plum-soup:

idk despite all of bruce springsteen’s protestations he STILL maintains a fanbase of lame republican boomers so like. i think the problem kinda HAS to be his music and the fact that it isn’t clear enough in its criticism. like it’s not just that people misunderstand him or he got too popular and people ignored his lyrics…that might be true for some but i don’t buy it on a wider scale. just because it’s “country rock” or whatever you want to call it (is the jersey shore “country” now??) doesn’t mean people will automatically assume it to be patriotic, just look at what happened to the dixie chicks! like bruce springsteen NEVER suffered a backlash like that.

So maybe his music isnt as radical as people seem to think? his fanbase certainly doesn’t think so, and in fact I think many see his political criticisms through the bias of their own conservative boomer values. like its too open to interpretation, and the criticism is clearly not harsh or biting enough, or most right wing people in the country would hate his guts just like they hate the Dixie Chicks

Like, “a rejection of the ‘American dream’ as illusory” looked like a feasible progression of “mid-Atlantic industrial-metropolitan young white man from a working class, rockist background who is confronting disillusionment and empty, broken promises of the post-Golden Age” when he started his career and built his brand in the late 70s and 80s but was not ultimately the path much of the similarly-positioned audience he built took