On the Inimitable Greatness of The Boss

Bruce Springsteen’s most famous and best-selling album, Born in the USA, is remarkably sandwiched between two works of music that are far less commercial and radio-friendly, 1982’s Nebraska and 1987’s Tunnel of Love. In sound and style, if nothing else, these two could not be more different from Born in the USA. So let’s examine this stunning trio.

In the summer of 1984 Bruce Springsteen released Born in the USA. The album would feature several of his most prominent hits (Dancing in the Dark, Glory Days, I’m on Fire, and the title track) and has sold some 30 million copies. The album helped to make Springsteen a household name and is one of the most recognizable works of the 1980s. It is perhaps fitting that the songs on this bestseller embody the anthemic, arena rock sound that would pack stadiums around the world during the following tour.

It is all the more remarkable to consider it in the context of the albums that precede and succeed it. 1982’s Nebraska is a dark, haunting folk album featuring only Springsteen’s voice, a guitar, and a harmonica. The tracks concern criminals, outlaws, the unemployed and underemployed, what Springsteen saw as the forgotten underbelly of Reagan’s America. It is not a pop album and has no ready-made hits. Springsteen did not tour for the album, perhaps fitting given its themes and sound. Nevertheless, to say it has aged well as it turns forty this fall would be a massive understatement.

Advance to the other side of Born in the USA and we have Springsteen’s highly anticipated follow-up, 1987’s Tunnel of Love. Although Springsteen largely abandons the Woody Guthrie-esque guitar and harmonica vibe of Nebraska, the album still parallels it in many ways. The songs cast aside Born in the USA’s grandeur for soft, somber compositions, led by light digital sounds and Springsteen’s voice. The topics also don’t feel ready for top-40 airplay. Yes, there are love songs here but not the bubble gum variety that dominates the charts. Instead, we get deep, probing reflections on commitment, aging, love, temptation, disillusionment, and heartbreak.

For instance, the two faces of love, “one that laughs and one that cries,” found in Two Faces, offer a stunning depiction of a man wrestling with his loving commitment for his partner and his propensity to damage the relationship. Meanwhile, the opening verse of the wedding song, Walk Like a Man, will send shivers down the spine of anyone who has pondered the mystery and commitment of marriage. And consider these lines from later in the same song, relayed from Springsteen to his father, “Well, now the years have gone and I've grown/From that seed you've sown/But I didn't think there'd be so many steps/I'd have to learn on my own.” Has any popular artist captured in so simple and powerful language what it is like to grow up?

Tunnel of Love is introspective and personal in a way that Nebraska is not. Nevertheless the albums are two sides of the same coin, the strangest sandwich one could imagine when Born in the USA is the crowd-pleasing filling. Writing for The Ringer, Elizabeth Nelson rightly recognizes that Nebraska is “notoriously on any short list of the bleakest LPs ever rendered by a major recording star near the apex of their commercial powers.” 

This is part of what makes Springsteen both brilliant and unique. For his Born in the USA follow-up also has to stand as an odd choice. Apparently, his thought process went along the lines of “Let me follow up these fist-pumping, relentlessly catchy sing-along anthems with twelve intensely personal, somber tracks that inspect the challenges and rewards of love and commitment in the late twentieth-century.” If nothing else, these albums deserve admiration for both their inherent brilliance and for Springsteen’s audacity to make them while at the height of his cultural influence.

Of course on further inspection Born in the USA is not as much of an outlier as it seems. Springsteen was working on Nebraska and Born in the USA at the same time and the shared themes strike a powerful chord when one focuses not on the sound but on the lyrics.

The aching desperation of Atlantic City (from Nebraska) is echoed in Downbound Train (from Born in the USA), both songs that feature not just economic hardship but relationships under strain, the first struggling to endure, the second dissolving in divorce. Listen to Atlantic City, “Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City” and now Downbound Train, “I got laid off at the lumber yard. Our Love went bad. Times Got hard.”

Both albums are filled with resonant parallels, to the point that one could almost claim Born in the USA is simply Nebraska with a stadium rock sound. The song Highway Patrolman from Nebraska details two brothers, one of whom works as a police officer while his brother, a struggling vet, frequently runs into trouble. But, as the officer sings, “sometimes when it's your brother you look the other way.” Born in the USA, both the album and the song, delve more deeply into the challenges facing Vietnam Vets as they return home. Meanwhile, Nebraska tracks like Used Cars and Mansion on the Hill tackle the hopes, dreams, and resentments of growing up poor.

This is but a glimpse into the strange, unexpected, and at times discordant greatness of this trio of albums. I haven’t even considered his first 1980s album, The River, which was released in 1980 and feels more like the capstone to his 1970s catalogue. But that would require another essay at least. Let me conclude with three cheers for The Boss and his 1982-1987 trilogy of albums. As he says, without offering much explanation or hope, “still, at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.”

