We decided to extend the discussion of Bruce Springsteen‘s “American Skin (41 Shots)” into two weeks. As a coincidence, we launch this post on The Boss’s 64th birthday–a celebration, of sorts, of his extraordinary body of work, developing many of the themes we discuss here week to week.

Introduction

I probably should have started out last week’s post with an acknowledgment that I’m a relatively new Bruce Springsteen fan. Sure, over the course of the years I’ve enjoyed his big hits. But it’s only since I started writing this blog that I’ve really gone back through his back catalog and explored full albums. I’ve gotten a better sense of a much broader and deeper artistic vision.

Nebraska (Spotify) has made it onto my all-time favorite albums list. It succeeds on the score of “album as album,” cohering as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It’s also quite pertinent from the murder ballad perspective, as Springsteen fans will already know. Some of you will remember that Shaleane wrote about the title track and some of the other classics from that album in a series of posts last year.

The main reason to mention my personal Springsteen evolution here, though, is that the context of his broader work is essential for understanding “American Skin (41 Shots)” and why Springsteen professed to be caught off guard by the controversy around it.

In the previous post, we looked at the incident Springsteen alludes to in “American Skin (41 Shots)”–the police killing of Amadou Diallo. We explored the controversy the song generated when he presented it in live concerts in New York City. Finally, I argued for a particular reading of Springsteen’s artistic choices. I have two goals for today’s post, hoping to provide greater depth to the themes introduced last week. First, I want to dig into a few of Springsteen’s accounts of the songs origins and about the controversy it sparked. Then, we’ll take a look at his re-purposing the song in the past year to focus audience attention on the Trayvon Martin case. In the first part, the metaphor becomes deeper; in the second, the critique becomes far more pointed.

“A meditation on what it means to be an American…”

The controversy around the Madison Square Garden shows brought Springsteen continued media attention in the months that followed, and gave him an opportunity to place the song in the context of his other work. The interpretations he provides for some of the symbols in his work don’t exhaust the possibilities of what you might find there, but they show that Springsteen was creating something more than “just” a protest song.

Reporter Robert Hilburn asks Springsteen about the song in an April 2001 interview with the Los Angeles Times:

Q: Did you anticipate the controversy over “American Skin (41 Shots)”?

A: No, I was surprised because the Diallo incident had been written about extensively in newspapers and magazines, and I felt the song was simply an extension of the music I had been writing for my whole life. It was a meditation on what it means to be an American at a particular moment in time.

Bruce Springsteen and Little Steven Van Zandt in concert (source: Wikipedia)

It struck me as almost funny that all these people would go on the record about something they never heard, since there was no record of it out. The song had only been played once in Atlanta when the uproar began. We were rehearsing for the New York shows and [guitarist] Steve [Van Zandt] brought in these [news]papers and we both went, “Holy cow. What’s going on here?”

Q: What was your purpose in writing the song?

A: It felt to me like the most necessary issue to deal with at the turn of the century was the question of race in America and how we deal with one another. To some degree, the answer to that question is going to decide a lot about how the nation as a whole eventually rises or falls.

I wanted to point out that people of color are viewed through a veil of criminality and that ultimately means they are thought of as somehow less American than other Americans, therefore people with less rights–not just by law enforcement but the guy behind the counter at the convenience store and whoever.

The first verse is about people trying to cross the river of race, and how the river is tainted with blood. The second verse is about a mother sending her child to school, having to give very specific instructions about how to act. It’s so painful for her because most people assume their children will be safe, but she can’t make that assumption. She knows the slightest movement or slightest misunderstanding could mean the end of your life.

I’ll take up the “river of race” question below. Springsteen further elaborated on the thematic point a few months later in an interview with SpeakUp magazine:

“American Skin,” basically, I was looking for a song for the end of the tour. Really, it was misrepresented and there [were] a few comments made by some police representatives before they’d heard it, or without hearing it, and it got turned into a bit of a media circus in New York for a while, you know. But it was just… for me I was just writing about, you know, it was a continuation of the work that I’d done in the past. I was writing about the place that I live and, you know, what defines “American-ness,” you know. I think that I live in a country where a lot of people of color feel denied full citizenship, they feel denied full “American-ness,” and that the Diallo case became a metaphor for that feeling. And it was just something I wanted to write about.

These points and others come out in an illuminating and rather more entertaining exchange between Springsteen and Elvis Costello on Costello’s show Spectacle in 2010:

“This is what our band… This is what we’re built for. This is what we do.”

Springsteen’s insight about the personal power of music to capture the imagination and evoke deeply personal responses is quite on point relative to the firestorm the song initially invoked. More pertinently, however, this capacity also furnishes the music with its staying power. Springsteen follows this reflection, of course, with an excellent solo performance of the song, which you can listen to here.

I feel obliged by our ever-present attentiveness to symbols (especially rivers and birds) to note that Springsteen does some interesting things with the river symbol in this song. When I first heard it, I interpreted the river metaphor as Stygian. The cop is praying for the dead man’s life, but essentially waiting for Charon to ferry him across. At the end of the song, the bloody river cakes our boots with mud, but also represents the source of redemption through baptism. We’ve listened to too many songs to count where this two-fold function of the river, death and redemption, has been a central metaphor. Think of “Little Water Song,” “Barton Hollow,” “Bottom of the River,” “I’ll Lay You Down,” just to name a few.

I’m not exactly sure how Springsteen intends the river functions as a symbol for race. The “river of race” presents a lot of possibilities conceptually–confluence, flooding, nourishing, dividing, conveying. There’s a lot more to fathom in this river. Perhaps we might mark some of its depth as a symbol, at least within the American context, by meeting on the banks of the Mississippi, building a raft, and heading downstream together.

