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.
No More Limits, No More Art
The problem for popular art today is that, increasingly, there is nothing to rebel against. The structures of morality and societal norms have almost completely disappeared. No one could write "The River" today because the protagonist's decision would be incomprehensible. An unexpected pregnancy at age eighteen no longer brings with it an expected duty or moral burden. Legal and widespread acceptance of abortion makes it easy to solve the problem with a trip to the clinic. Moreover, there is no expectation that such a pregnancy, even in the absence of abortion, necessitates marriage. Today's eighteen-year-old would likely say, "Couldn't we just move in together for awhile?" Even more likely is that the pregnant girl would simply be expected to have the child out of wedlock. Such occurrences are becoming statistically as common as births within marriage.
If the narrator of Springsteen's song didn't want to alter his lifestyle, he'd simply choose not to. He might visit his "baby momma" occasionally, or not, and pop in and out of their lives, or not, but in the main he'd just go on doing whatever he wished. The expectations and moral codes that propelled the Springsteen song into such haunted melancholy and greatness are absent from today's society. There is no burden to bear and, with no burden, no clash between the individual's yearning for freedom and the community rules that constrain it. There is no anguish and, thus, no art. There is only freedom.
It's not that Springsteen is promoting such morality in the song. The point is that, in order to write a great rock-and-roll song, you need something to rebel against. You need something to long for, a wall to crash into, a rule to thumb your nose at. Those boundaries and rules are increasingly absent in today's society. But without such restrictions, popular music and art more and more become a rebellion in search of something to rebel against.
When there is only freedom, there is left only the celebration of self, the attaining of what one wants, not the hoping for it or the experience of being denied it or the longing for what one cannot have. Art becomes the expression of pleasure. With the horizon of unacceptable behavior forever receding into the distance, the limits and burdens of life are no longer available as subjects for artistic lament or rebellion, and so they get replaced by self-absorbed celebrations of whatever one self-indulgently chooses.
And that does not produce art; it produces pornography. It is a grand form of cultural masturbation, a constant pleasuring of the self in the absence of anything that says no. Watch any VMA awards show, listen to the top ten songs on iTunes, read the popular paperback fiction on the New York Times bestseller list, or browse the most popular images on the internet, and see if this isn't true.
A Moment of Illumination
That road trip to Lincoln was a milestone of my youth. But the moment faded. We came back to school, finished up our studies, graduated, and eventually went our own ways. We married, pursued our various careers, raised our own children. Bruce Springsteen's song "The River" marked a spot on that path and is a lament for the past that we left behind. The song illuminated the deep and important moment that faced us. There were choices to be made. Yet the boundaries we came up against in our lives showed themselves to be not so much burdens as opportunities for a fuller, deeper life.
There is always loss and sadness as dreams are left unfulfilled and replaced by other, larger things of which we did not dream. But such burdens and truths are required to save us from perpetual childhood, from an adolescence that never ends and serves only the self.
Unfortunately, we seem to live in a time and place that appears stuck in just such an adolescence. Boundaries cease to exist; rules and norms weaken and disappear. There are consequences to all of this, of course, not least of which is a degrading even of popular, rebellious art forms. The irony is that, when the freedoms and enjoyment that artists and singers call for is actually granted, the art and music itself is eviscerated and withers away.
May God save us from art that has nothing to yearn for, rock-and-roll that sees no frontiers to rage against, and a society that can only say yes.
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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