Religions Reviewed

McCarthy’s study of the music of Bruce Springsteen makes use of a robust mix of sources, including Springsteen’s lyrics, biography and journalism on Springsteen, and McCarthy’s own reflections on her fan experience. While I thought that the personal anecdotes were interesting, and the confession of the author’s background was relevant, this case was the first among those we’ve read in which I actually felt that the author might have been a little indulgent of her own tastes and interests in choosing her subject matter.

The study has at its core a discussion of religion in popular culture. Accordingly, McCarthy doesn’t afford a lot of attention to theoretical parameters of the phenomenon of religion, implicitly understanding it in terms of the institutionalized, biblically-oriented religions of the historical American mainstream. She explores the biblical themes of exodus and deliverance present throughout Springsteen’s lyrics, and traces a chronological arc of their increasing sophistication and critical awareness, complemented by a distancing from the white blue-collar community of his origins. Springsteen’s use of religious tropes thus progresses from evocative and particularistic modes, towards more consciously moralizing and universal perspective. The three phases she identifies center on escapism, personal redemption, and political redemption, in that sequence. She thus points out that a single religious theme (the “promised land”) can communicate these divergent messages in popular culture, even in the work of a single artist. She also discusses the aspects of ambivalence and irony that keep these messages from being completely discrete from one another.

Rather than emphasizing the unique individual creativity of Springsteen in his lyrical incorporation of religious tropes and themes, McCarthy describes how his approach is typical of trends and traditions in American popular culture. She compares Springsteen’s escapist mode to the one found in much road-oriented 70s and 80s rock music. The heavy metal lyrics that she instances, for example, are full of religious references every bit as explicit as Springsteen’s. She construes the middle period of personal redemption as contiguous with “an old blues tradition, the assertion of manhood, of ‘somebodiness,’ through acts of violence against a world whose more subtle violence the protagonist can no longer bear.” (p. 30) In the later political phase, she points to his homage to Woody Guthrie, and his exaltation of Steinbeck’s character Tom Joad.

In addition to looking at how religion manifests in the popular culture products of Springsteen’s recordings an concerts, McCarthy also takes into consideration the nature of Springsteen’s celebrity status, and how it was rooted in, yet became alienated from, the local culture of working-class
New Jersey. Although her particular conclusions regarding Springsteen might not generalize to other popular culture stars, the analysis of social paradoxes involved in his “authenticity” could possibly serve as a model for looking at the celebrity person and persona as a site of religious operation. To bring in a theoretical orientation that McCarthy does not, Springsteen’s career illustrates the fragility of Weberian charisma, even in situations that draw on a robust milieu of religious symbolism and pre-existing community.

While the study doesn’t provide theoretical boundaries to the category of religion, it does focus on the question of “myth,” identifying it especially with symbols and narratives of aspiration. McCarthy seems to view myth as a central psychic feature of religion, and one which can migrate into secular settings, as in the case of Springsteen’s music. As much as the study claims in its title to relate to the “myth of the American promised land,” it also relates to the myth of the American singer-songwriter: the way that devotional community can form around such figures, and the fissures and conflicts that arise when mythic perceptions are challenged by the behavior of the idolized figure.

McCarthy also describes the communitas of fans at concerts (thus bringing in Victor Turner’s ideas about religious function), and implies that the multivalence of the lyrics and concert experience may make Springsteen’s music into the equivalent of sacred scripture for those integrated into the social and symbolic (i.e. mythic) universe of rock’n’roll. In these considerations, she begins to discuss American popular culture as religion.

Overall, the study makes a persuasive case about the presence of religious elements in the music of Bruce Springsteen, and an insightful discussion of how these elements relate to his development as a celebrity and popular culture personality. Her occasional suggestions that Springsteen fan culture expresses an emergent religious sensibility are less convincing, in light of the disaffection of his “native” fan-base when he challenges their political preconceptions. Instead, it seems more sensible to attribute the communitas of the concert-goers to the larger cultural phenomena associated with rock-concert ritualism, albeit perhaps intensified through the spiritual evocations of the singer’s allusive lyrics.