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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