Nebraska (Sir)

Nebraska (Sir) - Bruce Springteen 1982-Columbia Records

I've always had some distance in my mind when listening to "the Boss".  No particular reason.  In the same way I had never fully listened to this album or read the lyrics until April 1st of this year, '21.  After listening closely I know why the "distance" was there, and a large part of me has shied away from diving into Bruce's dark pool. 

 

From start to finish NEBRASKA is backwoods hick despair, as in sad, depressing, lonely.  Unbelievable, and unbelievably distant from even my own dark experiences.  And I've had a few myself.

The first song reminded me of the film "Natural Born Killers".  And they became progressively darker after that.  Of course, there is a reason for that, as his subject matter was influenced by Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", along with the Terrence Mallick film "Badlands", and his own research into the 1958 killings by Charles Starkweather and girlfriend Caril.  That pair has become the stereotypical young renegades associated with other works besides Natural Born Killers and Badlands, a slew of films like "The Sadist", "Kalifornia", and "Starkweather", and other songs such as "Small Town" by John Mellencamp, and probably "Take the Money and Run" by Steve Miller Band. 

 

We could give Bruce a great deal of artistic credit here and say possibly that since the language is always in the 1st person (even when he's singing from the electric chair/gallows) he is actually portraying these points of view, totally personalizing them, acting them out, projecting.  But in channeling someone, we become them, as that's inferred, so therefore to your audience, the singer is the person, especially when the acting is good.

 

I found myself wanting to know, however, after several tracks, who this "Sir" is that he repeatedly addresses.  It made sense when his song character was in front of the judge, but then he does it quite often in other songs and consistently includes the address to "Sir" when he's being ironically apologetic.  You get the definite sense that he does NOT like this Sir.  His usage of the impersonal pronoun is not respectful, but blaming, in a backhanded way.  He is, without being direct, identifying for us, the audience, ANY authority.  One senses it could be God, if it weren't for the fact that he also backhandedly declares he is an atheist on the same album...ok, his narrative voice declares it.

We can be reasonably assured that his answer to the "Sir" question would be "corporate bosses", or anyone who owns anything, seeing as how he's a confirmed blue-collar communist, the real kind.  He's immensely popular with struggling life-forms, the bottom of the ladder, the subjects of his songs.  He often feigns having had their same experiences, identifying with them; hicks, wayfarers, factory workers, migrants, street people, drunkards.  

 

Jesus himself "identified" with people like that, so it could be seen as a virtue.  But the identification was one of association, and not necessarily like-mindedness.  Jesus continually drew people away from their lifestyle and asked them unabashedly to "follow me", not "pick up your gun and point it at the nearest rich target you can take down".   Or for that matter, any target, as that is an expression of your anger over being in a world simply filled with meanness and doom.  What we're likely missing here, as it is usually missed by those who perpetrate such chaos, is that they are contributing to the meanness and doom, and have become embodiments of it, extensions of it.  In taking that control, they are essentially admitting they are controlled by the very thing they hate.  It's a vicious Catch-22.

 

This also reminds me of a moment in the TV series "The Expanse", wherein the captain is challenged by a crew member with this rhetorical question: "You know what your problem is?  You think that just because someone is the underdog that they're also the good guy". 

 

I may not give the album another listen, but I am certainly going to do some more research into Bruce's historic motivations, and I'll be reading the lyrics again.  Poetry and prose both reveal things after more than one round.

- Agitatus