New Jersey

Where to even start here? I guess I could make some New Jersey jokes, but probably you've heard them. Or I could use this post to analyze some of the fine musical stylings of Jersey Shore's Pauly D, who is allegedly a DJ. But, of course, when you think of New Jersey you think of Springsteen. (If you don't, go buy Born to Run immediately and rectify the gap in your musical knowledge.) The hardest part of writing this entry was not thinking of songs to write about, but choosing from the wealth of options created by Bruce and the E Street band during the last 30 years of his career.



A couple of years ago, I was on my way to New York by train and chatted with a man from Georgia who was sitting beside me. He'd never spent any time in the northeast and asked me if our trip, from Philadelphia to Manhattan via New Jersey, would be scenic. I was surprised, and had to break the bad news to him that NJ isn't exactly known for its stunning vistas. Even Bruce Springsteen, arguably its most famous and loyal resident, spends a lot of time singing about how much he'd like to leave New Jersey. And that's what this entry will be about. In New Jersey, I'll consider the traditional American expansionist mentality: the desire to go West in search of a better life.

Earlier in this blog, I looked briefly at the writings of Sir Walter Raleigh and the consistent desire in American art to escape and expand. Springsteen looks from his home state toward loosely “western” spaces like the Badlands, California, and even Florida; he is more concerned with the idea of escape than the destination. "Born to Run" displays perhaps the strongest sensibility of the West as freedom or redemption, though these are themes that run throughout his extensive catalogue. Springsteen associates the West with the redemptive qualities of speed and youth, closely tied to American ideas of rapid progress. His catalogue is filled with songs that crescendo from quiet vocals to bombastic finales as western spaces open before bold young protagonists (“Thunder Road;” “Jungleland”). Springsteen begins “Born to Run” by identifying what must be redeemed through a westward journey: “in the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.” Labor, once a gateway to success in America via the Puritan work ethic of Underhill’s peers, now symbolizes entrapment. Springsteen’s New Jersey home is populated with grim factories and grinding labor. “Working on the Highway” compounds this commentary on the loss of pride in work through a story of what seems to be honest employment, but is really convict’s toil “on the Charlotte County road gang.” “Atlantic City,” however, offers Springsteen’s most negative vision of soulless labor in the East: “Well, I got a job and tried to put my money away/ But I’ve got debts that no honest man can pay… I’ve been looking for a job, but it’s hard to find/ Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line.” In these lines, Springsteen paints a grim portrait of what must be escaped via westward travel.

Economic freedom, an escape from the poverty of Springsteen’s New Jersey, becomes a chief motivation for the speedy escape that “Born to Run” prescribes. Springsteen was “born down in a dead man’s town” where “the street’s on fire/a real death-waltz between what’s flesh and what’s fantasy” (“Born in the USA;” “Jungleland”). “Mainstreet’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores/ Seems like no one wants to come down here no more/They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks/Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back,” he worries in “My Hometown.” In the face of this poverty, he speculates about “packing up our bags maybe heading south.” His greatest desire is to leave the “swamps of Jersey” that bog him down literally in “Rosalita” and spiritually in dozens of other tracks. In the face of impossibly high debts in “Atlantic City” he says, “So I drew what I had from the Central Trust/And I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus.” Springsteen portrays movement—to anywhere new—as the first and most logical escape from sorrow and poverty.

Love and youth also become obsessions for Springsteen in his rejection of the oppressive East. “I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul,” he promises Wendy in “Born to Run.” Most images of westward escape in Springsteen include a partner to escape with, whether “Rosalita,” the woman the narrator addresses in “Atlantic City” or Mary in “Thunder Road.” “Thunder Road” links the romance of escape to the re-attainment or preservation of younger, happier times—a connection first made in Raleigh’s redemptive explorations for Elizabeth. “So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore/ Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night,” Springsteen tells Mary when he proposes that she “climb in” and leave their dreary town behind (“Thunder Road”). They are not too old to hope for a better future together. For Raleigh, the West is a chance to return to past joy; for Springsteen, it is a place to stay young and in love.

So, maybe this entry wasn't about New Jersey, but about how to leave it. No matter what Springsteen thinks about his home state, one thing is certain for me. There is no American musician who captures the spirit of life in our nation the way Springsteen does. Some might argue for Bob Dylan, but I'm ruling him out because at this point I can't even understand him when he sings. The first song I remember hearing was 'Thunder Road.' I was three and my mom had a cassette of Born to Run that she often played in her car. At that age I didn't know who Roy Orbison was, but even at that age I could envision the scene in rest of the opening verse.

The screen door slams,
Mary's dress waves.
Like a vision, she dances across the porch as the radio plays...

No one else has ever captured a moment, and such a quintessentially American one, in the way Springsteen does. When he sings, I'm on my porch too. The boards are too hot under my bare feet and the paint is chalky, a sun-faded blue grey. Screen door springs are always worn out, so the door closes behind me with a metallic clang that rings down across the yard. There's actually nowhere to drive a car near my porch, but every once in a while I still look out past the columns hoping someone will be waiting with an offer to set off for somewhere new. In Springsteen's America he would have a beat up car and guitar. Maybe that's the real American dream--certainly an American tradition, anyway--setting off to explore even though you might not really be ready.

