We’re focusing this week on Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots).” If you have any concerns about us calling this song a murder ballad, I encourage you to read here, here, and/or the postcript below. It’s going to take us a few steps to get to the music, but a short delay in *really* hearing the song illustrates an important part of its story. Hang in there. You’ll be rewarded.

This is the first of three posts. Read Part Two here and Part Three here.

The Killing of Amadou Diallo

Four plain-clothes officers of the New York City Police Department’s Street Crimes Unit saw Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant and asylum seeker, outside his apartment building in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx on February 4, 1999. As they passed by in their Ford Taurus, they thought Diallo matched the description of a well-armed serial rapist in the neighborhood. The plain-clothes officers got out of their car and approached him, later claiming in court that they loudly identified themselves as police officers. Startled, Diallo’s reaction was to run toward his building’s entrance.  He may have thought he was being robbed, not understanding, at least at first, that these men were police officers.

When the officers pursuing him demanded that he show his hands, he stopped in front of the vestibule to his building and withdrew his wallet from his jacket. He may have thought that he needed to produce identification for the officers to prove his immigration status. In all probability, he had no reason to think he resembled a wanted man.

One officer saw the dark black object in Diallo’s hand, silhouetted by the light of the vestibule behind him, and shouted “Gun!” All four officers opened fire. One officer fell backwards, apparently leading the others to believe that Diallo had fired. The officers fired 41 shots, hitting Diallo 19 times and killing him. He was the wrong man. He was not the suspect. (The actual suspected rapist was later caught.) He was 23 years old.

A police investigation determined that the officers had acted within policy, given Diallo’s reactions and what they believed to be the case at the time. Public outcry about police brutality and racial profiling continued to build. A grand jury in the Bronx indicted the officers on charges of second degree murder in March of 1999. In December of that year, the officers successfully requested a change of venue for their trial, and they were acquitted of all charges by a mixed-race jury in Albany, New York in February 2000. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to pursue a case against the officers for violating Diallo’s civil rights. The New York Police Department subsequently disbanded the Street Crimes Unit.

“Dirtbag”

In June of 2000, Bruce Springsteen debuted two new songs at concerts in Atlanta. Springsteen was heading into the home stretch of his reunion tour with the E Street Band, which had started in April of 1999. One of these new songs was “American Skin,” noted on the set list as “41 Shots.” The end of the tour, following Atlanta, was going to be a 10 show run at Madison Square Garden in New York City, a short drive away from Springsteen’s home of northern New Jersey.

Between the Atlanta and New York shows, “American Skin” created a stir. Word was spreading about the refrain of “41 Shots,” and nobody had any doubt that Springsteen was referring to the Diallo incident. Whether anybody really understood the lyrics of the new song in concert is another question. The New York area had been rocked by protests of the Diallo verdict earlier in the spring. Over 1700 people had been arrested in city protests of the trial’s outcome. The case polarized the public, and resentments and distrust lingered.

In this charged atmosphere, policemen’s representatives and politicians said some rather ill-considered and, frankly, stupid things about the song. Apparently without having heard it, Patrick Lynch, President of the New York Policeman’s Benevolent Association, issued this statement on June 8, 2000, condemning Springsteen and urging officers not to provide security or even attend the concerts.

The head of New York’s State Fraternal Order of Police, Bob Lucente, called Springsteen a “dirtbag” and a “floating fag” for performing the song. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others piled on with criticisms, alleging that Springsteen was part of the movement still trying to condemn the acquitted officers. On the other side, Police Lt. Eric Adams of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care said, “We commend Bruce Springsteen, and we believe that he is courageous in the position that he is taking,”

It’s doubtful that any of these folks weighing in on the matter really knew what that position was. Springsteen had not released the song commercially. He also didn’t reply to any of the criticism.

We don’t know how many police officers followed Lynch’s advice. Springsteen played the song in the MSG shows without introduction or explanation. Any booing as he began it was soon obscured by fans cheering “Bruuuuuce!”. My friend, Julianne, attended two of those shows. She says that when the song started there was “an atypical mix of boos and clapping, and a tension.” She adds, “a MSG crowd is very skewed to Bruce’s faithful,” but she doubts that anybody in the audience hearing the song for the first time would have been able to discern much of the lyrics. The repetitive singing of “41 shots” may have been all that people could really pick out.

“We’re baptized in these waters, and in each other’s blood.”

Now we can listen. Here’s the song as it was played at Madison Square Garden. The video is the official Bruce Springsteen music video on YouTube, which is truncated. The Spotify embed is the song recorded on Springsteen’s Live in New York City. Keep in mind that you’re hearing it more clearly than the people in the arena were.

