The song Bruce Springsteen gave to Donna Summer to fight racism
Rock and roll hasn’t always been about the music that makes people want to have a party. Between the songs about the freedom of teenage angst, other artists like Bob Dylan were trying to open listeners’ minds to the real problems going on outside the school dances of the world, creating songs that worked as great political messages on their own. Even though Bruce Springsteen was more focused on writing character portraits, one of his major hits ended up in another’s hands for political reasons.
For the first half of his career, Springsteen had to do his best to run away from the Bob Dylan comparisons. While Springsteen was a fan of what Dylan could accomplish, his tendency to ramble in his songs like the folk-rock icon made critics label him a clone of the original.
Then again, Born to Run showed everyone Springsteen was more than just a rock and roll plagiarist. Throughout the album, ‘The Boss’ constructed a masterful look at what life was like throughout the scene on the Jersey boardwalk, creating lavish tales of romance throughout songs like ‘Jungleland’ and ‘Thunder Road’. While the album reached success beyond what Springsteen imagined, he was in for another shakeup in the next decade.
With the arrival of MTV, Springsteen would offer up his most radio-friendly material on Born in the USA, revitalising his sound by bringing in synthesisers and creating cutting dissections of the American Dream on songs like ‘Glory Days’ and ‘My Hometown’. Although ‘Cover Me’ perfectly encapsulates teenage insecurities with romance, Springsteen had his eye on someone else when covering the song: Donna Summer.
Since the end of the 1970s, Summer had been known as one of the foundational pieces of the disco scene. From the romance of ‘I Feel Love’ onward, Summer epitomised the glamour of what was going on in the Studio 54 scene, creating songs about living life on one’s own terms.
One of the most significant pieces of Summer’s appeal was the representation in the disco scene. While Springsteen liked Summer’s voice, he thought that ‘Cover Me’ was too good to give away, saving it for his own album. Although some fans embraced disco with every fibre of their being, Springsteen could see the ugly side of the rock scene starting to turn on the genre for impure reasons.
Electing to give Summer the song ‘Protection’, Springsteen would express his grievances with having to take the thousands of racist comments lobbed in disco’s direction, saying, “She could really sing, and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement”. It’s not like Springsteen didn’t have a point, either, with disco demolition in the 1970s showing the extent of how far people would go to hate music that black and gay people primarily made.
Considering the lyrics to ‘Protection’, though, it’s clear that Springsteen has his fingerprints all over it, creating a song about a woman who is just looking for some sort of protection from their lover. Given the amount of bile thrown Summer’s way for having hits, these words are so direct that she could have easily written it herself.