Who would have thought? The most beautiful music about America might come from New Jersey.

Tracks:
Born to Run
Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)
Atlantic City

For more on visions of the West in American music, I recommend Greil Marcus' excellent book Mystery Train.

Florida

I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet,
like a newly orphaned refugee, retracing my steps,
all the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead.
They said, 'You'd better look alive.'
Four Winds, Bright Eyes




I don't have any particularly warm feelings about Florida. Disney World is nice and all, but I doubt I'll ever want to live in a place where the average humidity is a steamy 91% in July and alligators could chomp down my dog/child/leg like a Kit Kat. So why begin my journey here? I started this blog by making a list of each state and then listing the songs I could think of, just off the top of my head, that spoke about it. Some, like the painfully un-rhyme-able Hawaii, remain blank for the moment. Florida, surprisingly, hit upon two of my favorite artists-- Bruce Springsteen, who name drops the state in 1984's 'Working on the Highway,' and Bright Eyes (the sometimes stage name of Nebraskan singer-songwriter Conor Oberst), who penned the lyrics above for 2007 album Cassadaga.

As much as I love The Boss, 'Four Winds' prevailed because it says so much about what I too want to say about America as I write. But we'll get there soon-- some background on the song first. 'Four Winds' was the first single from Cassadaga, an album named for a small Floridian community of psychics. The track itself is replete with Oberst's beloved literary references and SAT vocabulary. (Check out the full lyrics: here). Broadly, it's a song about American cultural diversity, but the concept doesn't get the same laudatory treatment it got in your high school history textbooks. "She breaks, she breaks, she caves, she caves," is the song's final line. Four Winds is about cultures failing to mesh, oil on water rather than a melting pot.

Florida is a great place to begin because it was one of the first places were cultures brushed. Ponce de Leon's expedition of Spanish explorers in search of gold and youth landed in Florida in 1513 and Europeans in all parts of the Americas wasted no time in obliterating, intentionally or just carelessly, the native cultures they found (with the exception of the stupendously hapless Cabeza de Vaca, who really deserves a minute of your time on wikipedia). 'Four Winds' suggests that we haven't made much progress since Ponce de Leon and his contemporaries blazed through pre-Columbian America. "Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe/ There's people always dying trying to keep them alive," Oberst begins. America is a nation founded on taking risks, accepting the possibility of death, to keep your beliefs and your culture alive. But this isn't a song about the American dream. The next verse begins: "The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qur'an is mute/ If you burned them all together you'd be close to the truth," dismissing the value of the traditional religious beliefs that so many Americans hold dear. Oberst isn't very hopeful about America in general. "There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight/in an abandoned building where/ squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl..." Multiculturalism, sure. But squatters and decomposing bodies too.

'Four Winds' isn't a song about the American dream, and this blog isn't about that either. What surprised me most as I looked over that song list was how many tracks reflected what Oberst says so beautifully. There's a darkness to America that seeps out through its music; there's glamor, and hope, and beauty-- but there's something richer, too. A sense that sometimes the spiral is unwinding, the seams are splitting because there's so much underneath. I considered the possibility that this just said something about my music taste, but the spectrum of musicians that voiced similar opinions was remarkably broad. 'Four Winds' is a song about the processes of convergence and divergence that we face in such a vast nation. Cultures don't blend like they might; they're blind, deaf, and mute to one another. The titular winds never converge: they ruffle the hair of the Mexican girl, "cry" and level stands of trees. There's pressure from all sides, and Oberst isn't sure we can stand up to it.

Expansion, another key aspect of the American dream, isn't the answer either. (This theme will come up over and over again as I write.) The notion of a frontier is one of the earliest aspects of American literature, extending back to Sir Walter Raleigh's travels "to seek new worlds, for gold, for praise, for glory” after being slighted by Elizabeth I. Traditionally a symbol of attainment and success, the frontier in modern music remains present but becomes less tangible than it was for early explorers. In 'Working on the Highway,' the young couple at the center of the song reach their frontier-- a new life in Florida-- but aren't allowed to stay. Their motivations weren't so valorous anyway; they ended up in Florida to escape disapproving parents. Oberst's description of himself as a "newly orphaned refugee, retracing [his] steps/all the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead" suggests that he doesn't place much faith in exploration either. He and the psychics of Cassadaga seek belonging among a group that is no longer even on Earth, never mind in Florida. Is it because he doesn't feel there's any place for him among America's living population? Because that population is so lacking in cohesion that there's no way to identify it and decide if he could belong?

That's what America is about, after all. People seeking a place where they can belong. In this blog, I'll explore the way musicians belong to their places, or come to the conclusion that they actually don't.

Florida is a place we go at the beginnings and ends of our lives, softened in memories with a humid haze around the edges. As children we take a spin in Walt Disney's magical teacups, and when we're old we retire there to bask in the enveloping warmth of tropical sun. It's a place to escape from what happens in between these two poles of existence, apart from Springsteen's seedy romance and Oberst's bitter dismissal of our cherished national identity. A place at the fringe of our country, for people on the fringe of society like Cassadaga's psychics. A place to visit, but not to stay. So let's go on.

Tracks:
Working on the Highway
Four Winds
The Killers' fantastic Four Winds cover