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Music’s power to influence, to ease, to pleasure, to cajole, to invigorate, to march, to calm, exceeds almost every other human endeavor. It can work miracles – it can soothe the beast, calm the distraught, enrapture the sacred and the profane alike – but it can’t achieve the impossible.
David Brooks remembers how music began his post-University of Chicago real world education. It did not begin, "Hello, everyone," with which classicist Karl Haas introduced middle America to Adventures in Good Music. Nope, David Brooks was born to run when he discovered The Boss:
[O]n the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.
Bobo "wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering." He was "hooked" by the "emotional uplift" of his music. Assuming his readers won’t believe their eyes, he repeats that Dale Carnegie-ish phrasing: "The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning." Expecting sustained incredulity, Bobo waxes about having followed Mr. Springsteen "into his world" of "teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law."
Like most of us, Bobo didn’t venture into the badlands of northern New Jew Jersey or visit the blighted mills arcing from Pittsburgh to Chicago. He didn’t attempt to land that first big gig, to broadcast that first single or to publish that first album (or the second, to show it was talent, not a fluke). Average guy Bobo went to New York, Brussels and suburban Washington, DC, for the Wall Street Journal, the National Review and the New York Times. But he claims that he learned about the real world by walking a mile in Mr. Springsteen’s music, not his shoes, and that he learned what he knows about the virtues and dignity of the common woman, the loser, the average Joe and Jamal, from listening to The Boss:
[O]ver the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.
What grades, do you think, Mr. Springsteen would award Mr. Brooks for retention, comprehension and application?
21 Comments
I grant that anyone can enjoy Bruce Springsteen, but I suspect that David Brooks knows as much about the everyday world of today’s average Joes and Janes, and cares less, as he does about economics. Zilch, nothing, nada, and that he’s secretly proud of it. But it’s good propaganda occasionally to throw bread to the mob and to be seen to eat some of it, too.
“In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.” ; well, he obviously failed the curriculum.
Bobo may enjoy Springsteen’s music. He vehemently disagrees with his politics and has no emotional attachment to his concerns – middle America and the working poor, and the newly poor, owing to Reagan and Bush’s politics. But hey, Bobo telling the NYT readership in a dedicated column that he’s an average guy and likes average guy things is like the head of Goldman Scratch claiming he “does charity” because he feeds cats.
When I started reading this I was saying, now this doesn’t sound right. How is Brooks going to claim “education” from this music?
But since it’s Brooks, I figured the code has to be in there somewhere, and I think I found it here:
What’s one big chord that’s absent in Bruce? What do his “losers” lack? Political activism! None of the protagonists are political fighters. They’re either destroyed by defeat, or take refuge in nostalgia or escapism. Many of the best songs are about, not fighting to make your world a better place, but getting in a car and escaping.
So Brooks sneakily approves of music he thinks tells you to “retain your dignity” by pulling up yourself up by your own emotional bootstraps, or better yet just using cheap emotion to pretend you’ve been pulled up.
At any rate, dignity is a private, solitary matter, never a collective, political one. That’s the message Brooks hopes emanates from Bruce and from rock in general.
(I don’t mean any of that as a negative commentary on Bruce, whose music I take for what it is – good but not having any real political significance. That’s referring especially to the 70s era stuff brooks is talking about. I assume he didn’t mean to include something like the Diallo song.
But when someone like Brooks writes about it, I take it for granted there is an ulterior political motive.)
You nailed him perfectly.
Add the column on the choice for “vibrancy” versus caring for each other and you get. It’s OK to be a loser in a vibrant moneyocracy. Look you can always have dignity.
Helps me to not feel quite so guilty in my loathing for Brooks.
Interesting!!
I was never a groupie of the Boss like my brother, Frank. I liked his tunes but never his message and you have probably nailed the reason why.
NW, unfortunately, the idea that “In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their dignity….” is false. Here are the lyrics from Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”; where is the retention of ‘dignity’? And if the story sounds a lot like what is happening now, then it just goes to show how little has changed in 40 odd years.
“Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much
‘Til you spend half your life just covering up
[chorus:]
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I got in a little hometown jam
And so they put a rifle in my hands
Sent me off to Vietnam
To go and kill the yellow man
[chorus]
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
I go down to see the V.A. man
He said “Son don’t you understand”
[chorus]
I had a buddy at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
He had a little girl in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years down the road
Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go
I’m a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I’m a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A. “
I think that’s a good bet. Some of Brooks’ columns may sound “personal” or like filler on a slow news day, but they are unlikely to be either. He is a conservative pundit during a Democratic administration, and he occupies real estate on the NYT’s op-ed page. He uses it for paid advertising for his patrons.
Bruce Springsteen isn’t one of them, but suggesting that someone as nebbishy and conservative as Brooks educated himself by listening to Springsteen co-opts his name and music – notably used by Democrats the last several election cycles. When neither the pundit nor his party has any dry powder for their weapons, the next best thing he can do is to pour water on the other guy’s.
