Bruce Springsteen challenges us to lead larger lives, says R. TODD ERKEL

While the campaign for America’s political future has been under way for months, its most interesting enunciation to date came last week, not from a presidential candidate or talk-jock, but from the nation’s pre-eminent political songwriter, Bruce Springsteen.

The release of Springsteen’s latest collection, “Magic,” brings some welcome nerve and provocation to the conversation. While the old liberal guard has faded into the background, Springsteen, now 58, continues to gain gravitas and clout as our most persistent agitator. With each new work, Springsteen has grown more adept at integrating the personal and political, and more unflinching in his resolve to make us uncomfortable.

It’s taken Springsteen three decades to embrace this role. Early comparisons between Springsteen and Bob Dylan lacked staying power. Even as Springsteen’s character sketches and narratives gained depth and sharpness, most poignantly on the 1980 solo release “Nebraska,” his art and activism remained staunchly nonpartisan.

Springsteen quietly worked the edges, lending financial support to displaced workers and food banks, and joining other, more overtly political artists for concerts and tours benefiting such groups as Amnesty International.

A public quarrel involving Ronald Reagan in 1984 may have been a turning point. A speechwriter had tried to curry local favor during a New Jersey campaign stop, linking Reagan’s Morning-in-America rhetoric with Springsteen’s chart-topping success. Springsteen bristled.

More troubling that summer may have been the artist’s sudden mass appeal. Springsteen seemed both buoyed by the stadium roar and dumbstruck at how his newfound audience refused complexity, misreading the scathing “Born in the USA” as a feel-good patriotic anthem.

In the years since, war and rhetoric have riveted Bruce’s attention, first on “The Rising” and three years later, on the solo “Devils & Dust.” While touring for the latter, Springsteen hinted at how the personal and political had come full circle. In a rare glimpse into the artist’s family life, Bruce described a tender moment as his 15-year-old son hosted the first boy-girl gathering at the Springsteen home. “This is for all of the parents in the audience,” Springsteen said, aware of how control over his oldest boy’s fate was not solely in his hands. “Keep the faith.”

What’s clear from Springsteen’s latest work is that he, like many parents with sons and daughters of soldiering age, has lost trust. On “Livin in the Future,” Springsteen declares: My faith’s been torn asunder / Tell me is that rollin’ thunder / Or just the sinkin’ sound / Of somethin’ righteous goin’ under.

A generation earlier, Springsteen, like his eldest son, approached the threshold to adulthood as part of a country at war. Bruce has often talked about losing friends to the war in Vietnam. He knows first-hand the well-crafted, highly persuasive call of duty and country that drew his friends into a bloody and expensive war that many did not survive, and that few could justify or explain.

The path connecting then and now, Vietnam and Iraq, Springsteen and his son, leads to the source. What drove Springsteen to become an artist in the first place was a fierce desire to challenge the assumptions laid before him about work, life, loyalty and his larger engagement with the world.

Looking into the eyes of a disillusioned father, and others like him in Freehold, N.J., Springsteen hungered, like a chained dog, for some alternative — a frontier where desire and spirit might stand a fighting chance.

What makes Springsteen such an important artist is his steadfast belief in the power of music to inspire someone to venture further from home, to risk more of themselves and claim more of their soul than they ever thought possible. We parents need to recognize this birthright in all children: the essential desire for an instinctual relationship to their own lives and destinies.

An artist like Springsteen, at the peak of his observational and allegorical skills, reminds us what it means to listen and see with spiritually and politically attuned eyes and ears at the world swirling around us. Our best hope for our children is that they might cultivate some of the same sharp senses and insistence on truth.

We do our kids a disservice to simply rail against President Bush and other powers-that-be, to pass around satirical e-mails or find refuge in some smug sense of moral superiority. The real audacity of hope is to sustain ourselves on some wilder shore of existence; less in need of everything we think keeps us safe and comfortable.

It is that invitation, captured in the wailing wall of sound in Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” that instructs our kids on how to be smarter than the illusionists in our midst; how to fight with their life not against foreign enemies, but against any force that would deceive them into asking smaller questions and living smaller lives.

First Published October 7, 2007, 12:00am

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