Songs Without Borders
Paul Gregory Alms on Why Springsteen's "The River" Couldn't Be Written Today
It was 1984 and I was twenty-one years old. My favorite song was "The River" by Bruce Springsteen. It had become so at the end of a road trip with friends from Chicago to Lincoln, Nebraska, in a rusted-out Volkswagen Beetle. As we came into Lincoln at sunset, "The River" came on the cassette player and it seemed to fit our journey perfectly. Though we could not have said so at the time, it matched not only the car trip but also our lives. Soon we would graduate from college, begin to get married, and go on to jobs and other pursuits. We would scatter, and the half-childhood, half-adulthood period of college would morph into the full challenges that come with wives and responsibilities and children of our own.
That car ride and Springsteen's song were characterized by coming up against limits. Sunset marked the end of the day. The trip marked the end of college freedom, and the song marks the end of the singer's own youth in the face of his impending fatherhood and marriage. That moment with the car stereo blaring in the tinny confines of the Volkswagen was a moment on the edge of a border, of bounds weighing in on us, limits we barely understood and often reacted against. We imagined ourselves somehow different from other beer-drinking young men of that age, anxious to distance themselves from their parents and upbringing.
A Lament for Lost Freedom
That is why "The River" was a perfect song for that moment. In the song, as a plaintive harmonica plays, the narrator relates just those feelings. He had been brought up "to do like your daddy done." His future has been mapped out: workplace, job, and family. But Springsteen's character glimpsed freedom from those prospects in rides out to the river with his high-school sweetheart, Mary. They would "drive out of that valley" and dive in the river. There, in those moments, the song seemed to say, was the possibility of a life other than the one laid out for him.
But that freedom and the romance that seemed to be the path to a new life turn out to circle back in on the singer and bring him right back to the life he thought he might escape. Mary becomes pregnant, and so the very thing that had promised him freedom and difference—romance and adventure with his girl—now becomes a weight. He must undertake the responsibilities he once thought to evade. He must get married. He sings that for his "nineteenth birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat." He must work just as his dad did to provide for his wife and child. The burdens come to rest on the young man's back. The wedding brings no smiles and no flowers. It is a task to be done. He remembers the moments at the river, but they seem to mock him now as a curse, not as glimpses of freedom.
The lyrics present a dark portrait of an adulthood not freely chosen, of responsibilities not easily undertaken but received as an unwelcome load. The song is a meditation on the limits and barriers that community morality and obligation bring. The narrator never for once considers the possibility that such barriers do not exist. The birth of the child is his responsibility; he never considers abandoning the child or the mother. The moral code of his community is too strong. He must get married, and he must work to provide for what is assumed by all, including himself, to be his new family. While the life that is given to him is grim and filled with dread, it is nonetheless accepted as his own.
The Irony of Rebellious Art
This is a gloomy portrait of work and family, but it is a deeply moral one. The song cannot exist without the acceptance of imperatives that see such choices as inevitable and binding. The song is a lament that longs for freedom lost, for the promises of a different road that disappeared. But the limits and barriers the singer finds himself constrained by are the engine that drives the song. Without the strict expectations of the community in which the singer lives, there is no song.
This is the great irony in the popular art of the last sixty years. Its forms thrive on rebellion and the overturning of conventional limits and expectations and even of morality. Popular art often seeks to break conventional patterns and to ignore what society expects. Singers cry out for personal freedom. Painters disregard normal rules of color and perspective and form in order to transgress a boundary. Writers sketch narratives that investigate the immoral or amoral, or sometimes abandon standard narrative altogether.
But the irony is that for such art to work, in order for it to make a statement, such rules and boundaries and markers have to be in place. If one wishes to deface a wall with graffiti or some other outrageous markings, the wall must be there to be defaced; you can't deface a wall that doesn't exist. If one wishes to scale a barbed-wire fence marked "no trespassing" and wave his arms and say, "Look at me," there must be a fence to scale. If one wants to sneer at conventional rules of behavior, there must actually be rules that govern how most people act. If you are going to be a freak, you need to be surrounded by ordinary people so you can stand out.
Paul Gregory Alms (paulgregoryalms.blogspot.com) is pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church (LCMS) in Catawba, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with both MDiv and STM degrees. He has written extensively for journals such as First Things, Concordia Theological Journal, Lutheran Witness, Lutheran Forum, The Cresset, and others. He is married and the father of four girls.
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