Recommendations of the Editorial team
There is no better cover. The wide gray sky above the highway that disappears in the horizon. On the side of the path: nothing. The sky seems to be shining, diffuse and toxic. And there may be snow on the radiator hood or at the bottom of the window where the windshield wipers are attached. The car from which this view was photographed must be a Buick. Although Bruce Springsteen was the Cadillac man.
To “Nebraska”. He just rocked with his buddies from the E Street Band, sang over hungry hearts, auto cemeteries and the little luck after the end of the service. That was “The River”, the record for America’s worker.
“Nebraska” is the negation of everything that the United States is proud of. The landscape itself: no place, nowhere. Nebraska, that is medium west, but above all the middle of nothing. A country to drive through, a merciless country. “Cold -blooded” and “The Last Picture Show” fall into one thing: gruesome violence and bottomless boredom. Sam the lion is dead, the last film is running, and the wind blows everything away.
Bruce Springsteen sings of a godless America
From the first second, Springsteen’s “Nebraska” is a road movie, a folk song, a moritat, a social report. “I saw Her Standin ‘On Her Front Lawn Just Twirlin’ Her Baton/ Me And Her Went for a ride sir and ten Innocent People Died”: Of course, this is pure hemingway. “In Media’s Res” is still a understatement for this opening, in which a kind of drumstock from the Spielmannszug releases the completely brilliant picture for everything that makes up the teen queen.
Now we know about the two as well as about the couple in “Thunder Road”, only that the guy has no machine and no future. If he tells now, everything is over. “I Can’t Say that i’m sorry for things that we deal/ at least for a little while sir me and her we had us some fun.” It is a cliché that an American can formulate existentialism in a single sentence. But Camus is not laconically enough to give jump streams the water. Write a real sentence.
The realism of this record is free of all sentimentality and also romantic. Nothing happens at all in the song “Mansion on the Hill”, which Springsteen plays in concerts against the original plaque today. The villa stands on the outskirts of the city, dominates the factories and fields, and in summer the lights shine and laugh at people, and a wonderful moon opens over the villa. The narrator and his sister listen to the sounds in the cornfield. Pure magic.
In the “Open All Night” motorway, the narrator drives into safe madness, but as in “State Trooper” he asked for redemption, here from the car radio and the rock’n’Roll: “Hey Mr. Deejay Woncha Hear My Last Prayer/ Hey Ho Rock’n’Roll Deliver Me From Nowhere.”
In Springste’s negative eschatology, in America without God, there is only one moment of consolation. In the end, the singer rubs his eyes: “Struck me Kinda Funny/ How at the End of Every Hard Earned Day/ People Find Some Reason to Believe.”