation as the styling
of an individualized consumerism and pornographic self-expression. Any
transformational social project, or genuine contact with the working class, is
seen as anachronistic and totalitarian. As Arcade Firedescribed on their 2010
album The Suburbs, what appears as progressive experimentation and
“liberation” is really Rococo—trivial but elaborate ornamentation that amounts
to little more than an indication of privilege and isolation, like the
elaborate dress of the court of Louis XVI.
Naturally, this ideology—which emphasizes consumerism and
the liberation of the market while discouraging social and political
engagement—poses no threat whatsoever to structures of power and domination,
and is therefore ubiquitous. It has served to mask and even defend the marginalization
of working-class art while concealing the domination of the cultural terrain by
the forces of capital, under the guise of liberation and freedom. As Arcade
Fireput it, “they seem wild, but they are so tame.” With Wrecking Ball,
Springsteen has produced a record of startling beauty, that unambiguously
proclaims solidarity with the 99% and reaffirms the possibility of a better
world. It is a powerful statement in support of the Occupiers’ struggle against
a ruling class that is waging unmitigated war against workers and the poor. The
force of this statement, and the nature of Pitchfork’s response,
help to reveal the class bias concealed behind postmodern “common sense” and
hipster skepticism.
The Plague of Class Society
Pitchfork’s review seems to advance the peculiar
suggestion that class conflict is caused by the troublemaking of workers. This
assertion is deeply anti-democratic, disdainful of the poor and working class,
and ignorant of history—not to mention current events. The only way that
democracy can be practiced in a society divided by its economic system into
classes is through the popular organization and activism of the systemically
disempowered—the 99%. In the absence of such mobilization, the desires and
interests of those empowered by the system—the 1%—have been pursued almost
unopposed, as reflected in the platforms of both the corporate-owned political
parties. The bipartisan consensus around “free trade” and deregulation has led
to the implementation of measures permitting our rulers to endlessly enrich and
empower themselves, while reducing their obligations to the rest of society.
The vast and growing disparity in power and wealth that has resulted has
contributed to the dangerous weakening of already limited democratic
institutions, constraining the ability of people to defend the victories of the
past.
It is worth noting the level of abstraction at which the
review operates: aside from distant allusions to Occupy as a divisive plague
(to which the album contributes), history is noticeable only in its absence. In
a review of an album dealing almost entirely with working-class issues at an
absolutely critical historical juncture, the Pitchfork reviewer
makes no note of the radical, bipartisan attack on working people (and their
organizations and communities) underway across the country, intensifying in
recent years. That the reviewer did not even consider such issues relevant to
his critique indicates the degree to which the working class has been rendered
invisible, and explains the vital importance of forcing working-class voices
into the public arena. With capital’s increasing dominance over cultural
production, the appearance of the working class in the world has likewise
diminished, its voice silenced. As shown by the Occupy slogan “we are the 99%,”
in the current hegemonic ideological constellation, even proclaiming the
existence of a single working class is a subversive act. If
the historical moment that gave birth to the record were clarified, the meaning
of the record as a contribution to a struggle for justice and freedom would be
plain.
In the wake of the economic crisis, millions of Americans
have been thrown out of their homes and left with nothing, while the banks
evicting them are provided with trillions in tax dollars. Across the United
States, unions are being attacked and dismantled, and hard-fought gains in
living standards and political rights rolled back. The recent “right-to-work”
(for less) offensive, direct attacks on public sector unions in Wisconsin, New
Hampshire, and elsewhere, and the revelation of the activities of the American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a national anti-labor organization in which
corporate lawyers hand legislation to the “representatives of the people” to
propose in legislative bodies across the country—are only the most recent
examples of this battle.
This ruling-class offensive has been justified by deflecting
blame for the economic crisis from Wall Street financiers on to working people.
In the wake of the 2008 economic catastrophe, a myth was fabricated by the
bankers and elite corporate managers. The crisis, they argued, had nothing to
do with the immense risk that had accumulated within the financial system,
responsibility for which lay with the laissez-faire, deregulatory attitude of the
post-Reagan era and the ensuing bonanza on Wall Street. Rather, according to
this myth narrative, the causes of the crisis were the remnants of
working-class organizations and excessive state spending, which provoked a
“debt crisis.” And since, as usual, any reduction in military spending is off
the table (with the exception of a few symbolic gestures and accompanying
histrionics from the “defense” establishment) these cuts must come from our
already pathetic social safety net—which is the laughing stock of the
industrial world.
