The Nation: "Darkness in the Center of Town"
- From: Donnieb78 <donnieb78@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:14:09 -0700
This is one of the best pieces I've seen in terms of connecting the
album's thematic dots:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20071002/cm_thenation/3239190
Springsteen's Magic: Darkness in the Center of Town
David Corn
35 minutes ago
The Nation -- As I listened to Magic, the new (and maybe last?) album
from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, I thought of a buddy and
a movie.
A few days ago, a pal of mine, who had spent about a year in Iraq in
a nonmilitary but intense position, told me about a recent episode. He
had gone to a bar on a weekend night and had fallen into a dispute
with a bouncer--a big bouncer. My friend, who's not that young and not
that fit, surprised himself by becoming highly aggressive with the
bouncer. He was ready for a fight--eager for it--knowing damn well
that if one came his way, he would end up on the downside of the deal.
Fortunate for him, the moment was defused, and he moved on intact.
"That's not me," he told me. "That's Iraq. After being there, you feel
you don't have to put up with anything here and what happens here is
nothing compared to what happens there."
In Paul Haggis's new film, In the Valley of Elah, GIs come back from
Iraq with a different attitude toward violence and death. The war has
changed them--not by robbing them of limbs, but by stealing them of
innocence (yes, a cliche) and, more important, by undermining their
sense of decency. To say too much would be to give away the mystery in
the movie. But Haggis's point is that besides the obvious impact of
the war--the death count, the physical wounds, the mental injuries
(such as post-traumatic stress disorder), there are other costs--
subtle but deep--to turning young men and women into killers forced to
make choices no one ought to have to face.
As Haggis's film and my friend's experience illustrate, there is a
consequence of war that does not fit into the box scores of lives
lost, troops hospitalized, and money spent. It's what warring turns us
into. And that seems to have been on Springsteen's mind when he penned
the foundational songs of Magic.
Much of the album is imbued with a melancholy and a sense of loss,
even when Springsteen deploys the power chords, searing guitars, and
cascading piano that once (oh so long ago) underscored themes of
youthful exuberance, rebellion and escape. This loaded-with-hooks
album has its obvious moments. On "Last To Die," Springsteen sings,
"Who'll be the last to die for a mistake?" It's John Kerry's once-
famous line rock-and-rollified. (In the last election, Springsteen
campaigned with Kerry.) "The wise men were all fools," Springsteen
wails, as drums pound. Neocons, take note.
But on other tracks, Springsteen eschews the big picture for the nitty-
gritty, chronicling broken souls and detailing lovers lost in grief,
all apparent victims of a faraway war. On the elegiac "Devil's
Arcade," a gravely wounded soldier lies in bed at home and feels "the
glorious kingdom of the sun" on his face, as the song's narrator--
probably his wife--asks him to "just whisper the word 'tomorrow' in my
ear." In the pop-infused (maybe too infused) "Livin' in the Future," a
fellow who's received a letter saying "somethin' 'bout me and you
never seein' one another again" feels untethered from the present
moment. "My faith's been torn asunder," he says, "tell me is that
rollin' thunder/Or just the sinkin' sound of somethin' righteous goin'
under?"
Well, the answer is clear. The ship's gone down, and folks are left to
deal with the wreckage on their own. And the grand sum of all these
individual tragedies marks a societal demise. On the title track--a
somber, violin-draped number--Springsteen sings of a magician who
moves from making a coin disappear to sawing a volunteer into two.
"I'll cut you in half," the sly trickster says, "while you're smiling
ear to ear. And the freedom that you sought's driftin' like a ghost
among the trees." As Springsteen has acknowledged, this song is about
the Bush administration, and the Bush-Cheney magic act ends
apocalyptically:
Now there's a fire down below
But it's comin' up here
So leave everything you know
And carry only what you fear
On the road the sun is sinkin' low
There's bodies hangin' in the trees
This is what will be, this is what will be.
There's a lot more than darkness on the edge of town. There's ruin.
Yet overall the album's music does not match it's downhearted view.
Springsteen creeps along a tight rope, balancing his musical
brightness with his belief the nation has lost its soul at the hands
of deceivers.
He ties it all together, though, in "Long Walk Home." Against
Springsteen's long-perfected anthemic bar-band sound, he sings of
returning--that is, trying to return--to his home town. But things
ain't the same. The place is full of strangers. The veterans hall is
closed: "The diner was shuttered and boarded/With a sign that just
said 'gone.'" He recalls his father once telling him,
Son, we're luck in this town
It's a beautiful place to be born
it just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
That you know flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't.
It's no secret; he's talking not about a fine ol' town but about the
romanticized American ideal. Whether it ever truly existed on the
ground can be debated. (Remember "Born in the U.S.A"?) But what's for
sure is that it's promise has been trampled by the current gang. And
the war's one helluva tipping point. In this song, Springsteen's
narrator sings, "Hey pretty Darling, don't wait up for me/Gonna be a
long walk home."
Springsteen, whose last album was a romping collection of pumped-up
versions of songs associated with Pete Seeger, is not wallowing in
nostalgia. (Bodies hanging in the trees? We're way past nostalgia, he
seems to be saying.) He's expressing a desire. Rock and roll has
always been about yearning. In earlier days, it was about longing for
sex, love, a fast car, flight. You know, "it's a death trap, it's a
suicide rap," and so on. But as he surveys the horizon and sees a
nation in trouble, that small town Springsteen wanted to flee as a
young man doesn't look so bad now--that is, as a symbol of America's
best values: community, compassion, the rule of law. So he's brought
the band together and called upon the rock idiom he knows so well to
share his present-day yearnings. At the age of 58, Springsteen knows
that it's not about running away, it's about walking back. And though
the music soars, his message is mired in realism: this walk is not
going to be easy.
.
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