Bruce Springsteen, the Divine Feminine
The Boss’s representation of American masculinity is only made possible by his vulnerability.
On a humid June night in Paris in 1985, Bruce Springsteen stood on stage under a single red light while the E Street Band played the long interlude for his next song. The music that was playing was ethereal, and you get the feeling that everyone is holding their breath. Springsteen inhales deeply, and leans himself towards the microphone:
I remember, growing up, at night, and my dad would sit in the kitchen with all the lights out and he waited for me to come in, and he’d sit there and drink, and I’d stand in the driveway and I’d look into his screen door, and I could see the light of a cigarette, and then I’d rush up on the porch and try to get by him but he’d always call me back. And it was like he was always… always angry. Always mad. He’d be sitting there thinking about everything that he was never gonna have until… until he’d get me thinkin’ like that, too. And I’d lay up in my bed, at night, and be staring at the ceiling, and I’d feel like if something didn’t happen — if something didn’t happen soon — it felt like I was just gonna… like some day, like I was just gonna…
Springsteen exhales. “I’m On Fire” starts playing.
I don’t know how many times I’ve watched that video, and I don’t know if I’ve ever heard an introduction like that before, especially from a rockstar on the same level as the Boss. Springsteen is famous for his dramatic monologues in concert; after President Ronald Reagan called Born in the U.S.A. a “message of hope” on the campaign trail in 1984, Springsteen was pushed into a corner to address Reagan’s words. If you listen to the title track of Springsteen’s most famous album, it is clearly not what the president described, rather, the story of a desperate Vietnam veteran’s return to a country that sent him across the Pacific to fight a pointless war. As a result, Springsteen had to “dissociate [him]self from the president’s kind words”. Since, he does not allow his music to be misunderstood — his monologues put us in the context of what he is singing, of what he wrote.
His introductory monologue to “I’m On Fire” reminds me of Catherine Lacey’s short story for the New Yorker, “Cut”, where she writes: “if you’re raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house. You will find him even when he is not there. And if one day you find that there is no angry man in your house — well, you will go find one and invite him in!”
This destructive relationship Bruce had not only with his father, but with himself, pushed him into a corner once more.
Is the angry man always going to be in the house? On the porch, smoking a cigarette, waiting for you to rush by?
The Divine Feminine — a concept that sounds like it was created specifically for a sex column on Goop — is the idea of a certain type of spirituality within all of us. This spirituality is all about embracing vulnerability, putting your whole self out there while maintaining your tenderness. Despite, despite, despite. Divine femininity has everything to do with staying connected to yourself and those around you, and nothing to do with being a woman (although the traits of divine femininity are often associated with our “feminine” side).
Springsteen’s music is all about vulnerability. He admits that love is hard for him, that his relationship with his father is hard, how being in your hometown is hard, how being yourself is hard, how becoming a better person is hard. His lyrics are laced with desire, but not always in a sexual way as it is in “I’m On Fire”. Bruce’s desire lies in running and getting the fuck away from here, to the darkness on the edge of town.
You can make the argument that every songwriter that has written something personal is in touch with the divine feminine, and you would be right. However, you would be hard-pressed to find a rockstar that embodies traditional masculinity in the way that Bruce Springsteen does, while also allowing himself to be as vulnerable as he is.
Bruce Springsteen is not only an icon to the conservatives, or the working class, or Barack Obama, but also for many queer people. Naomi Gordon-Loebl for The Nation writes: “Do many queers love Springsteen because nearly every song he has produced in his 50-year career reflects a crushing, unaba[ted] sense of alienation and longing — what could be more queer than that?”
I did not grow up listening to Bruce Springsteen (I come from a Beatles household). I knew the A-sides: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (which I count as a Springsteen song, the cover is that good) and “Glory Days”, mostly. But when I was a sophomore in high school and heard “I’m On Fire” for the first time, I remember feeling surprised. From what I knew of Springsteen, this was not the kind of music he sang. Who knew Springsteen sang about yearning? Certainly not I. (I would soon realize that’s all he sings about.)
The more I listened, the more I fell in love with his writing. Not only is Springsteen an expert performer, famous for his three-and-a-half hour concerts, but a master songwriter as well. The reason why his music resonates with a sixty-year-old former president but also with a fifteen-year-old hearing his music for the first time is because Bruce Springsteen lets himself do what many of us refuse: be vulnerable.
