fAvouRite disC

 

 

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.

Kevin Meisel's 'Coal and Diamonds' was reviewed in Flyin Shoes #1 ( see the archives)