Bruce Springsteen is in the news today for
saying “Hello Ohio!” in…Michigan on Friday, but geez people, how many of us are way under 60 and way less
talented, energetic, or able to memorize 27 songs a night,
let alone write or perform them?
last concert ever at Giants Stadium last month, and for a mostly-life-long
Jersey Girl, it was a giant treat, one of those serendipitous gifts from above
that make me pinch myself.
Sure, I had told my neighbors, I’ll take care of
your three cats for two weeks. That’s what pet-loving neighbors do for each
other in
and do for free. And then the neighbors come home and
say “Hey, we fell into two free Bruce tickets, wanna come?”
Is the Boss a hottie?
I grew up on Bruce. He sang the anthems that described my teens and twenties, the pride we took in finding beauty and meaning where
everyone else saw overcrowding and pollution.
I discovered him in high school, when I was just starting
to understand that cool music was out there, when I heard a guy a year older
talking about Clarence Clemons.
This was the music that captured the 80s for me, but also
whatever this decade is called. Only Bruce has the power to make me feel what
borders on nostalgia for those strange, mournful, and oddly-sunny days right
after September 11.
Only Bruce could have written the two songs–“Born to Run”
and “
somehow buoyed me and kept me hopeful during a six-week cancer scare in 2007.
And when my Dad died the day before I found out I didn’t have cancer, it was hearing “
inexplicable reasons, but mostly because I had never shared my worry with my
parents.
50-year-olds, “my people,” the girls who taught us to smoke, the people
who blanket the sands of Point Pleasant, the guys our marching band played for. This is where we go when the weather turns, all 65,000 of us.
We bring praise for Bruce, for his productivity, for the way
he describes our lives. We admire the way he lauds the common man, the way he’s
probably a nice guy (and we can’t believe any allegations
to the contrary). One of us even carries a sign that says “Bruce is My
Religion.”
Then it hits me, when the Jumbotron displays a close-up
of all the hands raised in praise.
I look with my binoculars. I realized, I hadn’t seen that
many white people in a public place since I took my mother to see the
Cheiftains at NJPAC in Newark.
Truly, the only black guy I can see
is The Big Man
himself, playing the sax. All those arms
were white, a a sea of Crayola “flesh” color, or at least that’s what it was
called when I was a kid, before we started to know the error of that name, the
implication that other colors didn’t count.
Am I that white that my all-time favorite rock star has
no appeal for black Jerseyans? Is this music, which embodies both my youth and my
recent years, somehow excluding or repelling people of color? What’s wrong with
me for loving something that doesn’t seem to be loved universally?
I asked a friend of mine who is black, apologizing first
for asking someone “what black people think.” (“Ask them yourself,” my college
roommate rightly told me once.) My friend said she noticed the same thing at
Bono and U2 concerts, maybe concerts are too expensive, who knows? Maybe concerts by black artists have audiences that are less melanin-deprived.
poetry, can anyone think of a better motto for this particular recession than “No retreat,
baby, no surrender”?