I heard Brooks on the NewsHour, the first time I have listened to either in a while. He was actually making sense on Afghanistan. He talked about how the COIN strategy required a massive involvement and 10 years and that it was nation building. OK, I thought nation building in Afghanistan is likely more thant a 10 year deal but I kind of agreed with the rest. He asked why we were there, a question I often ask in terms of policy (or the lack of one). Brooks went on to say how it was better that Obama take his time to get things right. This was still reasonable even if it indirectly justified Obama’s expected 34,000 troop increase. I thought it was unusual that Brooks could go this long without inserting a talking point. With him, there is always a talking point. I waited and there it was at the end. If we leave the Taliban will take over and that will be a disaster. That this contradicts all of his prior talk of the complexity of the issue and the length of time needed to assess is of course vintage Brooks. His bottomline is that we must stay in Afghanistan for a minimum 10 more years or the Taliban win.
Also I should point out that Brooks’ writing shares a lot with Jack Kerouac and Hunter Thompson. He was deeply influenced by both from the time he once saw a copy of On the Road in a bookstore and someone mentioning gonzo reporting in a conversation.
If it helped his cause, Bobo would claim to be a knowledgeable, indeed an empathetic, but recovering DFH, because he once changed planes in SFO.
Another theory:
Could it be that his mother was a Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman who won a pink Cadillac? Influenced by The Boss, Bobo dreamed of stealing it and driving away from the suburban hell hole he lived in. Driving fast through the night to rid himself of the stink of cheap lotions by indulging in cheap thrills.
Or did Bobo embrace the Mary Kay experience that preached “emotional leadership is fundamental to leadership success” (From “More Than a Pink Cadillac” by Jim Underwood). Armed with the “we are elected to serve others and find great satisfaction in giving” Mary Kay philosophy, Bobo got into the U of Chicago. He arrived in his mother’s pink Cadillac. It was here where he thought he would meet other true believers in the American entrepreneurial spirit. “God didn’t have time to make a nobody –only a somebody,” Mary Kay said. And when asked “How are you?”, you always answer “Great!” His mother’s mission had been to enrich women’s lives. Bobo would now enrich men and women’s lives. He would learn at U of Chicago that there were really a chosen few whose mission it was to bring the message of the free market to all mankind for this enrichment. And although there were no nobodys, there was a hierarchy of somebodys.
Brooks says in his article
I submit this as evidence that Brooks was heavily influenced by Mary Kay before he heard The Boss’ song. And I submit that rather than a million strings, his inner instrument has one dull chord.
You are wonderful! Love it.
What’s a Taliban “win”, I wonder? Is it more onerous for us – or more importantly, for Afghans – than a “win” for this tribal leader or that? Do we know or care, or are words like “Taliban” and AQ now just cattle prods for the GOP base? Has any foreigner won in Afghanistan since Alexander the Great? If the stakes are that high, initiate a draft and send Elizabeth Cheney, Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling, along with Jamal, Frank, Betsy and Niki to fight it. If not, get out.
If we stay in Afghanistan, we stay at war. It’s just as good as the GWOT: it justifies being “hard right” on everything from using tasers on grandma or reading her e-mail and listening to her phone calls, to outsourcing kill squads to Blackwater. It all makes lots of money for Mr. Brooks’ patrons and keeps us all kneeling in our pews, hoping the next harsh restriction on civil liberties will be the one to end all terror.
I love it when the Simpsons use good rock music in the show. It irritates me when I hear good rock used by madison Avenue. It feels like cultural treason to hear it stolen by the Right.
On the other hand, the Pretenders song that Rush uses as him intro, I once heard that used in a porn movie. It must have been at the end of a hard days shooting because the male star needed lots of help to… anyway the hythm was perfect, and now whenever I hear Limbaugh’s opener, I have the image to go along with it.
OMG, Hugh@7 had me going for a moment there! It was yeah, they all three use keyboards to write…
Brooks loves Springsteen. Whatever. It’s mediocre worships mediocre, IMO.
Read the comments on the Brooks piece. They are so much better than that piece of drivel.
I recall that Brooks, who claims he coined the term, is a self-avowed Bobo.
From Wiki:
But I betcha that Bobo is actually a hypocrite even in terms of his Bobo-ism. I bet he buys foreign all the time. And given his statements on policies he has very little actual interest in working class America other than his assertions that he’s a conspicuous consumer.
Anyone know his actual “roots”? He was born in Toronto. Is he even a US citizen? Upper, or Upper-Middle class? Did his family ever face an economically threatening situation?
Bobo is a US citizen; he grew up in lower Manhattan. His academic background is an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Chicago.
Here’s a bit of trivia. David Brooks and David Axelrod both grew up in Middle Class Jewish families in Peter Cooper Village in Stuyvesant Town in Lower Manhattan. Both ended up at the Univ. of Chicago. The major difference is that Axelrod was born in 1955 and like many of his era were attracted to the Democratic Party via the Kennedy’s. Brooks was born in 1961 and would have been coming into adolescence in the post-Nixon Reagan era. When Brooks starts fulminating about hearing “The Boss” in 1975 or so it would be as a young guy a bit out of the loop. Springsteen was, for the cool kids, already a bit of a big thing back in the early part of that decade. He’d been playing in the smallish Jersey and NY clubs for six years, and was going into larger venues like Winterland.
By 1975 Bruce was “big time”…being rather ostentatiously hailed as “the next Dylan” on the cover of the Rolling Stone, and getting spreads in Newsweek and Time magazines (the same week, IRRC). Clearly Bobo wasn’t very hip…the Ramones were the band the ones in the know were going to see in 1975. New wave and punk rock at CBGB’s were what a 14 year old from the East Village should have been listening to if he were truly “hip”.