‘The Rising’: how Bruce Springsteen helped heal America
Let me set the scene for you here. The year is 2001, and the US has never felt scarier than it has at this exact moment. Although many people were prepared to go to war once they saw the Twin Towers get knocked down in New York, there’s still a good portion of the public worried about what the future holds for a potential war and what the coming years will look like for the kids born into a world that watches planes destroy innocent civilians. It was never going to be easy for anyone to process that, but as everyone was still looking at the embers, Bruce Springsteen helped us all to feel hopeful again.
Granted, it might be a touch disheartening listening to a guy from New Jersey sing about the perils of New York City for those who grew up in Manhattan. While Springsteen was never strictly from New York, it was a brand of blue-collar workers that he felt a kinship with, and looking at 9/11 play out was enough to take the wind out of everyone’s collective sails no matter where they were in the country.
When seeing someone viciously attack the country, though, a lot of people would immediately look at it and grow angry. After all, that seems to be what President George W Bush did at the time, eventually going in to blast the living daylights out of the Middle East despite having some flimsy reasons for wanting to start a full-on invasion of the country.
Springsteen wasn’t interested in those bigger questions, though. He knew that every person who was trapped in those buildings that day had a name, family, and story behind them, and while most people could have made tribute songs as a slightly gross way of cashing in on the tragedy, there isn’t one single piece of The Rising that feels anything less than empathetic to the people who lost their lives and those whose lives were changed that day.
To get through the writing sessions, a lot of Springsteen’s lyrics involved research, eventually meeting with family members of those lost during the attacks and asking them to share their experiences getting through that kind of grief. While Springsteen’s lyrics on the record are far from the news exposes that most would expect, hearing him sing about someone who never got to say goodbye, like on ‘You’re Missing’ is still breathtaking. There’s no anger, and there’s no real resentment. It’s just pure melancholy.
But Springsteen isn’t the person that someone comes to feeling like the world has turned on them. ‘The Boss’ could always find beauty in the pain, and a lot of moments on the record talk about the resilience of the American people, like watching them deal with such a tragedy on ‘Into The Fire’ and putting together places where they can cope with their struggles in light of the attacks.
While he doesn’t shy away from the still-raw wound on a song like ‘My City of Ruins’, the title track is where the real depth of the album comes in. Americans have always been known to rise out of any potential problem they have to face, and even looking at something as cruel as killing hundreds of people, Springsteen helps remind us that if we look out for each other, we can even manage to survive this as well.
And that kind of spirit hasn’t stopped ever since. Even though a lot of what they sing is miles away from what Springsteen was talking about, hearing everyone from Spanish Love Songs to Sam Fender to The War on Drugs discuss how they can survive adversity comes from the kind of optimism that The Rising taught us all to have no matter what comes our way.
Because even if the world seems to be going to hell and is being controlled by nincompoops trying to claim that they have their country’s best interest at heart, it’s up to everyone else to look out for each other. If there’s one thing that 9/11 helped teach all Americans, it’s the compassion we all should have for each other, and if we follow what Springsteen talked about here, perhaps America can help heal some of its own deep-seated scars.