The lyrics are found here on Springsteen’s website.

From a songwriting perspective, the genius and the power of the song lie in the punches Springsteen doesn’t throw. However much the repeating phrase “41 shots” sounds like an indictment in and of itself, the song isn’t judging, and starts from a perspective that probably surprised a lot of people who had condemned it without hearing it in full.

As a rule, Springsteen paints pictures more than he preaches in this song. He gives a glimpse of the Diallo episode and a glimpse of a fictional mother speaking to her son. Both are intimate and affecting in their own ways, but contain enormous themes.

We start inside the cops’ perspective. Springsteen’s approach to telling the story is what makes the PBA and FOP responses so nonsensical. Whether or not you think the policemen acted wrongly in the actual situation, they definitely made a mistake. (Whether it’s a morally or legally culpable mistake is a different question.) It’s difficult to imagine that the officers did not suffer a moment of soul-crushing regret (if not remorse) when reality dawned. The song puts its finger right on this spot, and sympathetically.

“You’re kneeling over his body in the vestibule, praying for his life.”

The chorus also puts us in the police’s perspective in seeing the ambiguities and dangers of their work, when a split-second’s misjudgment could be fatal. Springsteen here balances his protest and lament for what happened in this episode with his artistic persona as working class bard. He shows solidarity within the suffering here, and everybody is a potential victim of violence and disconnection.

While the song undoubtedly comments on race in America, it makes no explicit reference to it. “American skin” is an ironic construction. There is no such thing–or rather, there is no skin that is not (potentially) American. America’s ideal or explicit self-concept involves unification by shared commitment to principles of self-governance rather than a shared ethnicity or even a geographic heritage. E pluribus unum. [This is why, by the way, I think the name “Department of Homeland Security” rings false.] The irony of “American skin” deepens in light of the fact that the nation has repeatedly fallen short on its dedication to the proposition that all people are created equal.

In the next verse, Springsteen moves on from Diallo. Again, he provides no real ethnic or racial markers in the vignette of “Lena” and “Charles,” but his audience will recognize that Lena’s warnings are quite literally daily matters of life and death for some, most often African Americans and Latinos in the States, and not others. It would be naive to suggest otherwise. Springsteen, however, makes an important narrative pivot that makes this story a kind of shared American lament rather than a metaphorical club with which to beat the police officers in the Diallo case.

The final verse is just a variation on the first, but brings back this portrait of shared suffering and the possibility of shared redemption. Springsteen’s own comments about the imagery of the song will shed further light on this in the next post.

Revival and renewal

All that’s just in the lyrics. The music itself is vital, though, and the context of presenting it is hugely important. Springsteen chose to release this song in concert. It’s about two and a half verses, but the song lasts almost eight minutes. Compared to a real ballad, it’s incredibly spare in its storytelling. The music itself matters and playing it live in front of an audience was important. (See the end of this post for the studio version.)

I can’t listen to live performance of the song now without hearing the power of catharsis, healing, and a kind of reconciliation within the arrangement itself. As Springsteen tears into the guitar solo, the impossible and irreconcilable feelings, the soul-gripping tragedy within the song pour forth. It’s a lament. It sympathizes. It attempts to help us move on. It’s as much about the tragedy of Diallo’s death as it is about our hearts breaking for that mother’s daily anxiety. Far from re-opening old wounds, as his political detractors alleged, Springsteen was attempting to heal them. He’s a rock and roll priest administering a kind of musical sacrament.

I don’t think Springsteen was being cynical or manipulative, or that including this song would have the effect of “fattening his wallet,” as Lynch suggested, but I do think he knew what he was doing by introducing the song in live concerts in New York City. Atlanta was just a warm up. (Plus, Atlanta has done better at integrating than New York.) Bringing this song home before a live audience was a big part of ensuring its success–artistically, and for whatever other purposes Springsteen had in mind for it.

This is not to suggest that Springsteen or his listeners don’t have opinions about what went wrong in the Diallo incident or the trial that followed, or for that matter what is wrong with a country where such incidents are common. The point is that his art becomes a vehicle for processing the feelings around those opinions, not so much for forming those opinions themselves. The song makes room for everybody. That’s the point.

Political art, artful politics, or something else?

We’ve gotten into this territory before: exploring how it is that the songs function both to make political points and artistic ones. Songs that only have room to slam home one political point are often hampered artistically and short-lived. They’re much harder to pull off. Pat discussed this in contrasting Johnny Cash’s performance of “I Hung My Head” with other songs that were more or less politically-motivated anti-gun songs.