In the live version of “Cover Me” in his 1985 tour, Springsteen nearly screams into the microphone: “this whole world is rough, it’s just getting rougher / I ain’t going out there no more / I’ve seen enough, I don’t wanna see anymore.” The live version of the song has a different introduction than that of the studio, in which one of his background singers croons, “we’ve got nowhere to run to, baby / got nowhere to hide.”
By adding this introduction and putting us in the context of the song, the same way he did for the aforementioned Paris version of “I’m On Fire”, Bruce sets a completely different tone. On the album version of “Cover Me”, the pop-rock sound can easily be taken as a song about having sex with your lover. The live version, however, cannot be mistaken for anything but a post-Vietnam confessional. It’s a song about sexual desire, but it’s also about how traumatic the world we live in can be. It’s authentic. It’s whole-hearted. And that is the magic of Bruce Springsteen.
Springsteen, in all of his glory, found strength in vulnerability. Admittedly, I didn’t understand how allowing ourselves to be vulnerable could ever be a source of great power until I watched a TED Talk from one of the coolest women ever, Brené Brown. Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston in Texas, who delivered her TED Talk about how her research into human connection came out with one key finding: in order to be worthy of love and belonging, you need to believe you are worthy of love and belonging.
Brown stresses this is not as easy as it sounds, and requires much more than just faking it until you make it. Out of her six years of research and interviewing, Brown found that the one single trait all of the people who felt happy in their connection to those around them—their peers, their lovers, their families—were those who had the courage to be vulnerable. Courage is no different than vulnerability. Courage is vulnerability.
“The courage to be imperfect,” Brown explains. “They had connection, and — this was the hard part — as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were.”
For a long time, Springsteen did not have the courage to be who he really was. Bruce has written in songs such as “Independence Day” and said in interviews that certain manifestations of masculinity had been forced upon him; the most jarring example he has shared was after a motorcycle accident in 1967 left him immobilized, his father cut his long hair against his will.
“I can’t get to him and I can’t have him,” Springsteen wrote. “I’ll be him.”
And thus, Springsteen’s on-stage persona — butch, muscular, singing about factory jobs he never held — was crafted after his father. There will always be an angry man in the house. Until… there wasn’t anymore.
I have never met Bruce Springsteen. I have no idea what he is like in real life. If you trust Noel Gallagher’s opinion, which I very much do, Springsteen is a “proper dude”. I have no idea what Springsteen’s father was like other than what Springsteen has said. One thing is clear though: Bruce Springsteen is not the angry man in the house. He is the icon for modern American masculinity, but he is not angry. There has been no one quite like him, before or since. He may have started off by wearing his father’s character as a suit, but that is nowhere near who Bruce Springsteen ended up becoming.
Bruce Springsteen’s eulogy for not his life-long friend, but partner, Clarence Clemons, is one of those passages that once you hear it, it sticks with you. It sounds like something Steinbeck would write, but is so undeniably Springsteen:
So, I’ll miss my friend, his sax, the force of nature his sound was, his glory, his foolishness, his accomplishments, his face, his hands, his humor, his skin, his noise, his confusion, his power, his peace. But his love and his story, the story that he gave me, that he whispered in my ear, that he allowed me to tell — and that he gave to you — is gonna carry on. I’m no mystic, but the undertow, the mystery and power of Clarence and my friendship leads me to believe we must have stood together in other, older times, along other rivers, in other cities, in other fields, doing our modest version of God’s work… work that’s still unfinished. So I won’t say goodbye to my brother, I’ll simply say, see you in the next life, further on up the road, where we will once again pick up that work, and get it done.
As his music so aptly describes, all there is, all there will ever be, that matters is human connection. It’s all about old friends. Everything, all of it. We all know and recognize the importance of love and support, but so many of us disregard the power behind platonic love. Springsteen’s beautiful description not only captures his relationship with Clemons so heartbreakingly well, but reminds us of how indispensable our friends are.
After the nightmare two years we have experienced because of the coronavirus, where so many of the people we know and care about have suffered, why not open up more? Why not hug our friends tighter, why shouldn’t we let them know how much they mean to us? Why are we not granting ourselves the strength to be in touch with the divine feminine — the courage to be vulnerable?
Bruce Springsteen has.
