[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
On a more pessimistic
and a more optimistic way to read a unique Springsteen song.
Bruce has
sung in falsetto on
recorded songs a couple times in the past, and occasionally
does so in concerts as well, so the moments in the chorus of “The Lost Charro” when
his voice moves into that upper vocal register are not necessarily new (if
certainly unusual). But I think my BruceStudying credentials are strong enough
that when I say I’ve never quite heard Bruce sound like he does in “The Last
Charro,” you’ll trust me that the sound of this song is quite unique in the
Boss’s canon, and well worth checking out if you haven’t already. Even for
someone who is first and foremost (and really throughout and last) a lyrics
guy, one of the pleasures I found in the Tracks 2 “lost” albums was the
chance to hear Bruce do so much musical experimentation that we wouldn’t
generally find in his official body of work—including a
country album and one built entirely on hip
hop drum loops, for example—and I enjoyed that in “The Lost Charro” as
well.
If we turn
to the
song’s lyrics, I’d argue that it’s one of the most interestingly ambiguous
tracks on not just this album but also across the whole of Tracks 2. On
its face, the song depicts the gradual but unmistakable tragedy captured in its
title: the speaker’s loss of his past identity as
a charro (a traditional Mexican horseman), which has been replaced by his
present work as a
migrant laborer in the Southwest U.S. That narrative builds to the song’s
most overt and painful lines, in its final verse: “I’ve traded in my leather
for the denim of my
campesinos/Godmother, I’ll return home soon you’ll see/And tonight in my
dreams…” When the two young Mexican brothers at the center of Springsteen’s earlier,
similar song “Sinaloa
Cowboys” (1995) prepare to migrate to the U.S., their father says to them, “My
sons one thing you will learn/For everything the north gives, it exacts a price
in return.” The price those two pay is far more violent and tragic than that of
the speaker of “The Lost Charro,” but there’s no doubt he too has paid a price,
and it’s a sad one.
But y’all
know me well enough to know I’m gonna look for a more critical optimistic way
to read even a sad song like this one, and I think we can find one in the title
of one of the chapters in my book We the People:
“Mexican Americans Have Never Left” (I wanted to add, “Motherfucker,” but I hope
and believe it’s implied). One of the most pernicious narratives around immigration
in recent decades (a very, very, very competitive
list to be sure) is the idea that Mexican immigrants (and really any
Hispanic immigrants as framed by this narrative, but the focus is frequently
on Mexican arrivals) represent a change, a relatively new community in the
United States. Literally nothing could be further from the
truth. So yes, the speaker of “The Lost Charro” has seen his identity
change, from a more traditional to a more modern one; and yes, more importantly,
the modern community he’s part of need
to be much better paid and supported and respected. But to my mind his isn’t
the story of a shift from Mexico to the U.S., because Mexican Americans have
never left. Like most of the songs on Inyo, this unusual Bruce ballad
can help us better remember those histories.
Last
InyoStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
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