BIG READ: Them Big Boys did what Hitler couldn’t do
As deindustrialisation corroded US working-class life, Bruce Springsteen’s music has moved from escape to reckoning
Bruce Springsteen’s remarkable body of work has tracked the declining fortunes of the white working class in the US since the 1970s. Beginning in the 1990s it also moved towards profoundly empathetic portrayals of migrants and offered a vision of a route into wider solidarities, a route spurned by the millions who have chosen Donald Trump and his politics of open racism and xenophobia.
Springsteen was 25 years old when, in August 1975, his magnificent third album, Born to Run, exploded into the world. By October he was on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week. The title track, with its rushing wall of sound, was about getting out of the working class life into which Springsteen had been born, getting out in a muscle car, perhaps a Mustang: ..
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