- John McWhorter on Bruce Springsteen, and my own takes;
- About modern music.
I mentioned that I had a couple thoughts about music recently. The first is inspired by this piece:
NY Times, John McWhorter, 7 Aug 2025: Springsteen Isn’t Who I Thought He Was [gift link]
McWhorter is a Columbia University linguist, who often writes about trends in English language usage. Here he admits that he only recently got around to listening to Bruce Springsteen, really listening. He begins:
From a distance I have always found Bruce Springsteen interesting, especially in his current incarnation as a committed populist straddling the line between his own politics and those of his many MAGA fans. But his set-to last spring with President Trump, who called him “overrated” and “not a talented guy,” made me realize how very little of Springsteen’s music I have ever really engaged. I must come clean and say that I just never got it.
My aside: I’m not so sure that he has lots of MAGA fans. Springsteen in much too introspective and empathetic for MAGA. If he has MAGA fans, they’re probably like Ronald Reagan, who cheered his song “Born in the USA” only because he didn’t actually listen to the lyrics.
Continuing:
That fact came up in conversation the other day with a Springsteen fan, a fellow member of the Catskills bungalow colony I visit every year. He gave me a song list, and I sat down to listen.
And I mean really listen: My mantra is that you have to give something seven tries to really get it. That’s tough in the thick of a workweek, but I’m on vacation, so I made time for all of it: “Rosalita,” “Prove It All Night,” “Brilliant Disguise,” “The River,” “Spirit in the Night,” “The Promised Land,” “Backstreets,” “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “The Rising,” “New York City Serenade” and the album “Born to Run.”
Here’s what resonated with me: “you have to give something seven tries to really get it.” Yes, I agree: even pop songs, except perhaps the most superficial and most formula. The catchier the new pop song you hear, the more quickly you will grow tired of it — an extreme example might be the “Baby Shark” songlette, which is indeed very catchy. The more complex some new music is, the more listens it will take for it to ‘take’ — and the deeper it will embed itself into your being.
Continuing with McWhorter. What I notice is that his friend recommended songs almost all from Springsteen’s early career and albums, in the early ’70s. The farthest out are “Brilliant Disguise,” from his 1987 album Tunnel of Love; and “The Rising,” from the 2002 album of the same name.
But then he had a revelation.
As engrossed as I was, I kept having to remind myself to listen to the music. What grabbed my ear was the lyrics. That had been my mistake all these years — waiting for these songs to be, primarily, songs, as if they were Schubert lieder. For me, Springsteen’s work is poetry with musical accompaniment. Realizing that helped me understand something important about him, but something important about America, too.
And,
Springsteen’s primary contribution is as a poet. And the immensity of his popularity should put to rest forever the notion that Americans don’t like poetry. I have previously argued that the poetry Americans love is Black. It’s hip-hop. I see now that was only part of the picture.
His conclusion is that Americans really do like poetry, because they like Springsteen and like hip-hop? And Taylor Swift?
My Bruce immersion teaches me that the reason poetry on the page is such a rarefied taste in America today isn’t that Americans don’t have a taste for verse. It’s because there are pop music artists whose lyrics scratch that itch, just as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Lowell once did. Taylor Swift’s music fits into the same category for me, as well as for many people over 40 I have spoken to about her work. I hear her songs as poetry; the music’s job is just to help get it across. And that’s what I hear when I listen to Springsteen: I hear poetry, and I hear Americans’ love of it.
I’m not so sure. I think people listening to music, especially pop music, primarily respond to the melodies, the beats, the vibes. Lyrics are secondary. I include myself in this, because I respond to singers and groups that I like first because of vocals and arrangements and only secondarily (in most cases) understand the lyrics.
That’s why I’ve posted links to several Springsteen songs in recent weeks that I’ve revisited to examine the lyrics.
For example, on July 27th, I posted a YouTube link to Springsteen’s song “Paradise,” from his album THE RISING. It’s subdued, mysterious, weird. The lyrics are suggestive, and enticing. What I didn’t spell out in that post, and which no one might know without looking it up — well there are some lyrical clues — is that the song is about a mother planting a bomb in her son’s backpack so he can go to a crowded place and blow lots of people up, including himself. But, she assures him, “I see you on the other side.” She survives; the boy doesn’t.
Google Springsteen Paradise Lyrics.
I agree with McWhorter: this is poetry. It’s also a gorgeous song.
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Second musical topic. I’ve been listening to a lot of 20th century music lately, by Pärt and Schnittke and others. and I mentioned the other day at the end of a post:
“When you listen to modern music, it’s like being exposed to a new language. It sounds weird, and you reject it at first, but eventually it becomes understandable, even essential. It opens new realms of perception and understanding.”
The premise here is that “modern music,” meaning contemporary orchestral music, mostly, is very different from the familiar protocols of traditional “classical” music — Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, et al. When people go to orchestral concerts, they mostly want to hear the familiar favorites. There’s an analogy here between pop movies and art-house cinema, between bestseller novels and literary novels, even between traditional “sci-fi” and more mature, literary treatments of science fictional ideas. (To some lesser extent this is true about paintings; 20th century folks embraced impressionism and Picasso and even all the weird “art” you see in modern museums, rather than rejecting them and clinging to the literalism of earlier painters, of landscapes and religious figures; and that was due to the technological advance of photography, which gave painters license to do something else.)
I think it’s a matter of exposure, the earlier the better; early exposure will expand your horizons and your range of experience. Listen only to patriotic and church songs, and everything else will seem irrelevant, even blasphemous. Listen only to 1950s crooners, and all the rock groups of the 1960s will seem merely noise.
I certainly don’t pretend to have catholic musical tastes; I don’t listen to jazz and country music, for example. But I escaped the trap of rejecting “modern” orchestral music… in a couple ways.
First, was the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, that used not only a popular waltz by Johann Strauss, but also some very weird music by the contemporary composer György Ligeti, who was about 45 at the time, in the final scenes. I saw the film in 1968, when I was 13, or perhaps 14. Was this even music (as my mother asked)? Of course it was, very weird music, all the more impressive for being played by a conventional orchestra. Here’s a YouTube video showing Simon Rattle conducting it.
My point above about being exposed to a new language. Repeated exposure gets you used to it. Just as repeated exposures to anything, as a child or young adult, get you used to anything. (For better or worse.)
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Then, simply, the radio. I listened to KUSC in Los Angeles, on a little clock-radio I had in my bedroom, when I was 18 or so. KUSC played much more adventurous music than most classical music stations do today, it seems. And I think that’s how I discovered Arvo Pärt, and by extension Alfred Schnittke, and Gorecki, and Vasks.
By 19th century classical music standards these composers’ music was virtually unintelligible. Because 20th century music created new languages.
Here’s a piece by Alfred Schnittke.
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Then, Philip Glass. I’m not sure if I heard him on the radio first; more likely it was the release of the film Koyaanisqatsi in 1982
I’ll pause here, and follow up on Philip Glass soon.
