If rock and roll chose an anthem for itself, it might be Dancing In The Street by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?
Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the street

A brand new beat.

It’s what has always powered pop music, and always will. These lines are a clarion call to anyone who wants to hear them. They say, join in. Join us. The invitation is spontaneous, universal, democratic. Let’s dance with wild licentious abandon (“every guy, grab a girl”), because we can’t not. The urge is simply too strong. It’s just what we do.

It helps that the music bursts from the speakers like a factory worker on a Friday night. There is swing. There is swaying. And there is the stomp of the “brand new beat”. A stomp that started in Motown and pounds continuously through northern soul and disco and house music and EDM. The stomp has sound tracked Saturday nights for over 50 years.

No wonder that Barbara Ehrenreich titled her cultural history of communal celebration after this song. Its full title: Dancing In The Streets: A History Of Collective Joy.

Collective joy. That about sums it up.

But here’s the thing: joy can’t last forever. It fades.

Abandon is spontaneous, but it is also momentary. The urge wanes. We get over it. We grow up. Mostly. It’s sad. But sadder still is when we can’t let our youth go. When we fake the urge until it’s an empty ritual. When we cling on to who we thought we were, only to find we’ve let everything else change around us.

There is also an anthem for this view of the rock and roll dream.

It is Bruce Springsteen’s Racing In The Street.

If Motown is the upbeat clarion call, Racing In The Street is the downbeat and muted response — an elegy for the energy of youth. It pans away from the city’s endless summer to a perennial darkness on the edge of town. The optimism has dissipated, crushed beneath the grim weight of everyday living, guilt and regret.

There’s no joy, only ennui. No communal celebration, just a solitary and isolated sadness. The urge is no longer what you do, it’s who you used to be.

It is an extraordinary song.

It’s sung by a nameless man who clings to his own version of the teenage dream. He loves cars. Goes hot-rod racing on the strip every week. Lives for it. With his pride and joy, a 69 Chevy (“built her straight out of scratch”) he burns off other drivers for kicks, leaving them as roasted as any song forced to follow the Vandellas on the rock and roll radio.

It’s all in the present tense — we’re hearing this guy’s reality, a mix of mundane details and adrenaline thrills. Words of full of speed and anticipation echo the spontaneity and energy of the Vandellas.

Tonight, tonight the strip’s just right
I wanna blow ‘em off in my first heat
Summer’s here and the time is right
For racing in the street

Only, it’s strange. There’s no stomp. The words are set to a forlorn four-figure dance picked out on piano. The music is slow and sad. The contrast is unsettling. Something feels wrong.

Still, the guy is happy, and in the second verse he’s looking down on others who just don’t get it.

Now some guys they just give up living
And start dying little by little, piece by piece
Some guys come home from work and wash up,
And start racing in the street

In the next he’s reminiscing about the time he ‘won’ his girl.

I met her on the strip three years ago
In a Camaro with this dude from LA
I blew that Camaro off my back
And blew that little girl way

This is the peak of the good times story. It’s also the only moment we’re in the past tense. Then, in an instant, not even a chorus to catch your breath, we’re back in the present. Only this time life has caught up. We’ve not missed a beat but it’s like he’s woken up in a different present, one where the illusion of happiness is long gone.

But now there’s wrinkles round my baby’s eyes
And she cries herself to sleep at night
When I come home the house is dark
She sighs “Baby did you make it all right”

There’s a lump in your throat. Finally the sadness of this guy’s reality has caught up with the aching mood of the music. His baby is out of reach, he’s clinging to his cars and his youth. Have the race and the road kept him from the life he should have been building at home?

It gets worse.

She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house
But all her pretty dreams are torn
She stares off alone into the night
With the eyes of one who hates for just being born

That is one bleak image. Two minutes ago all we knew about this guy is that his passion is to “come home from work and wash up, and start racing in the street.” Now we’re in the middle of a neglected relationship and thinking, how did it come to this?

Has he only just noticed too?

This is the emotional power of the song. For isn’t this the way we observe change? Not as it happens, but after the fact. Not tracing it over time, but realising it in an instant. You turn around and it’s 5, 10, 20 years. The song asks, is this also how we lose the optimism and spontaneity of youth — not with a bang but a whimper? Is this how we realise we’ve been living a different life to the one we thought we were? Were we just wandering blind?

In a downward spiral, you can’t see where you’re going or where you’ve been.

But then, at the last, maybe redemption.

For all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels
Rumbling through this promised land
Tonight my baby and me we’re gonna ride to the sea
And wash these sins off our hands

It’s not clear what “sins” will be washed away. Are they doing it “for all the shut down strangers and hot rod angels” or for themselves? Is it regret that he’s let her and the relationship go? Is it guilt for the part of their lives they’ve thrown away? Or is it guilt for ditching that “dude from LA”?

Maybe it’s sadness for their atomised generation and its lost sense of optimism — a generation that went from dancing in the street to “rumbling through this promised land” in a few short years and hasn’t really found its way back.

I don’t know.

And I don’t know whether the two-minute voiceless high-lonesome coda that follows is the saddest thing I ever heard, or the sound of hope on the horizon.

I hope they make it all right.