Glory Days: Introducing a New Series on the Value and Loss of a Working Class Aesthetic in a Polarized America

“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”- Bruce Springsteen

           The first thing we need to recognize right off the bat is that Bruce Springsteen is full of shit.

           The guy who sang “It’s the workin’/ just the workin’/ just the workin’ life” in 1978’s “Factory” hasn’t worked a regular job in his entire life. The guy who was punching his baseball mitt and wearing workboots and jeans in the video for 1985’s “Glory Days” earned $80 million touring behind Born in the USA. The guy who claimed in “Racing in the Street” to have a “’69 Chevy with a 396/ Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor” couldn’t even get that right; as car nuts have been pointing out for decades, the 396 was a big-block engine, and fuel-injected cylinder heads can’t go on a big block.

           The other thing we need to recognize, though, is this: it doesn’t freakin’ matter.

           Everyone knew that Bruce wasn’t actually a construction worker, a union pipefitter, a factory hand. But for an artist like Bruce Springsteen, born to a working class family in Long Branch, NJ, who had his commercial breakthroughs in the 1970s and 80s (arguably the high point of working class representation in popular culture), the yardstick of success was simple: if you want regular people to like your stuff, you better look and act like regular people. And like his stuff they did: by 2012, Born in the USA had sold 30 million copies worldwide.

           Arguing about authenticity is a sucker’s game, the province of hipsters and scenesters and all the other types of cranks you’ll find loitering around the outskirts of a fading empire. I come not to bury The Boss, but to praise him. Though Bruce Springsteen may be an elite (I can think of no better word to describe someone who has spent as much time in the stratosphere as he has), he is an elite who works in a very particular vein: as an embodiment of the working class ethos, which he translates into a working class aesthetic (automobile fact errors notwithstanding).

           So, what is this ethos, this aesthetic? What does it mean to be working class, and how does that translate into art, music, literature? These are the questions I’ll be exploring in the coming weeks (or months, or however long my gracious host will continue to put up with me). For I think these questions raise other, subtler but perhaps more poignant questions: Who speaks for the working class? Do elites have a responsibility to focus on working class concerns? What can we say about a nation or culture that validates or prioritizes the lives of blue collar men and women? More significantly, what can we say about a nation or culture that ignores or even demonizes those same lives and experiences? What are the political ramifications of any of this?

           Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” One of the defining features of our current media landscape is the sheer multiplicity of voices and stories that are being told, through outlets too numerous to count. Clearly, this is not in itself a bad thing; there is no canon whose borders wouldn’t benefit from stretching to include more authors, more stories, more nuance. But, as many have pointed out before me, our loss of a popular monoculture has not been without its drawbacks. Television shows like Roseanne, or Roc, or  Chico and The Man; heartland rock, grunge, outlaw country, and the golden age of rap; the realist films of the auteur-driven 1970s through some of the blockbusters of the 1980s; all of these were mainstream examples of working class art. Their relative absence in the contemporary pop-culture firmament speaks volumes about the types of stories we’re currently interested in telling.

           The characters that inhabit Bruce Springsteen’s catalog collectively offer us a way to understand ourselves, to explain ourselves to others, and ultimately to be remembered. And they are not simple portraits, nor easy glorifications: the people in his songs may work hard and dream big, but they also walk out on their families, outrun the cops, or spend the last of their money on a weekend in Atlantic City. That these lives were captured, warts and all, mattered; that these songs were popular, widespread, a part of the cultural stew in which most of us marinated mattered even more.

           As I noted earlier, the 1970s and 1980s were the high-water mark for popular representations of working class culture; not coincidentally, they were also the high-water mark for working class wages and labor union participation. They were, in a very real sense, the glory days. Today, despite the fact that working class Americans still represent the biggest chunk of the population, our popular culture bears little trace of us: at best, our stories slip through the cracks into silos, niches, or sub-genres, and at worst we become caricatures, cartoonish stereotypes, easily mocked and even more easily ignored. What happens to a working class nation in the absence of the connective tissue of mainstream representation, as we start finding it harder to understand ourselves, or to have others understand us, or to even try? What happens to these stories if no one tells them, or if no one listens?

For one answer, we can turn to another generation-defining working class rock star: Eddie Vedder. In December of last year, Eddie (it seems fitting to call him by his first name) released an EP of home-recorded acoustic tracks, including a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up,” and a solo performance of the Pearl Jam classic “Porch.” That song, from 1991’s mammoth LP Ten, offers us in the second verse a line which has, unfortunately, proven to have aged quite well: “There ain’t gonna be any middle anymore.”