Bruce Springsteen sings 'The Rising' under Lincoln's watchful gaze (Mark Ralson/AFP/Getty)
Somebody please pinch me: I’m still metaphorically high from Obama’s election and the magnificent inauguration ceremony replete with Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing under the watchful, but I think approving eye of ol’ Abe Lincoln. The icing on the cake is this magnificent quotation from a N.Y. Times profile of The Boss, in which he nails our current communal euphoria with the precision and passion found in his best song lyrics:
Mr. Springsteen played “The Rising” at campaign events in battleground states, including a rally in Cleveland two days before the election.
“Once you start doing that kind of writing, it feeds off itself,” Mr. Springsteen said. “You write ‘The Rising’ for this, it gets picked up and used for that, so you end up here. If someone had told me in 2001 that ‘you’re going to sing this song at the inaugural concert for the first African-American president,’ I’d have said, ‘Huh?’ ” He laughed.
“But eight years go by, and that’s where you find yourself. You’re in there, you’re swimming in the current of history and your music is doing the same thing.”
He continued: “A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it? What does it mean? ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Badlands,’ I’ve seen people singing those songs back to me all over the world. I’d seen that country on a grass-roots level through the ’80s, since I was a teenager. And I met people who were always working toward the country being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very far away.
“And so on election night it showed its face, for maybe, probably, one of the first times in my adult life,” he said. “I sat there on the couch, and my jaw dropped, and I went, ‘Oh my God, it exists.’ Not just dreaming it. It exists, it’s there, and if this much of it is there, the rest of it’s there. Let’s go get that. Let’s go get it. Just that is enough to keep you going for the rest of your life. All the songs you wrote are a little truer today than they were a month or two ago.”
Why bother to try to say more when The Boss has said it all?
.. and it’s the grassroots principle that can work for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well..
whoa there pardner. how can you make light and celebrate when gazans are dying?
You have a way with a non sequitur, Tzvee. So when Obama’s administration helps engineer an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will you then concede you’re a joyless churl?