An Open Letter to Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen:
You probably do not read open letters, Bruce Springsteen. You have people for that–Jersey cousins who double as roadies, unpaid interns who learned to type on the dashboard of a ’69 Chevy, maybe even Parking Lot Patti back in the day. But on the off chance this open letter to Bruce Springsteen lands between your lyric scribbles and your ibuprofen stash, hear us out.
We never liked you. Not for a single tune, not for an ear-shattering denim-clad yowl. The first time we heard you wheeze through a harmonica solo, we prayed the reeds would snap and amputate your lips. (Bob Dylan you ain’t.)
For half a century you have inflicted a one-man garage sale of clichés upon the world–motels, highways, dead-end jobs, broken dads, women who sling the body–like a jukebox that only plays truck-stop rhymes. America kept calling you “the voice of the working class,” as though the working class begged for a nasal sermon about mufflers and regret.
You were not born to run. You were born to overstay. Every song the same worn out pose: one foot on the monitor, veins bulging, howling like a man who just found out denim cannot be deducted as a business expense.
The decades have not made you mellow; they have calcified you. The underwhelming Broadway show was the final insult: charging people a month’s rent so that aging paralegals and clapped out Jersey girls could hear you brag about being a Jersey kid with feelings. You have become the world’s most successful open-mic confessional poet, only louder and in dad jeans.
The ghosts in your lyrics have fled. Mary ran off with the Uber driver. The river was paved over for condos. The Cadillac is on cinder blocks behind a Wawa. Yet you drag your E Street cadavers across the globe like an undead pep rally for nostalgia-addled boomers.
We do not want one more encore. We want an exorcism. Retire. Today. Preferably before lunch. Take your last bow, donate the Telecaster to Goodwill, and use the harmonica for something useful–like patching the hole in your swimming-pool cover.
You once asked, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” We know the answer: it’s something worse, and it’s been on tour and getting worser for forty years.
If the unhinged, unconventional ramblings of our fearless editor in briefs fancy your tickle, wander over to our Satirical Commentary page and try a line or two.