Springsteen, Bruce

1949–

American Rock Singer and Songwriter

Bruce Springsteen's work reflects the impact of social and cultural change on masculinity in America during the late twentieth century. His upbringing in the manufacturing town of Freehold, New Jersey, exposed him to the conservative, patriarchal ethos of a white working-class ethnic community, but his early fondness for rock and roll in the 1950s and the “British Invasion” of the 1960s eventually transformed his view of social and gender relations.

Early in his career, Springsteen relied on the constructions of masculinity prevalent in working-class environments. His early songs feature men resolved to flee small towns “full of losers” (as in “Thunder Road” [Born to Run, 1975]), as well as the more passive attitude of the “little girls” who may or may not go along with them. Paradoxically, it was Springsteen who remained tied to his working-class neighborhood after his family left New Jersey for California in the late 1960s. While moving back and forth between his native Freehold and the declining beach resort of Asbury Park, he met the musicians that would make up the E-Street Band, with whom he has performed with continually since 1971 (with some early personnel changes).

In the 1980s, Springsteen began to question prescribed gender constructions and to address the personal circumstances of both men and women. His music became less tied to his New Jersey roots, and a changing social environment demanded more complex characters in his songs. During this period, well-paid blue-collar jobs vanished, while a new service economy provided mostly dead-end jobs at lower wages. Downward social mobility would consequently undermine the role of men as the sole breadwinner of the family, especially [Page 438]when women, driven by economic necessity and the impact of feminism, entered the job market. This symbolic emasculation of American men can be found in releases from The River (1980), Nebraska (1982), and Born in the U.S.A. (1984).

Springsteen's most characteristic themes are working-class populism, male bonding, and the will to overcome difficulties. These themes overlapped with, and sometimes reinforced, the resurgent conservatism of the 1980s. His antiwar song “Born in the U.S.A.,” for example, was reinterpreted (or misinterpreted) by the public as a nationalist anthem, and President Ronald Reagan hailed him as an example of the self-made individual that Reagan's administration supported. Springsteen's masculine image in his performances also coincided with the conservative religious belief that gender differences are “divinely ordered.”Yet Springsteen himself resisted such conservative constructions, and instead expressed an emergent “sensitive male” ideal that embraced pacifism and accepted homosexuality. For example, he kissed E-Street band saxophone player Clarence Clemmons onstage and added an antimilitaristic introduction to Edwin Starr's “War” on his recording Live 1975–1985 (1986)—but these actions received much less public notice.

After the mid-1980s, Springsteen's liberal attitudes on race, ethnicity, and sexuality became increasingly central to his work. Nonwhite and non-English-speaking workers (“American Skin,” on New York City Live, 2001), gay men (“My Lover Man,” on Tracks, 1998), and poor working women (“Spare Parts,” on Tunnel of Love, 1987) became his protagonists, replacing the unemployed or class-resentful males who had once been his focus of attention.

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