Against AI

Reading Meghan O’Gieblyn’s deeply insightful book, God, Human, Animal, Machine, has me ruminating on some questions regarding consciousness, humanity, and AI.

Here are a few thoughts, organized around the following claim: The world would be much better off if the energy, money, intellectual effort, and prestige of Silicon Valley were redirected to more useful ends.

For instance, let’s say you find questions of consciousness, self-awareness, identity, and meaning to be fascinating. The world is already filled with billons of non-human sentient creatures—animals—who, through habitat destruction, pollution, overfishing, deforestation, sprawling horizontal development, ecosystem destruction, and the general effects of climate change, not to mention animal testing, roadside zoos, and factory farming, are being catastrophically wronged by humanity.

We don’t like to talk about this. To do so is to offer another rant that can easily be categorized and put into a box—environmentalist, animal rights, vegan, hippie, and so on.

Alternatively, in the worlds of popular culture, private industry, and academia, AI is exciting, sexy, and supposedly future-oriented. Note the headline-dominating discussions, Ted talks, research grants, Silicon Valley symposia, obsequious media profiles, proliferation of robots on college campuses, and so on that indicate our (apparently) exciting future.

The focus on AI, sentience, and consciousness in big tech, from titans like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, is justified because it will supposedly help us live longer and make us more intelligent through cyborg enhancements. Eventually, technological advances will perhaps even allow us to achieve immortality as we are transferred into digital form and able to live forever in cyberspace. Many people in Silicon Valley, both visible and behind the scenes, seem to genuinely subscribe to such beliefs.

These questions of immortality and identity raise their own problems, since a digital copy of myself, even if fully conscious, would not be me but a copy of me, and I would still die. Fully conscious digital copies of ourselves, if ever possible (I am skeptical), would only offer metaphorical immortality, as a being like me would exist after I die. But this is immortality in the same way that my progeny offer me immortality—they share my genes, they may share and pass down many of my experiences and ideas, and thus I live on in a way, but it is not literal immortality. Philosophers of the mind have wrestled with these fascinating questions for decades. But I digress…

Meanwhile, in the real world, humans live longer through antibiotics, cholesterol and blood pressure medication, vaccines, public sanitation, preventive medicine and universal healthcare, functioning social systems that reduce violence and address despair, and so on. Note that these actual life-saving advances, from statins to respirators, are examples of technology, broadly defined, but they are not AI. As for AI, O'Gieblyn argues that "most commercial AI systems today are designed...to perform more narrow and specific tasks: delivering food on college campuses, driving cars, auditing loan applications, cleaning up spills at grocery stores." Hardly life-saving. And yet this is where massive amounts of private capital are invested.

On the other hand, the actual life-saving medicines and practices mentioned above, under-invested in the private sphere and under constant strain in the neoliberal public sphere, are not exciting or sexy or futuristic. The same goes for reckoning with the billions of conscious beings we already share the earth with, widely known as animals.

Our treatment of animals today, both in the US and globally, is paradoxical, at once rife with care and cruelty, use of them as mere instruments and respect for them as valuable entities in their own right. Recent efforts in the US congress, like the passage of the Big Cat Public Safety Act and bipartisan efforts to discourage the use of animal testing, embody this positive aspect, as do similar or stronger bills in the EU and elsewhere. Witness as well efforts to confer rights and other legal protections on rivers, lakes, and even ecosystems. (See, for instance, this book by Joshua Gellers). Moreover, millions of people around the world treat their pet dogs and cats as equal (or near-equal) family members and companions.

At the same time, the animals killed in factory farms, tested and discarded in labs, and devastated in the wild as their ecosystems are destroyed all stand testament to a glaring failure to address these genuinely important questions regarding what we owe non-human conscious beings.

It would be far more productive if we focused on improving the ledger here, by recognizing that consciousness exists on a spectrum and that mammals and birds, at the least, possess it in significant amounts. Even reptiles and fish have some consciousness. Perhaps plants do as well, though this seems less certain. Computers and robots, meanwhile, do not. (Whether they ever will is unclear). We currently inhabit a world filled with conscious humans and animals and unconscious machines. What does recognition of this entail, both in terms of how we live our individual lives and how we organize our institutions?

These questions and similar ones that O’Gieblyn’s book so forcefully addresses are as important now as ever. If we fetishized technology less, we would see that questions of animal consciousness--how humans relate to one another and how we relate to the conscious animals that populate the ecosystems of the world--should be a guiding concern of life in the twenty-first century.

To the roboticists, computer scientists, and engineers preoccupied with AI, spare a moment to recognize that the futuristic world you envision, one rich with billions of conscious non-human life forms, already exists. And we are failing it miserably.