It’s not that it can’t be done. Bob Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” both provide searing critiques. Springsteen probably could have gone this route with a song about the Diallo case, but I hope I’ve shown above that he obviously didn’t. We can then ask why and, in the answer to this question, find an important point about the power of this song.

Although she was not speaking about “American Skin,” poet Meena Alexander drives to the heart why a song like “American Skin (41 Shots)” is so riveting and successful artistically. Her statement below unfolds why a song like this is still politically potent despite the inclusiveness of its point of view and the passing of years.

Meena Alexander

“The poem is an invention that exists in spite of history… In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist… Poetry’s task is to reconcile us to the world — not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense, to return us in love, the province of the imagination, to the scope of our mortal lives.” (from Meena Alexander’s address to the Yale Political Union.)

The balance between art and politics, between making a particular statement and elaborating fundamental themes is precisely the balance struck most adeptly by Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots).” Springsteen engineers quite a feat through this song, crafting a musical tragedy that captures the intensity and loss of a particular event as well as the broader and pervasive themes about violence, race, and American identity that are part of what make that event important in the first place. He gives us a song about one man’s death and everyone’s life. It’s a protest song to be sure, but what and how it’s protesting is far more complicated and sweeping than Springsteen’s initial critics ever imagined.

Next up

In the next post, we’ll hear what Springsteen has had to say about the song and the controversy around it. We’ll listen to two covers of “American Skin (41 Shots)” that each lend a different cast to the song and demonstrate its ongoing viability as a vehicle for delivering an important message. In the final post for the week, we’ll listen to a range of other musical responses to the Diallo killing as a way of illuminating some contrasts in artistic approach, but also as a way of showing how the incident itself resonates differently among different American subcultures.

Before we go, here’s the studio version, released on Springsteen’s 2002 album, The Rising.

Postscript

Given the history of misunderstanding of this song, and because it may be the first Murder Ballad Monday post you’re reading, I thought a few more words on this already long post might be helpful.

When we first started this blog, I wrote a disclaimer to explain that, despite our title, not all the songs we would talk about would be stories of murder. Sometimes they wouldn’t describe killing. Sometimes the killing they described wouldn’t be murder. Even when the stories the songs tell are true, we’re not making a legal claim. Sometimes we’re not even making a moral one. “Songs About the Deliberate Infliction of Potentially Lethal Violence Monday” just seemed rather inelegant. If you’ve been here for a while, you’re acquainted with the variety of songs we listen to, and you’re familiar with how, where, and why we push the boundaries.

I wrote that wary disclaimer in January 2012 mostly in anticipation of covering today’s song. I was aware from the get-go that sometimes the songs we would discuss would involve living individuals who had been tried and acquitted or tried and convicted. By choosing the title of the blog or applying the designation “murder ballad” to the songs, I wasn’t choosing to enter a debate about whether a jury had reached a proper verdict. That’s still true.

I’ve wanted our focus to be on the music and how it “functions” in our imaginations and emotional lives. I’ve wanted to avoid getting bogged down in political debates or debates about the “crime” itself for that matter. Those of you who have been with us for a while probably remember our discussion of “Harris and the Mare.” It came out around the time that Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in Florida. I added a disclaimer that I didn’t intend my discussion of “Harris and the Mare” and the theme of lethal self-defense to be a commentary on current events. It wasn’t. It was just an accident of scheduling.

I’ve wanted to discuss “American Skin” from the beginning of this blog, and before Trayvon Martin’s death.  Springsteen has made it difficult for me, not only by writing a song so persistently and tragically relevant, but by more recently dedicating this song to the memory of Trayvon Martin, as we’ll hear in the next post. It’s not that I don’t have opinions about these cases, just that I have chosen to focus the blog on some things and not others.

That being said, one of the things that I most appreciate about Murder Ballad Monday is that we’re simultaneously able to be about one thing–murder ballads–but able to use that one thing to discuss a range of different topics–race, class, gender, violence, history, etc. For example, a story like “Frankie and Johnny” can be a vehicle for exploring the scorned woman theme or a way to discuss trajectories of race and class dynamics across a century of popular music. “Those Three Are On My Mind,” can be a lens focused on American Civil Rights History or a tool to think about what constitute the best and brightest examples of democratic citizenship. We inevitably touch issues relevant current events, but we do our best to do so from an arts and humanities focus, and less so from a political one.