Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuce!

Bruuuuce!

I love Bruce Springsteen.

Seriously, I love the man. I love his music and his politics and his attitude to life. I would happily be bossed round by the Boss. In fact, there is still a part of me that wants to be adopted by him, so I can be raised in the warm glow of his wisdom.

I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen in concert four times now and every one of those concerts is right up there with the best concert I have ever been to.  There are moments, images, songs that will stay with me until I forget how to remember.  His hand, raised like a preacher’s, during “The Rising” in the rain at Western Springs.  Playing Born to Run front to back on a Sunday night at Mt. Smart, ending with “Jungleland”.  A tear in the eye. Mine, not Bruce’s. Probably. But you never know. I couldn’t really see, what with the tears in my eyes and the fact he’s on the stage while I’m a hundred metres away, in the stands.  But just maybe Bruce too was caught up in the same emotional whirlpool.

However, as adoring and everlasting as my man love for Bruce is, it is not unqualified.  Unrequited yes, unqualified no.

No, there are a couple of things I need to unpack here, to do with Bruce’s oeuvre.  Some lyrics that I reckon need deeper analysis.  For sometimes even the words of Bruce can be problematic to me.

“Hungry Heart” is a rollicking good time song off Bruce’s 1980 album The River.  It is a song that cheers me up every time I listen to it.  Like now, as I type these words. Be grateful you cannot hear me singing along.

Yet even within this gleeful earworm, there are lyrics that perplex me.

“Don’t make no difference what nobody says/Ain’t nobody like to be alone”.

I get that Bruce’s voice is that of the American working man, so he uses the vernacular of the street, but even so there’s a lot of negatives in these lyrics. Don’t. No. Nobody (x2). Ain’t.  So do all these negatives actually add up to a positive? Because, you know, sometimes it is quite nice to be on your own, away from all the noise and the hustle and the bustle of the world.

I strongly suspect that what Bruce is saying here is that loneliness is a bad thing.  And I concur with that.  It’s just the way he says it that, as I say, perplexes me. Just a bit. But not at all in a bad way.

“Thunder Road” is one of my favourite songs off Born to Run, which is pretty much my favourite Bruce album. But there is a lyric within the song that goes beyond perplexing me (for I am generally easily perplexed) and heads off into the territory of vexing me.

Lyrically, “Thunder Road” starts with a lovely Springsteenian image:

“The screen door slams/Mary’s dress sways/Like a vision she dances across the porch/As the radio plays/Roy Orbison singing for the lonely”

As the song evolves Bruce is playing the part of the narrator, pulled up in his car outside the aforementioned Mary’s house, imploring her to get in the car with him, so they can drive off together, to a happy life, together.  Big romantic stuff.

Then, 1 minute and 4 seconds into the song, comes the vexing lyric:

“You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright”

Whoa, back up the Cadillac there Boss man.  Not a beauty? Alright?  I mean, I get that you speak for the American male and often men are not good at expressing their emotions.  But seriously?  That is the best pick-up line you’ve got?

“You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright”

Sure, if it was me (James) standing on the porch I would take it and run with it, for I know I am not a beauty so “alright” is plenty good enough for me. If it was me, I would get into Bruce’s car and it wouldn’t be at all creepy or weird as we drive off into the sunset and then live happily ever after.

But if I am Mary, standing there with my dress swaying, I would be asking some pretty darn serious questions.  This man doesn’t think I’m beautiful.  Just “alright”.  Am I his You’ll Do?  Can I do better than this dude who can’t even be arsed to get out of his car and come to talk to me here on the porch? What if the next dude who pulls up outside my house is actually Roy Orbison?  I mean, he ain’t a beauty but he’s alright plus he has a lovely voice.

“You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright”

I feel that here, as he sits in his car, on Thunder Road (which is a very cool name for a road, just quietly), with the engine idling, Bruce has come up a but short in the big romantic stakes.  Even Mark Knopfler reducing Romeo and Juliet to “You and me babe, how about it?” is preferable. If only ‘cause it means you don’t have to sit through a three-hour play about two soppy rich kids.

“You ain’t a beauty but hey you’re alright”

But it’s Bruce, right?  The Boss. So you know that Mary will overlook this unintended insult and she will get in the damn car because, as Bruce goes on to say: “It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win”.  Or as Shakespeare might have said had he decided to give R&J a positive, upbeat ending: “’Tis a village brimming with defeatists and I depart hence for triumph!”

But I do hope, as Bruce and Mary drive off, that she is giving him an earful about how she is a beautiful, strong woman and he is damn lucky to have her in his vehicle, in a not creepy way.