“For justice for Trayvon Martin”

As I mentioned in the last post, it’s unfortunately quite tough to stick to our topic and stay out of posts that invoke some national tragedy or another. In fact, the very day that our first “American Skin (41 Shots)” post went up last week, two incidents arrested our attention. One incident brought fear and chaos in the Nation’s Capital. More pertinently to today’s post, the other could be the subject of the next “American Skin (41 Shots),” with an innocent young man killed by a police officer in North Carolina, perhaps in part because he was also viewed through this “veil of criminality.“

The “veil of criminality” was also a key theme in the debates surrounding the Trayvon Martin case. Within a month of Martin’s death on February 26, 2012, Springsteen was playing the song in Tampa, Florida, just a little over 100 miles across the state from the location of the incident. He provides no comment on the intro to this recording, but it’s notable that Springsteen chose to release this performance on his official channel (distinct from the Vevo channel). The performance below is from March 23, 2012, and it was uploaded to YouTube on the 27th of that month.

He’s not in his finest voice here, and it looks like he hands off the guitar solo responsibilities, but this is the only version of this song on that official Springsteen channel. I’m sure this is no accident. He wanted this clip up, and as soon as possible. “You can get killed just for living in your American skin” rings forth with a powerful and righteous resonance. Springsteen continued to play the song through April as part of the Wrecking Ball tour.

Come the time of the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin in July 2013, Springsteen was abroad and again not hesitant to dedicate the song to Martin. He pulled it out in a concert that represented a kind of transatlantic religious revival–his first ever show in Limerick, Ireland.

Holly Cara Price’s review of the show on Springsteen’s “Notes from the Road,“ is unsurprisingly enthusiastic, but adds some important notes of context to this performance. After a surprise, three song acoustic pre-show for the early arrivals, the main concert began with the American Civil Rights-era standard, “This Little Light of Mine.” Springsteen closed the show with the same song.

In between, Springsteen played through standards and obscurities, and warmly engaged the audience. He chugged a beer on stage, handed to him from the audience. At one point, he collected some of the signs indicating audience members’ requests. Here’s how Price tells the story of what happened when the sign for “American Skin” appeared:

During the sign collecting Bruce had noticed another sign on the side of the stage and asked for it to be passed up to him, then displayed it for the crowd. It was “American Skin (41 Shots).” An immediate hush settled as we all recognized the significance of this request on the heels of the Trayvon Martin trial verdict just days before. “We’ll send this as a letter back home for justice for Trayvon Martin,” Bruce said before launching into what was surely the emotional centerpiece of the show. The audience and the band both appeared to be choked with tears at points in the song; rarely had the lyric “You can get killed just for living in your American skin” sounded more tragic or true. As it wound to its end and Bruce stood alone at the mike staring straight ahead with as much tension and anger as I’ve ever seen him display during a song, just chanting “you can get killed just for living in…” over and over, it was a moment never to be forgotten and a beautiful tribute to a young life sadly wasted for no good reason.

Aside from a little audience hand-clapping and some occasional off-pitch singing along, the audience clip below is a pretty good capture of this year’s vintage. We see the salience of the song before an Irish audience–another, reciprocating murder ballad sent east. It’s a remarkable moment, actually, as this most iconic of American rock stars musically meditates on “what it means to be an American” before this audience on foreign soil. Perhaps he’s taking a cue from James Joyce.

Springsteen immediately launched into “Promised Land,” the song he connected with this “American Skin” in the Spectacle conversation with Elvis Costello above. It’s a much different experience than a live show, but here’s a recent, solo acoustic performance of this classic: One virtue of this version is hearing the lyrics with clarity and finding within them the moments of resonance and counterpoint with “American Skin.” Like Chuck Berry’s before him, Springsteen’s Promised Land is a landscape of both pain and possibility.

Protest Song

When I discussed Steve Earle’s “The Devil’s Right Hand” a few weeks ago, we saw that Earle made a transition because of certain life events from viewing that song as “just a folk song about a juvenile delinquent” to being content with seeing it as an anti-gun song. I think Springsteen has also, at least temporarily, changed the point or valence of this song in an interesting way. It’s not quite the kind of change of direction that Earle went through, but it’s significant in how we now hear the song.

I completely believe that Springsteen laments the deaths of Diallo and Martin with equal fervor in the context of the song, but it’s difficult not to view these contemporary performances, re-contextualized by the Martin narrative, as much more direct and pointed protests. Perhaps that’s my own judgments creeping in, but the relevance of the deadly ambiguities and dangers a police officer faces every day fades away from the picture in how Springsteen performs the song now. The compassion for the officers, so relevant in that case, is not as relevant here.

This has less to do, I think, with the policemen in the Diallo case being duly-sworn officers, and Zimmerman instead being a “community watch volunteer.” The difference is that in the creation and early performance of the song, Springsteen was using the Diallo story to make a larger point about race. In these performances, the song is now a standard bearer for the larger point about race, and it seems to be used as a much more directed critique against what happened to Martin. In the earlier instance, the officers’ story is a tool to illuminate the larger issue. Now, that earlier story and the song are tools to criticize succeeding similar incidents and the actors in them. It’s a measure of the song’s success, and in some ways of our collective failure to avoid these tragedies, that the song has achieved this critical potential.

Next up

As I mentioned in the first post on this song, Springsteen was widely credited with being the first to put the Diallo tragedy to music for the benefit of his listening audience. In the next post, we’ll listen to some covers of Springsteen’s song. We’ll also listen to some other artists and how they applied their craft to those tragic events. In the process, we’ll be able to pull out some illuminating differences, particularly with regard to the art and politics of popular music.