Born to Interface Part 3

Springsteen’s Foreword to the book describes his town as one where “almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud”, and says of himself, that he was ”…a member in good standing amongst those who ‘lie’ in service of the truth…artists with a small ‘a’”. 

As one ruminates over the meaning and implications of this admission (or brag?), one finds that truth, authenticity and honesty surface often as recurring themes in the thought processes of the singer-songwriter through the writing of the book, Born to Run.

Some of these ideas are explained to the reader when Bruce writes of his first foreign tour when he was twenty-five, and nervous. He writes, “…I know I’m good but I’m also a poser. That’s artistic balance! In the second half of the twentieth century, ‘authenticity’ would be what you made of it, a hall of mirrors", and he proceeds to talk of the experience of being aware of his ‘performance self’, and his ‘true self’ while on stage, and of the ‘multiple personalities…fighting to take turns at the microphone’.

While Springsteen might have mastered the art of striking the right balance between the demands of communication that go with a particular situation, and those of ‘authenticity’, the articulation here does indicate that he sees these as ongoing challenges that are renewed at each live show. One begins to gain a better understanding of what is at the root of the quest of his continuing live performance saga.

Springsteen says: “In the 1960s the first version of my country that struck me as truthful and unfiltered was the one I heard in songs by artists like Bob Dylan…”, and that certain songs “…let me know that someone, somewhere, was speaking in tongues and that absurd ecstasy had been snuck into the Constitution’s First Amendment and was an American birthright. I heard it on the radio”.

In India, the first association with the word ‘birthright’, are the words of a renowned freedom fighter, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who declared: “Freedom is my birthright, and I shall have it”. As far as we are concerned, it was a term that Tilak coined, that has gained global currency.

If Springsteen was made aware of these events of Indian history as a part of the crash-course on human rights he went through before he played at the Amnesty International’s Human Rights Now concert at New Delhi in 1988, then this is an interesting linguistic connection being made in a sentence where he refers to the American Constitution’s First Amendment. It is my guess that he was thinking of the rule of law worldwide, of India, and of Mahatma Gandhi. The overall context is, after all, a discussion on Truth.

For those amongst us with the most exacting standards for Truth and Honesty, even Reality Theatre is an ambiguous phenomenon, where only a version that announces itself as being reality theatre passes the moral test.

Sometimes, however, possibly in the name of using art for social change, one cannot rule out the fact that reality theatre oversteps the limits of truth. In the context of attempts to bring about social change, this might just be another form of ‘astro-turfing’ (not to cherry-pick and dredge facts, but, in this case, to showcase desired reality by bringing it about).

For example, if policewomen in plainclothes, or any group of women, were to occupy public spaces that are not considered safe for women, at times of day that are not safe for women on a regular basis, preferably in empowering, revealing clothing, they would be able to eventually reclaim the space and time as being available equally to all.

Mahatma Gandhi, too, had said something to the effect of ‘be the change you want to see in the world’. Gandhi had attended an important international conference in only a loin-cloth, and was disparagingly referred to as a half-naked fakir. The benchmark for women to be what they want to be in public is a task more difficult than this.

Springsteen’s interesting and unexpected preoccupation with dress will feature later in this series.

Other than the speaking-in-tongues kind of biblical imagery that runs through the book, there are noteworthy instances of development-sector-UN-inspired imagery:

He describes the Upstage Club as “an incredible clearinghouse for musicians”. ‘Clearinghouse’ is a part of the oft-used jargon of the development sector, and is used to describe a bulk of existing documents, talent, connections or networks that are made available on a platform to be accessed, sorted or added value to.

When he was with his father on what he describes as “his seafaring fantasy”, he talks of how his “…dad was lowered, like a sack of United Nations grain, into the tender…”.

Echoes of this, and other UN-centric imagery lead one to glean an element of the aspirational (or the associative), in how the writer interprets his own role in history so far.

Regarding his work in music, he speaks of having been in a ‘transient field’, where he was meant for the ‘long haul’, and says, at one point of the book, that ‘the above case studies prove, no matter who you are, that’s not as easy as it sounds’.

Project-cycles in the UN are often looked at as short, medium and long term, where long-term would mean twenty years.

Further on in the book, Springsteen writes: “I was interested in what it meant to be an American, one small participant in current history at a time when the future seemed as hazy and shape-shifting as that thin line on the horizon. Can a rock ‘n’ roll artist sculpt that line, shade its direction? How much?”.

Springsteen flags a part of his role in world politics in terms of his drives past Checkpoint Charlie, his concerts divided by approximately seven years, and the eventual falling of the wall that divided (the Communist) East Germany from West Germany.

About driving through Checkpoint Charlie, he writes, “you knew the oppression was real…we didn’t forget; we’d be back in 1988 to play for a horizonless field of Eastern Bloc faces…a year later the wall fell”. Springsteen also mentions that the first trip through Checkpoint Charlie had had a deep impact on his friend and band-mate, Steve Van Zandt.

Other than the fact that when bands travel to places to play, there is a cultural interaction and inter-personal exchange of conversations and ideas, perhaps contacts, amongst all those involved at various levels in the immediate logistics of the conducting of a show, the primary impact, in this case, is most likely the impact of Springsteen’s words, and the band’s performance, the energy and assurance that a better world is possible, that played a key role in bringing about seismic socio-political change along this highway (or wall) of history.

This was, however, about the same time as when Springsteen says his music had taken an intentional left turn. Scholars of political science might be able to throw more light on, or confirm the existence of a school of thought that opines that of all the forms of government/state/law (using all the terms in a loosely interchangeable fashion here) that exist, it is prudent to ensure that the best (or most moderate version) of the worst form of government should also be kept alive in some (albeit rudimentary) form in the crucible of civilization.

Today, as the world is witness to a mixture of disruptive energies where it appears that the axis has begun to veer, and that nomenclatures of capitalist, socialist, communist and various permutations and combinations of these seem to be caught in a bizarre dance with labels of democracy, monarchy, military dictatorship, all surging towards One World, space, outer space and cyberspace, we need to look at the constructive energy that might exist in All Things Russian Mentioned in Born To Run!

To be continued…you’ve been reading Born to Interface Part 3