Why is Springsteen Doing All the Hard Work?
Julie Roginsky
On Monday night, I saw the most important concert of my life at Madison Square Garden. For three hours, Bruce Springsteen did something almost no major artist in America is doing right now: he told the truth.
A 76-year-old man stood in the middle of the world’s most famous arena and held up a mirror to the country — brutal, frightened, violent, and exhausted but still capable of grace and rescue, still not yet beyond saving. He did it with the body of work he has been building for half a century, long before Donald Trump darkened our national door. Song by song, wound by wound, he connected the horrors of this moment to the horrors he has been writing about for decades: war, abandonment, racism, poverty, police violence, homelessness, immigration, greed, hollow patriotism, shattered cities, and the stubborn hope that ordinary people can still save one another and the country.
I have been to a lot of concerts in my life and at least twenty-five other Springsteen shows over the course of many decades. This was unlike any of them.
The Land of Hope and Dreams tour is not Springsteen’s most fun and it is not the most nostalgic. It is also not the easiest. I would not want to sit through this concert again, though I ran to watch him over and over again on previous tours. This is how gut-wrenching this experience was — and how necessary.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/why-is-springsteen-doing-all-the
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