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Friday, July 26, 2013

July 26, 2013: AmericanStudying Ambiguous Hits: “State Trooper”

[This week’s series focuses on how AmericanStudies can help us analyze some of our most ambiguous pop music classics. Add your thoughts on these songs or any others for a chart-topping weekend post, please!]
On two very different ways to AmericanStudy one of Bruce’s most ambiguous songs.
As this week’s series has no doubt proved, when it comes to music I’m a lyrics guy—by which I mean not just that I listen to them closely, but that I try to figure out what they mean, even when (as with one of my favorite current bands, The Killers) that’s damnably hard to do (“Jealousy, turning saints into the sea”?!). There are no artists to whose lyrics I’ve listened more frequently and more attentively than Bruce Springsteen, and thus few Springsteen songs that I haven’t obsessively figured out. But there are still some that remain elusive to me, their ambiguity defying my repetitive listens and analyses. And at the top of that list would be the most eerie and evocative song on all album full of them, Nebraska’s “State Trooper” (1982).
From its title track on, Nebraska can be located in the American tradition of what we might call outlaw romanticism, valorizing—or at least sympathizing with—the misdeeds of those who find themselves living and dying outside the law. The opening verse of “State Trooper” concludes with an indication that its speaker sees himself as precisely such a justified outlaw: “License, registration, I ain’t got none / But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I’ve done.” Seen in that light, his repeated injunction to “Mister State Trooper, please don’t you stop me,” might reflect an outlaw code of honor, a sense that while the speaker and the law are by necessity opposed, he hopes to avoid violence whenever possible, particularly against innocent men who “maybe … got a kid, maybe … got a pretty wife.” “My argument is not with you,” says Jason Bourne to a Moscow policeman at the start of his trilogy’s final film—before he takes his outlaw fight to the heart of the American power structure.
Despite their cynical attitudes toward the law and power, such outlaw narratives tend to be ultimately optimistic, at least in their sense that there are those who will fight back—and their admiration for such figures. Yet from the final lines of its opening title track—“They wanted to know why I did what I did / Well sir I guess there’s just a meanness in this world”—Springsteen’s album is far more dark and pessimistic, portraying its outlaws as embodiments of a fallen and perhaps irredeemable America (although the album does end with an ambiguous song called “Reason to Believe”). While the speaker of “State Trooper” is apparently driving “to my baby,” the final lines suggest that he has nowhere to go: “Hey, somebody out there, listen to my last prayer / Hi-ho silver-o, deliver me from nowhere.” Seen in this light, the speaker’s injunction to the state trooper is simply a threat of more darkness and violence to come, in a world “where the great black rivers flow” and where “the only thing that I got’s been bothering me my whole life.” This is the land of the American nightmare, and its outlaws are simply symptoms of the disease, not a potential cure.
Crowd-sourced post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So what do you think? Takes on this song, or other American hits you’d highlight and analyze?

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