ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s critics have celebrated Springsteen’s characters and themes – including cars and highways, desperation and redemption, young lovers and keeping faith – and credited his music with universal appeal. This essay reassesses Springsteen’s music in terms of its particularity, identifying heterosexuality as a central and extraordinarily powerful theme here. I analyze the social-cultural effects of larger-than-life heterosexuality in Springsteen, trace how these have changed over time with broader societal changes in sexuality and gender, and consider all this in the context of globalization and neoliberalization.
Springsteen electrified listeners with his ability to render exhilarating and soul stirring the most overworked theme in popular music, that of love between a boy and a girl. No musician of the past half-century has brought more potent drama to heterosexual love and life. I analyze music and lyrics in four classic Springsteen songs to illuminate his poetics of epic heterosexuality in settings of both triumph and desperation and discuss this in relation to U.S. political economy. Springsteen’s heterosexual epic percipiently reflected historic changes in working-class life: the early heterosexual exuberance mirrored America’s long wave of postwar economic expansion, and a bleak turn to melancholy and ailing heterosexuality telegraphed the economic contraction of dawning globalization and crisis.
Such spectacular representation had real-world consequences. Situating Springsteen’s heterosexual epic in the context of totalizing heteronormativity and placing sexuality itself in political-economic perspective, I argue that Springsteen’s classic songs contributed to the forces of heteronormativity and thus (however unconsciously) stifled prospects for queer love and life. In dialogue with social and pop-musical history, queer theory, and prior commentaries on Springsteen’s sex-gender politics and performance, I also offer new readings of his vaunted emotionalism and homosociality that are attentive to pivotal factors of class, race, and ethnicity. Ultimately I underscore the contingency of pop music’s meanings and effects. Today, more expansive gender practices may allow Springsteen’s epic heterosexuality to serve purposes of queer inclusion in social life and cultural representation – even if mainstreamed, marketed, middle-classed LGBTQ identities grow ever less queer.
