Bruce Springsteen’s middle way is more vital than ever

Bruce Springsteen in the Jeep Super Bowl advertisement.

“There’s a chapel in Kansas standing on the exact centre of the lower 48. It never closes. All are more than welcome to come meet here in the middle.

“It’s no secret the middle has been a hard place to get to lately. Between red and blue. Between servant and citizen. Between our freedom and our fear. Now fear has never been the best of who we are, and as for freedom, it’s not the property of just the fortunate few. It belongs to us all, whoever you are, wherever you’re from. It’s what connects us and we need that connection. We need the middle.”

With these words one of rock’s greatest stars, Bruce Springsteen, began an advert that was screened during the Super Bowl on Monday (AEDT) and which the Jeep company had been persuading him to make for a decade. He saw it, apparently, as something akin to a prayer, a message to his country. And it concluded with the words “To the ReUnited States of America” appearing on the screen.

But if it was a prayer, what to? And if it was a message, a message about what? Apart from “I think you should buy this moderately expensive sports utility vehicle”. What does Springsteen mean by “the middle”?

Bruce Springsteen in 1984 — his Born in the USA period.

It’s worth pausing a moment to say why this advert, seen by nearly 100 million viewers of American football’s championship game, matters. Bruce Springsteen has always had the capacity to capture a feeling, to narrate a story, to paint a picture, to describe a mood. It’s this, as much as the muscularity of his sound, that led people to give up lives and careers to join him long before he had any sort of hit. His early manager thought him “a combination of Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry and Shakespeare” before later adding that he felt in promoting Springsteen he was less manager, more “John the Baptist heralding Bruce’s coming to the world”.

When Springsteen has engaged in party politics it has consistently been on the liberal side and sometimes importantly so, as when he endorsed Barack Obama during the 2008 fight with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yet his appeal has always been broader than that, and when he speaks he is listened to as someone who “gets” his country and understands what it is or at least what it yearns to be.

So it matters when Bruce Springsteen says that “we need the middle”. Especially because it is not a very rock’n’roll thing to say. Which only leaves the question: what did he mean by it?

When Springsteen talks of the middle, he starts with his idea of the middle person, the “ordinary” person, and their often hard lives. In his recent memoir he described how he found his political voice in his fourth album Darkness on the Edge of Town. “I determined that there, on the streets of my hometown, was the beginning of my purpose, my reason, my passion. Along with Catholicism, in my family’s neighbourhood experience, I found my other ‘genesis’ piece, the beginning of my song: home, roots, blood, community, responsibility, stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive.”

He is also reflecting on his own beliefs which often conflict and meet, if at all, in the middle. The man who says his work is rooted in his neighbourhood experience writes constantly of escaping. In his 2018 Broadway show he joked that after all his talk of being born to run, “I currently live 10 minutes from my hometown”. A man driven by his difficult relationship with his father has recorded countless songs that are a homage to his father. He admits he has lived a rock star’s life with a working man’s identity. “I’ve never seen the inside of a factory and yet it’s all I’ve ever written about.” A man who recoils from stadiums has become boss (The Boss) of the arena concert. A man who hates hype, hypes himself. A man who won’t make an advert makes one.

One of his greatest songs, Born in the USA, became an anthem for the right even though Springsteen’s intention was to make a protest song, as the lyrics make clear, even while the guitars do not. The singer regarded Ronald Reagan as a nostalgist, yet there is a strong strand of nostalgia in Springsteen’s work.

So his paean to “the middle” may simply capture his contradictions. But there’s more to it than that. I think Springsteen, with his sense of the mood, has understood that it isn’t just him that needs the middle: “We need the middle”.

The polarisation of public life has begun to frighten people: the unwillingness to compromise, the talking past each other, the trading of insults, the lack of a common language, the lack even of an agreed truth or sense of what truth is. It’s much more obvious and much more advanced in the United States (the Kansas chapel Springsteen visits in the advert is in a county that voted nearly 80 per cent for Donald Trump), but we’re not immune from it here in Britain.

Bruce Springsteen’s paean to “the middle” may simply capture his contradictions. Picture: AFP.

Whenever I describe myself as having quite middle-of-the-road politics, people respond: “Well, you know what happens to people who stand in the middle of the road, don’t you? They get run over.” Well not if it’s a dual carriageway they don’t. I think the middle isn’t a bad place to be when people are driving too fast in opposite directions.

The biggest problems associated with “the middle” – that it involves endless compromises, that it means splitting the difference, that it means living with things that you don’t like for longer than you want to – are not ones we should run away from. Living with other people means bending a little towards what they think and want.

Springsteen in concert in Melbourne in 1985.

Even when it’s uncomfortable for, say, a liberal who believes in open borders to make concessions to the views of others who take a tougher line on immigration. A society has to have a means to accommodate its differences and make decisions, which is why representative democracy, loser’s consent in elections and abiding by the law have to be protected so fiercely.

Without them compromise is impossible. And a properly regulated, market-based economy (coupled with welfare provision) allows people to reach agreement about what they want to buy and sell, and make and do. It was interesting and not inappropriate that Springsteen’s appeal to the middle was made in a TV commercial.

Reaching the middle, the average, of views is not an abandonment of principle; it is trying to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. A wisdom that relies on collective sense but also the individual’s willingness to strike out for themselves ("when they said ‘sit down’ I stood up,” as Springsteen sings in Growin’ Up).

The Boss is right about “the middle”. It is the road ahead.

The Times