Red, white and Bruce

A pop-culture historian places Springsteen in the company of Guthrie, Whitman, and Twain

by Linda Lowenthal

BORN IN THE U.S.A.: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION, by Jim Cullen. HarperCollins, 240 pages, $23.

IF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN has a stereotypical audience, I'm not it. I've never stood in a stadium yelling "Bruuuuce!"; his music has a visceral appeal to me, but it has always seemed best pouring out of someone else's window on a hot day. It took me years to get around to buying any of his albums, and when I did, they looked odd next to Stravinsky on the CD rack. To anyone who commented, I explained that Springsteen was my secret vice. But Jim Cullen, a historian of popular culture who teaches at Harvard, doesn't think the Boss needs to be anyone's guilty pleasure. He wants to make Springsteen intellectually respectable by putting him on a shelf with Whitman, Steinbeck, Twain, and even Lincoln and Jefferson.

In Born in the U.S.A., Cullen shows how Springsteen's songs and, to a lesser extent, his persona fit in with those archetypal figures. His themes, like theirs, touch on the virtue of the common man, the payoff of high hopes and hard work, the importance of literal and metaphorical mobility, the tension between roots and dreams. It's not exactly going out on a limb to call Springsteen an American icon, but still, it's not every day you open up a book about a rock star and find a quotation from The Federalist Papers on page four. Cullen -- who never met or interviewed Springsteen for this book -- makes no bones about the fact that he's writing cultural history, not rock criticism or even biography. He doesn't want so much to say something new about Springsteen as to show where he fits in with the old.

That means a lot of compressed lessons on such things as the principles of representative democracy, the aesthetic implications of republicanism, the work ethic, and the tradition of American triumphalism that was challenged most profoundly by the Civil War and Vietnam. Like the popular professor he undoubtedly is, Cullen lays the groundwork and connects the dots, drawing associations that range from the obvious -- the common subject matter of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford's film adaptation, Woody Guthrie's song "Tom Joad," and Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad -- to the unexpected: "Born to Run" sounds a lot more like Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" than you might think without seeing them side by side.

Unlike some other academics who take on popular culture (Camille Paglia mouthing off about Madonna comes to mind), Cullen is endearingly defensive about making such leaps: the book is studded with disclaimers and pre-emptive apologies ("it may seem odd, even absurd, to compare a rock and roll singer with the likes of Twain or [Martin Luther] King"). He seems to feel on firmer ground, though, when he turns his attention to masculinity, the topic that Springsteen has addressed most self-consciously. In one of the book's finest chapters, Cullen places Springsteen's early songs in the context of 19th-century America's "boy culture" to illuminate their romantic, almost erotic attitude toward male friendship, then traces Springsteen's evolving vision of women by showing how some later songs endow "traditionally gendered words and concepts," such as toughness, with more flexible, more sexually egalitarian meanings. It doesn't take a literary scholar to interpret the lyrics of a song like "Man's Job," but Cullen's analysis captures one of the biggest sources of Springsteen's appeal: the way he has learned to stake out the "vital center" of American masculinity, "accommodat[ing] to the social changes wrought by feminism without an enervating compromise of male sexual identity."

But as most people know by now, sexual politics aren't the only kind implicit in Springsteen's work. The familiar incident that opens the book -- Ronald Reagan's misguided invocation of Springsteen during the 1984 presidential campaign -- is a useful lens through which to view Cullen's entire argument. On the one hand, Reagan utterly misconstrued the meaning of "Born in the U.S.A.," which was presumably the song that made Springsteen seem like such a useful symbol (a mistake more recently repeated by Bob Dole). On the other hand, Cullen points out, that song and others really do tap into the patriotic grit, determination, and pride that the right has tried to claim as its own.

Reaganism and "Springsteenism" appealed to many of the same people, and in the same spirit, yet they were diametrically opposed responses to the same frustrations. Whereas Reagan sought to fuel white working-class resentments against other groups in American society, Springsteen's songs combined working-class sympathies with a heartfelt sense of egalitarianism and solidarity. As Cullen explains, even such nonpolitical "hard times" songs as "The River" embody two key qualities of the republican character: a commitment to understanding people as individuals instead of tagging them with labels like "welfare queen," and at least an implicit willingness to ask how those individuals' problems might be addressed in the public realm.

What's remarkable about Springsteen is that -- unlike Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, who worked in an era when the United States had a popular left to speak of -- he became a pop-culture phenomenon with this message at a time when populism had become the perceived province of the right.

These days, Springsteen's left-of-center politics are more overt, and (perhaps not coincidentally) his audience is not as vast as it once was. But he remains, in Cullen's phrase, a "good conservative" who appeals to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature": he restores our faith that America is not really about paranoia and resentment of perceived outsiders, and that progressive values are not really about tedious, out-of-touch political correctness. "When I listen to Bruce Springsteen," Cullen writes, "I remember how to be an American." In articulating what's behind the vaguely red-white-and-blue sentiments that Springsteen's songs so often evoke, he has written a book as unpretentious and good-hearted as its subject.

Linda Lowenthal is the arts editor of the South End News.