Of course, according to this ruling-class mythology, the
crisis has even less to do with stagnating real wage rates over the past thirty
years, despite the fact that the average American has worked more hours with
dramatically greater rates of productivity. That is, even as Americans produce
more—through both working longer hours and greater productivity—their wages
stagnate and decline. This means that every penny of this additional wealth has
gone into the pockets of the corporate and financial elite, even as they cry
poverty and insist that there “just isn’t enough money” to pay for public
schools, medicine for the old and sick, and houses for the homeless. Unable to
work any more hours, and with real wages stagnant, workers were forced to take
on debt to maintain standards of living, which also kept up aggregate demand in
the economy.
With workers now unable to carry any more debt and the
economy stagnating, the ruling class proposes to turn the screws still further
on working people. With its mythology parroted by politicians and the media
across the country, the ruling class now imposes its “solution”: cruel
austerity measures, which will further damage the economy and needlessly punish
workers and their families. The term austerity itself is misleading: this
austerity for workers and the poor has meant super-profits and mega-bonuses for
the rich. Springsteen presents these contradictions when he sings, “banker man
grows fat, working man grows thin / it’s all happened before, it’ll happen
again.” There is certainly a “plague” at work here, but not the one Pitchfork envisions.
It is the plague of the dictatorship over society by an elite few, who
systematically exploit the rest of society.
Wrecking Ball
From beginning to end, Wrecking Ball furiously
tears these myths to shreds, while incorporating a surprising array of
influences, each linked with the American experience, and weaving them into a
brilliant and contemporary pastiche. Attempting, as always, to create anAmerican music
(perhaps this time more successfully than ever), Springsteen incorporates
gospel, the blues, early rock, modern rock, Irish folk, African rhythms and
choruses, country and western, contemporary pop, New Orleans jazz and funk,
American folk music, and a seemingly endless array of other textures and
flavors in order to create a seamless whole. Though Pitchfork insists
that this is really all just an attempt to “cover up some of the album’s
lackluster songwriting,” the writing is worthy of comparison with the
compositions of America’s finest working-class troubadours (with whom the
writers at Pitchfork are no doubt unfamiliar).
The first half of the record, derided by Pitchfork as
a “misguided” if “noble gesture,” is a fiery denunciation of the wealthy and
powerful from the point of view of those who mow the lawns, pull the leaves out
of the drains, repair the roofs, harvest the crops, fix the cars, and who were
left behind to die as the levees broke in New Orleans. Springsteen captures
these voices and presents these experiences in the song “Jack of All Trades.”
By narrating American life from the point of view of the oppressed, exploited,
and neglected, Springsteen gives the working class the voice that it is denied
in dominant culture. As he sings on “Shackled and Drawn”:
gambling man rolls the dice, working man pays the bills
it’s still fat and easy up on Banker’s Hill
up on Banker’s Hill the party’s goin’ strong
down here below we’re shackled and drawn.
It would be hard to find a more succinct way to summarize
the principles that have animated economic developments in the wake of the
financial crisis than these few lines.
The opening song, “We Take Care of Our Own,” points out the
bitter class and racial divisions in the United States with biting irony. Do we
take care of our own? And who are “we”? The patriotic elite are always urging
us to unite around the flag in support of another foreign intervention, yet
they have abandoned working people to a grim fate. While the revolving door
between big finance and politics has ensured that the 1% has taken care of its own,
the disgusting neglect for the poor of New Orleans—who were literally left to
die—stands out in history as a shocking disgrace. But it is also clear from the
song that Springsteen is not merely addressing an isolated, tragic phenomenon
in New Orleans. Rather, those in need all across the country have simply been
abandoned by the ruling class, left without homes, medicine, education, and
food:
from Chicago to New Orleans
from the muscle to the bone
from the shotgun shack to the Superdome
there ain’t no help, the calvary stayed home
ain’t no one hearing the bugle blowin’
we take care of our own
wherever this flag is flown.
The pro-immigrant rights message of “American Land” further
deepens this question: If “we” refers to Americans, then what about the large
number of Americans who were not born here? “The hands that build the country /
we’re always trying to keep out,” he sings.
On “Death to My Hometown,” an incredible composition
embracing Irish folk music, American gospel, African rhythms and choruses, and
contemporary rock and pop, Springsteen declares war on the “greedy thieves” who
“brought death to our hometown.” Though there was no overt war—no bombs fell,
no armies invaded, and no shots were fired—“just as sure as the hand of God /
they brought death to our hometown” and then left us out to rot:
They destroyed our families, factories,
and they took our homes
They left our bodies on the plains
The vultures picked our bones.
