In his new album, Bruce takes up Occupiers’ cause

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Updated: February 21, 2012 8:40AM

Bruce Springsteen officially announced Thursday that his new album, “Wrecking Ball,” would hit shelves on March 6. Rumors had hinted that this would be his angriest album and that he would be addressing the current economic travails of middle- and lower-class America.

If the first single, “We Take Care of Our Own,” is any indication, this will be to Occupy Wall Street what “The Rising” was to 9/11: the moment when Springsteen takes up a cause and makes sense of an event that has stymied other musicians.

Springsteen’s not the first artist to take up the Occupiers’ cause, nor is he the first to filter his outrage through the iconography of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl folkie who has become, 44 years after his death, the patron saint of the 99 percent. Tom Morello evoked Guthrie’s example when he strolled around Zuccotti Park singing “This Land Is Your Land,” which won MTV’s dubious award for Best OWS Performance last year. More recently, Jackson Browne debuted a folksy number at Occupy Wall Street.

Guthrie has proved to be a potent symbol of grass-roots dissent, yet these songs make it appear as though the folk singer has been thrust upon OWS rather than embraced by its demonstrators. It could be considered a failure of imagination: No one has been able to conceive of a new form of protest music specific to this moment in American history, so they revisit the old, obvious exemplar and hope it still fits.

Springsteen certainly draws from this vision of Guthrie. The cover of “Wrecking Ball” shows him hoisting a guitar as a symbol of proletariat power.

“We Take Care of Our Own” is a tangle of barbed lyrics that confront economic and social issues in the broadest lyrics imaginable: “Where are the eyes, the eyes with the will to see?” he asks, not quite rhetorically. “Where are the hearts that run over with mercy?” Later, he poses the burning question, “Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?”

It’s all very straightforward and sincere, in language that’s simultaneously plainspoken and grandiose. Springsteen has long identified with the Okie folkie, covering “This Land Is Your Land” on the box set “Live 1975-85” and recording a handful of spare acoustic albums addressing social concerns. The people came first, it seemed, and the issues second. Springsteen may have stretched to rhyme “ravine” and “methamphetamine,” but those older songs had the power of parables, delivering potent messages without sounding preachy or overtly political.

“We Take Care of Our Own” does just the opposite. Rather than view this historical moment through the eyes of a character, Springsteen writes like he’s using bumper stickers like magnetic poetry. There’s nothing in the song to personalize the outrage, to give it relevance or impact or specificity.

Springsteen is writing what he thinks the country needs, which is not the same as what it actually needs. Yet, the best aspect of “We Take Care of Our Own” — the one component that makes you look forward to hearing the rest of the album — is a wonderful boardwalk bells-and-guitar theme that repeats throughout the songs, sounding heraldic and optimistic and perhaps even celebratory. That theme turns “We Take Care of Our Own” into something like a singalong — inclusive rather than exclusive, a communal experience that supports the sentiment of the song’s title.

That may be truer to the spirit of Guthrie than any of the song’s well-meaning lyrics.

Stephen Deusner is a Chicago-based writer. This essay was posted at Salon.