David Brooks' Sentimental Education: Bruce Springsteen

In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks described a 1975 Bruce Springsteen concert as the start of his “other education,” not the intellectual one from schooling but the “emotional education” from the popular culture.

Brooks is a superstar pundit. A featured journalist at The Weekly Standard, in 2000 Brooks was author of “Bobos in Paradise,” a smart look at “bourgeois bohemians,” the educated, “counterculture” crowd that had become America’s new blue state power elite. Brooks went on to occupy the house conservative Op Ed position at the liberal mainstay New York Times and the equivalent chair on PBS NewsHour’s version of crossfire, with ever-apologetic Brooks pitted against the always garrulous lefty Mark Shields. These two roles established Brooks as the left’s favorite conservative, a position he solidified as one of the Obamacons, prominent conservatives who supported Obama, believing him to be a moderate centrist, or in Brooks’ case, even a closet Burkean conservative.

Last week Brooks went with his 15-year-old daughter to see a Springsteen concert in Baltimore and witnessed her joyous astonishment. Her arrival at utter abandon echoed the exhilaration, the emotional learning, Springsteen had long ago imparted to Brooks, the depiction of a world of “teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law,” tales told with a jolt for “10,000 people in a state of utter abandon.”

Brooks fondly describes the artistry and stories of Springsteen’s universe, “a distinct map of reality” seen on an epic and anthemic scale, in which “losers” always retain dignity and their choices have immense moral consequences, with emotions like stoicism, seen through veils of exaltation and nostalgia.

Brooks also contemplates the artist, Springsteen himself, elusive, but for Brooks revealed by the “embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself,” which Brooks reads as a humble de-emphasis of his own individual contributions in favor of the various musical traditions he presents.

Brooks’ view is both charmingly personal and astonishingly superficial. It should occur to Brooks that the epic, anthemic performance he celebrates, through veils of exaltation and nostalgia, is a brilliantly constructed and much polished reach toward the mythological. The desperate teenagers, laid-off mill workers, lawbreaking drifters are less the real folks of Springsteen’s life or American history than the figures of 60’s counterculture mythology, all of whom stand in, like Bonnie and Clyde, for alienated middle class adolescents searching for an identity.

In an affectionate but clear-eyed analysis of the Springsteen show, Slate’s Stephen Metcalf has described this map of reality as “Faux Americana,” “a middle class fantasy of white, working class authenticity,” which Metcalf wisely attributes to Jon Landau, Springsteen’s producer, manager, and “full-service Svengali.” Landau, graduate of Brandeis and veteran of the 60’s Boston political scene, ‘discovered’ Springsteen, famously declaring, “I have seen rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen,” echoing left-wing journalist Lincoln Steffens 1921 remark after visiting the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Springsteen’s own politics have been decidedly left-wing: “I was politicized by the 60’s,” he has observed, and has supported John Kerry, anti-nuke, pro-Sandinista, Amnesty International, and MoveOn campaigns.

The ‘Bruce’ David Brooks celebrates is not just the self-effacing voice of our musical traditions. After all, in the rock pantheon he is ‘the Boss.’ Rather, the concerts are fully dramatized and choreographed presentations of Springsteen as the everyman oracle of this mythology, bourn on Wagnerian walls of sound. Metcalf observes, the persona is constructed, “a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang,” a much refined invention, all “po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce’s every move.”

The fanciful working class authenticity is key, the basis of the Boss’ claim on what Brooks sees as immense moral authority. Brooks quotes Landau, that there is “not a lot of irony” in Bruce’s work, which, if you have any critical distance from the fabricated character, attendant mythology, and anthemic music, is dead wrong, Otherwise, you are Metcalf’s “rock and roll naïf,” and Landau is a circus huckster.

Springsteen is not alone in constructing a persona, with its own mythology, claiming an imagined authenticity. Many among the cast of characters of the 60’s counterculture, including rock stars, were in fact middle class kids who remade their own histories and identities, which is okay so long as 40 years after Woodstock and Altamont you mention to your impressionable 15-year old kid, this is show business, these are not the real gods, this is not your real history.

But this is not likely among the blue-state elites. Rather, it is likely that Brooks’ daughter will, at an elite university, be taught a map of reality rather close to the Boss’ faux Americana. This is only too cruel, as it is also likely that today’s 15-year-olds will be asked to be stoical, to pay for all the mischief, all the self-serving boomer schemes, financial and otherwise.