The song then reaches its rousing climax to the sound of a
shotgun blast. Similarly, the somber, doubtful consolation the narrator of
“Jack of All Trades” provides his beloved masks homicidal fury at the injustice
of his situation, which explodes in the song’s final verses: “If I had me a
gun,” he groans, “I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight.”
On songs like “Death to My Hometown,” the object is militant
organization to “send the robber barons straight to hell.” But Wrecking
Ball is not merely a rabid attack against bankers. Even the narrator
of “Jack of All Trades,” despite his homicidal impulses, affirms that “there’s
a new world comin’ / I can see the light.” Where Springsteen once shied away
from the darkness on the edge of town, here he locates there the possibility
for something better, which is largely the focus of much of the album’s latter
half. Not surprisingly, Pitchfork views the second half as
“something of a rescue mission,” but wildly misinterprets Springsteen’s central
point. “Why spew anger when exultance is in your grasp?” asks Pitchfork—in
other words, ignore the darkness altogether and focus myopically on the light.
The religious imagery on the second half of the record could
lead one to conclude that the liberation and peace Springsteen describes can
only be achieved in heaven. But it should be read, rather, as a reaffirmation
of the utopian project—the realization of a better world on the other side of
the wrecking ball of capitalist crisis. On “Land of Hope and Dreams,” we
discover the sheer beauty of total liberation in a world in which “dreams will
not be thwarted” and “faith will be rewarded.” After “forty days and nights of
rain have washed this land,” “a new day’s comin’,” Springsteen sings on “Rocky
Ground,” but in the future paradise “Jesus said money-changers in this temple
will not stand.” Throughout the album, Springsteen deliberately plays on this
ambiguity between a heaven on earth and the realization of a divine afterlife.
“We Are Alive” presents a view of eternity definitely out of
sync with the Christian notion of the afterlife. Referred to by Pitchfork as
a “dry history lesson,” the song reminds us that those who dedicate their lives
to change live on in their victories, reaching out from the grave to stand with
us today and continue the fight:
we are alive
and though our bodies lie alone here in the dark
our souls and spirits rise
to carry the flame and light the spark
to fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart.
We hear the voice of a man who was killed in the Great
Railroad Strike in 1877, which lasted for forty-five days and spread to
Maryland, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri before being brutally suppressed
by the U.S. military. The voices of many other people are heard: one was killed
in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights movement, and another
describes trying to cross the U.S. border from Mexico. “Tonight all the dead
are here,” Springsteen sings on “Wrecking Ball.”
Far from being “divisive,” Springsteen unites these
seemingly disparate struggles, illustrating the universality of the
emancipatory movement to which he aspires. This inclusiveness is mirrored in
the incredible range of influences he exhibits on the album, which could be
seen as the musical expression of the unifying discourse of “the 99%.” It is
here that the greatness of Wrecking Ball lies, and it is what
makes Pitchfork’stake on the second half of the record particularly
troubling. The reviewer sees a music that “welcomes all Americans regardless of
class, race, creed,” and expresses the wish that the rest of album could be
equally “ambiguous.” But what he misses is that while Springsteen (like Occupy)
welcomes everyone to what he sees as a universal struggle for justice, it is
not Springsteen’s music that divides America into classes—capitalism does.
Class difference is not merely articulated, but rather is ontologically prior to
discourse. Rather than running away from this reality, Springsteen seeks to use
his music as a way of overcoming it—not by constructing some ideal paradise to
which we can escape, but by alerting us to the real injustices in the present
preventing the realization of such noble ideals.
The Invisible Cage
George Orwell once remarked, “all art is propaganda.”
Indeed, culture is the site of a giant battlefield, and music is a weapon
deployed by both sides. Antonio Gramsci applied the notion of a “war of position”
to the political struggle as well as to the terrain of culture. Rather than
seeing culture as a self-identical and coherent whole, Gramsci saw it as a
contradictory set of appropriations and deployments. From Gramsci’s point of
view, hegemonic uses of culture—that is, cultural deployments articulated
within the dominant order—unfold in accordance with a “logic of domination,”
while counter-hegemonic practices move according to a “logic of resistance.”
Thus in order to decode the meaning of a cultural activity, Gramsci argued, one
must identify the political processes that work either to maintain or transform
cultural patterns.
