Nebraska

The time has come when we can no longer pretend that we’re in control. An incipient sense of cosmic disorder, for the past year gnawing away at the fringes of our collective consciousness, has suddenly become devastatingly palpable.

In a world staggering punch drunkenly from crisis to crisis, where several drawn out wars involving carnage of bloody and gruesome callousness are being wages even as these words are being written, the wolf seems finally to have come to the door of those who through the late sixties and most of the seventies were cosseted and inoculated against the effects of global mismanagement. The western world can no longer afford its traditional complacency because there is no longer a surplus of money in the corporate kitty. Complacency don’t come cheap.

It is no longer an issue which affects only a marginal percentage. The effects of world economic crisis are coming home to roost on your own doorstep in the form of escalating unemployment, markets cut in half, pay frozen and therefore decreasing in real terms, social services cut, the machinery of State grinding to a halt. Welcome to the modern world.

Take it down to you and me and these little black lumps of plastic we love to celebrate and the picture is the same. That’s the context from which the reference to ‘markets cut in half’ above is drawn: in Ireland, the number of records sold in the first nine months of 1982 equals almost precisely 50% of the figure charted by the same stage of 1981, itself not ‘a good year’ according to industry insiders. It isn’t just that the wolf has come to the door; there’s a ravenous pack of the scabrous carnivores and they’re backed up by a corps of militant bleedin’ rats after blood. There’ll be a plague of redundancies in the music business very soon, and maybe a closure or two. Just a microcosm of what’s happening on a national, and an international scale. If you want to meet your local rock’n’roll stars, the dole would be the best place to start. There aren’t the gigs, there isn’t the money, so what can a poor boy do?

Cut the frills, strip things down, pare them back till there’s just the raw skin and bone left. It’s a bleak fuckin’ terrain out there so cut your cloth to match. The word recession is just a few crummy letters away from depression, which is how it feels when you’re out of work and out of cash. It’d turn a body to drink if you could afford it but when you can’t it’d turn a soul to granite. Steel yourself to do one job and the next one is easier. Or one shot. You want to talk about our chronic drug problem. Or the scarifying escalation in crimes of violence. Talk about urban decay, bureaucratic indifference, housing wastelands, enforced indolence, chronic overcrowding, rampant poverty, incipient malnutrition and a bum education system first. Talk about ignorance right left and centre: in the corridors of power because that’s the way they are up there and in the sprawling suburban ghettoes because its enforced and re-inforced from the time a toddler tries to take those first tentative steps towards self discovery and finds that putting a hand to ones’ genitals is a crime against not just humanity but something allegedly much much bigger and capable of even more barbarous acts of cruel vindictiveness. It’s as if we’ve internalised a vicious concept of hell and made our own world in its likeness.

This feeling of brooding despair, of barren desperation permeates Nebraska. It’s an album of stark vignettes, grim in their message of unrelenting malady, and bleak, utterly unremittingly bleak, in their execution. Even those songs which might have been up, in which Springsteen invokes the spirit of Chuck Berry in the bodily form of a chunka chunka rock’n’roll tune, it’s ultimately clear we’re being invited to a wake. The protagonist of ‘State Trooper’, on an inevitable collision course with the forces of law and order ("license, registration I ain’t got none/but I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I done/Mister State Trooper, please don’t stop me"), is haunted by the ghosts of childhood dreams and adolescent optimism. "Hey somebody out there, listen to my last prayer/Hi ho silver-o deliver me from nowhere", he pleads, succeeding only, in underlining the searing futility of his illusions.

‘Open All Night’, in which his homage to Chuck berry is most manifest – he paraphrases ‘Too Much Monkey Business’: "5am oil pressures sinkin’ fast/I make a pitstop wipe the windshields, check the gas", ends on a similar note of doomed optimism. Remove the traditional rock’n’roll accessories, the sparkling guitar, the pumping bass, the whacking drums and you’re left with a lonely boy hollerin like a wounded coyote. It doesn’t strip the form of its (loco) emotive powers but the sense of celebration is completely gone. The ultimate picture is of a country, a species, a world which had lost its direction. "Our eyes get itchin in the wee wee hours/suns just a red ball risin’ over them refinery towers/Radio’s jammed up with gospel stations/lost souls calling long distance salvation/Hey Mr. Deejay woncha hear my last prayer/Hey ho rock’n’roll deliver me from nowhere". The message of Nebraska is that it can’t and it won’t. Or not right now, at any rate, with the way things are.

Nebraska has been conceived in terms of black ‘n’ white movie, but that distancing device doesn’t diminish the feeling of appalling relevance. CBS might consider printing up a ‘Back To The Thirties’ button badge to promote the record except that it’d transgress the very kernel of the album’s power: its Spartan lucidity. Or maybe ‘Back to the Fifties’ might be more pertinent: there may not have been quite the same air of panic in the economic sphere but it was a bitter, grey era of enforced austerity and that’s the way the eighties are shaping up. It’s turn more than a few honest men to crime. "Now I been lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find", the protagonist of ‘Atlantic City’ confesses, "Down here its just winners and losers/and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line/well I’m tired of comin’ out on the losin’ end/so honey last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a favour for him…" That’s how the scenario is unfolding.

In the end, it’s the little guys that get squeezed. Springsteen takes his identification with blue collar workers to a new level on Newbraska without ever becoming tainted with guilt at the level of freedom and wealth his success has engendered. It’s a question of technique: his simple narrative structures achieve the intended insight without unnecessary comment. In every way this is a bare, solemn record of disadvantage and despair.

Where it isn’t a question of social deprivation, an even more fundamental malevolence rears it head. In ‘Highway Patrolman’, an unbearably sad refrain embodies the broken spirit of a reluctant policeman who sees his brother turn murderer. It reverses the perspective of the title track, a rewrite of the true story on which Terry Malick’s explosive ‘Badlands’ was based. Told from the point of view of a multiple killer, it’s brutal in its empty detachment, culminating in a last line of shattering appropriateness. "Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world," the murderer offers by way of explanation of his murderous actions.

And when you look at the monstrous barbarity of Begin, the CIA-backed slaughter in El Salvador, the sheer fanaticism underlying successive Iran vs Iraq confrontations, Maggie Thatcher lunatic jingoism, the crude power-mongering of the Soviets in Afghanistan – well, you’d have to admit that there’s a meanness alright. A big black streak of it running right through the rotting core of the whole stinking apple.

Over a melody that echoes sacred music, in the final song Springsteen etches four images of bad faith and suffering. "At the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe" he adds, nonplussed.

As if to say they’re fuckin’ crazy, one more time.