“A creature of optimism”: The one singer Bruce Springsteen knew was “voice of the people”
Every single American who has ever lived most likely has a Bruce Springsteen song they can apply to their lives.
Even though ‘The Boss’ never claimed to be making the best music America has ever produced, his stories about the hardships that working-class people face every single day made a lot more sense to people who were living those blue-collar jobs than those who were counting their millions as part of the 1%. And even when Springsteen became one of the biggest stars in the world, it took the right artists to help keep him grounded whenever he was singing one of his songs.
Because as much as he liked the idea of making great stories in his tunes, it’s easy for anyone who is popular to find themselves out of touch with what their audience wants out of them. Springsteen had already made the mistake of making songs that sounded too chipper on records like Human Touch, and while he wouldn’t be making that mistake again, he knew that the greatest artists that came before him did a much better job at speaking to what the public wanted to hear.
Bob Dylan was already the voice of a generation, but his maverick attitude couldn’t have been done without Woody Guthrie coming before him. Guthrie was willing to fight for anything and everything he believed in with a guitar in his hand, but if he shook people up and let people know what was going on in the world, Pete Seeger was the messenger who was willing to tell everyone about the positive side of life.
Seeger believed in every single thing he sang about, but it was about more to him than a bunch of platitudes whenever he sang his songs. The way he related to the audience was more natural than just about any politician in the world, and even if the government seemed particularly dire at every single turn, Seeger was the one with a smile on his face and letting everyone know that they could overcome just about anything.
And it’s that sense of optimism that made Springsteen single out Seeger as the kind of artist who spoke for America the best, saying, “He would have the audacity to sing in the voice of the people. Now despite his grandfatherly appearance, he is a creature of nasty optimism. Inside him, he carries a steely toughness and it won’t let him take a step back from the things he believes in.”
That’s not an easy tightrope to walk, but you can often hear where Springsteen tries to make those same moves whenever he writes his own songs. It’s hard to find any sort of optimism when making an album like The Rising, but instead of everyone else gathering around the flag and talking about bombing the living daylights out of terrorists, ‘The Boss’ was the one trying to help the country heal and reminding everyone that they could survive just about anything that someone threw at them.
And no matter how many people try to brand Springsteen as a war criminal for the ungodly crime of speaking his mind, a lot of what he’s singing now is still adhering to those same principles. He’s trying to praise his country, but being a true patriot also means holding one’s country accountable for its ugly chapters and pushing to make the country better, and every time he is critiquing those in power, there’s no way that he was going to give up searching for the America that he knew and make sure that it doesn’t slip away.
So call him a traitor and call him a hypocrite all you want, but Springsteen has been able to bring across something that’s sorely lacking in America today: humility. He knew that Seeger was going to make people feel included with the power of his music, and even if ‘The Boss’ has much bigger checks, he wasn’t going to forget the reason why people like him are so special in the first place.
