The powerful assert their privilege to sing backup in pop’s great reset.
The expurgated verse of Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 “Glory Days” portrayed working-class depression now forgotten in the rock idol’s wealthy dotage. Here’s that lyric:
My old man worked twenty years on the line
And they let him go
Now everywhere he goes out looking for work
They just tell him that he’s too old
I was nine years old and he was working
At the Metuchen Ford plant assembly line
Now he just sits on a stool down at the Legion Hall
But I can tell what’s on his mind
Not only was that verse omitted from the song’s official-release recording, but its sentiment was also missing from Springsteen’s recent rendition in Barcelona, Spain, where he performed “Glory Days” onstage, with Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, and Kate Capshaw, the wife of Steven Spielberg, serving as backing vocalists.
There they were — tycoons — showing the world their advantages, indifferent to the Vietnam vets who once were Springsteen’s original subject. Now Springsteen and his middle-aged cheerleader-tourists display indifference by escaping America’s current turmoil. They reminisce about the song’s vision of baseball America as a cultural ideal — now a place to invade. It was a performance of peculiar ambassadorship.
The ’80s nostalgia of “Glory Days,” from Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. album, always had a skeptical undercurrent, its rebuke of Ronald Reagan’s presidency anchored to the sorrow felt from the Vietnam War. The song’s Millennial revival carries a different meaning today, when good times and secure jobs are delusions. Bruce, Michelle, and Kate karaoke blithely, as if American produce wasn’t overpriced, the supply chain worked, crime was no concern, and the border was secure — or unnecessary. It’s both fake nostalgia and fake news. Yet, Bruce, Michelle, and Kate looked happy; living their best lives, vacationing in Spain and flaunting their globalist privilege — extending Obama’s 2008 apology tour as rich folks’ triumph.
Springsteen’s first verse of “Glory Days” evokes baseball (the all-American sport), and his elision of factory labor (the all-American grind) exposes the duplicity of his conceit. The song no longer celebrates common-man memory or tradition. Given the backup by the Obama-ettes, it asserts arriviste privilege, an elitist rant. The spontaneity of the Barcelona stunt — its nowness — challenges anyone who would deny that these Covid-apocalypse days are the new glory days.
Back in the Seventies, when Springsteen ingeniously positioned himself as a working-class hero who deserved his ultimate triumph, I, too, fell for the all-American romanticism of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. I still think they’re his best records. But this preceded the cynical, Nobel Prize–winning, racially mixed posture of Obama’s cultural-electoral victory and the victimhood Spielberg pretended to overcome in The Fabelmans.
Since attaining eminence, Springsteen has come to represent the same national virtues invoked in Spielberg’s films and Obama’s speeches. The Born in the U.S.A. album was praised as “heartland” rock music, even though its forlorn closing track, “My Hometown,” was utterly facetious about American race relations. (“There was nothing you could do.”) The album’s bogus image of all-American virtues (remember the Born in the U.S.A. album cover featured Springsteen’s blue-jeaned buttocks mooning the American flag) connects to what eventually became the “hope and change” coup. Spielberg has also spent the past few years selling Aberrant Patriotism to the world (Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, West Side Story, The Fabelmans), and that’s what defines the Barcelona performance.
On their obnoxious Spotify podcast Renegades: Born in the USA, the pop musician and former president promote each other as fellow travelers — from self-infatuated muzhiks to international VIPs. They high-five each other ideologically, just as Spielberg’s salute to Obama through Lincoln was also fan worship among the elites. Yet their appeal to average-man good times in the redux “Glory Days” is undeniably political — like everything associated with the Obamas — and it actually betrays the notion of bootstrap achievement. Michelle plays tambourine but obviously doesn’t know the lyrics while Kate air-kisses Patti Scialfa, Springsteen’s wife. Such demagogic disloyalty, coming from the most prominent people on the planet, gives “Glory Days” the political and cultural heft to be the Great Reset’s new anthem.
Mainstream rock music is no longer rebellious. There’s been a revolution — not by acned, tattooed teenagers, but by Boomers from the top. Bruce, the Obamas, and the Spielbergs enthusiastically tune out anyone who dares look back to the previous “Make American Great Again” administration. They promote fan worship at its worst. When the camera pans to Barack at the stage wings, nodding his approval of the act, it captures the ultimate political pantomime.