We Take Care of Our Own: Faith, Class, and Politics in the Art of Bruce Springsteen

Journalist Sawyers (Bob Dylan’s New York) explores how Bruce Springsteen has lyricized the “often-considerable gap between American reality and the American Dream” in this insightful account. Drawing on his blue-collar New Jersey roots, Springsteen explored his political consciousness in such songs as “Youngstown,” “a searing and angry portrait of a dying steel town” that highlights the plight of the working man. Though these songs now endear him to whiter, more conservative listeners, Springsteen is a “Roosevelt-era” liberal who prioritizes civil morality and social equality, according to Sawyer, who writes that the country’s contract to “take care of [its] own” is also the subject of Springsteen’s more “polarizing” songs, including “American Skin (41 Shots),” a blunt retelling of the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York City. Going beyond the stereotype of Springsteen as a chronicler of the white everyman, Sawyer examines his focus on social issues like AIDS and the Iraq War and provides an intriguing analysis of how his Catholic roots intersect with his political consciousness (several lyrics refer to a “Promised Land” that is in some songs symbolic of “the hopefulness and optimism of America itself” and elsewhere “more legend than reality”). It’s a dynamic portrait of the complicated political and social influences of a rock legend. (Sept.)