Today, the large-scale production of music is dominated by
concentrated capital, much like the rest of the media in the United States. In
their landmark work Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam
Chomsky documented the effects of private control over the media, and “free
market” pressures, on news content. Their results were startlingly consistent:
views outside of the elite consensus are marginalized and essentially silenced.
But these tendencies—exacerbated alongside continuous deregulation and
concentration—are also present in other areas of cultural production.
Here lies the moment of truth of the ideology of individual self-expression,
to which everyone supposedly has an equal right: it is not what is said that
matters so much as what is heard. As the ruling class accumulates
wealth and power, its control over culture grows, increasingly reflecting
bourgeois views of the world and its problems. Working-class art is
marginalized and reduced in proportion with its spending power and political
voice. What at first appeared as the freedom of all to express themselves
equally becomes the means through which capital dominates our conceptions of
the world, amplifying those voices it finds palatable and silencing those it
does not. Che Guevara, in his “Man and Socialism” speech, perhaps best
described the result: “Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement…become
convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon
of protest is combated. Those who play by the rules of the game are showered
with honors—such honors as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes. The
condition is that one does not try to escape from the invisible cage.”
Music critics are key components of this cage. Employed by
the same giant corporations which not just produce the albums but own the radio
stations and concert venues, their job is not to conduct a serious analysis of
the social-historical meaning of a given artistic development,
but rather to sell advertisements in their magazines. Since serious, critical
social analysis is prohibited, these critics are forced to consider music
solely in the abstract, without taking into consideration its real historical
foundation. As such, they become champions of Rococo (the obsession with
“meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement”), a key characteristic of the “modern
man” so brilliantly lampooned by Arcade Fire. The critical skepticism of Pitchforkand
those of like mind is thus merely a mask for the unrestrained domination of
culture by capital. Rather than urging that cultural elements and apparatuses
be appropriated as conduits for the voices of working people, and art used as a
way of protesting injustice, the working class, they suggest, would do best to
keep its filthy hands out.
The point of Springsteen’s work has always been the exact
opposite: to bring the plight of the forgotten into public consciousness. He sketches
the exact contours of the “invisible cage,” rendering it visible. Exploring
Springsteen’s most brilliant canvases can be a wrenching experience, awakening
the listener to the emptiness and despair swept under the carpet of the
American dream. Even the positivity of his most exuberant songs (“Thunder
Road”) is driven by the extreme fragility of the possibility of escape from a
dark and disappointing world to a vaguely conceived promised land. As he put it
in a recent interview, “my work has always been about measuring the distance
between the American reality and the American dream.” In Springsteen’s art,
this distance manifests itself as a tension between content and form, meaning
and aesthetic. Aesthetically, the foundation of much of Springsteen’s music is
the early rock-and-roll of artists like Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. But
clearly, Springsteen’s music is not just a kitschy throwback to the golden age
of rock. Rather, its originality and power reside in his application of this
pure form, the saccharine sound of the American dream, to the harsh realities
of working-class life. This is the counter-hegemonic gesture par
excellence: Springsteen appropriates and turns to the ends of the
working-class forces alien to it, redeploying these elements in accordance with
a logic of resistance.
This tension between content and form is a sonic
representation of class struggle, the very sound of the hollowness of
ruling-class idols. Far from the heroic and liberating depiction of the
automobile that was as ubiquitous in the early rock songs as it is prominent in
American dream ideology, to Springsteen, cars are objects of tragedy. They
illustrate the paradox of capitalist “liberation”: one can drive as fast or as
far as one wants, but it is impossible that the destination will be a “new
life” or a “new world.” The promise of the automobile, such a central part of
American dream ideology, is empty. Just as abstract ideals of democracy and
equality are circumscribed in their concrete application in a class society,
Springsteen lays the technicolor world of the town green beside the
unthinkable, barely concealed darkness on its outskirts.
The Occupy movement demands that we stare into that darkness
and imagine another world that might be constructed there. “Wrecking Ball,” the
song from which the record takes its name, is a moving testament to the
indestructibility of the human spirit, that infinite element that surpasses any
given situation. This is the place from which all resistance—and
reconstruction—must come. A wrecking ball destroys, but it also creates, and
the wreckage it leaves behind must contain the tattered germ from which the
future will blossom. Even the U.S. military, a white lynch mob, and the guns of
the U.S. Border Patrol cannot prevent those who have gone before from joining
us today. With them at our side, we must pick up the pieces and join the fight
for a new world. And in so doing, we will stand with them in eternity.
