His extensive, highly personalised chronicle of recent American urban history has attracted a lot of attention – obviously of millions of listeners and fans, but also of writers, politicians and, increasingly, of academic researchers. With respect to the latter, we can observe an emerging academic cottage industry, which has produced numerous already articles, at least one dissertation, monographs and even a dedicated academic journal (Boss: The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies, McGill University, Montreal). Many of these publications focus on the social and political dimensions of Springsteen’s songs and performances thereby highlighting the deeper meanings of his body of work. Much less attention has been paid on the urban dimension in his work. Yet, from an urban studies point of view, his extensive body of work offers fascinating vignettes of how structural processes of transformation – in particular deindustrialisation and related trends of social polarisation – have affected the lives of ordinary American citizens.

His work is based on his first-hand knowledge of the life of his father – an archetypical blue-collar worker – and of those with whom he grew up with in New Jersey. He has vastly travelled in the United States (both for the sake of travelling and on tour) using his keen sense of observation to get a sense of the place and talking to people to learn from their experiences. He even did proper fieldwork to get to know (in his own words) “the geography of the thing” to write the songs of The Ghost Of Tom Joad album (1995) which depicts the lives of undocumented migrants and refugees from Vietnam. He is, furthermore, an avid reader of novels and history books which enables him to construct the larger backdrop against which these lives are played out.

On his first two albums (both came out in 1973), the lyrics still have a rather “impressionistic character” (according to Springsteen) with a young adolescent in search of his own identity at the centre of the story. Already though, we can observe his eye for urban landscapes in, for instance, 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), Incident On 57th Street and New York Serenade. These songs describe the large diversity of the urban population in terms of ethnicity (Latinos, Afro-Americans), social class, dress styles (“my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet”), but also the moral and legal aspects of certain forms of behaviour. The references to streets, street corners, fire escapes, downtown trains indicate that all this is set in an urban environment.

Fast forward to 1984 and we find a rather different take on cities. In My Hometown, the closing song on the Born In The USA album, Springsteen explicitly refers to how the job loss had affected the place where he grew up:  

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores

Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more

They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks

Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back to your hometown

Springsteen came back to the theme of deindustrialisation some ten years later in his song Youngstown (1995). In just under four minutes, he first describes how structural forces first made Youngstown into a major industrial centre (“Them smokestacks reachin' like the arms of God

Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay”), the subsequent demise of manufacturing (“Now the yard's just scrap and rubble”) and how this has hit a young family.   

More than a decade later, Springsteen brought out Wrecking Ball (2012), an album that targeted the effects of the credit crisis which broke out in 2008 and those who were in his eyes responsible for this economic shock. The album contained the song Death To My Hometown thereby closing the circle that he started in 1984:

“The marauders raided in the dark

And brought death to my hometown

They brought death to my hometown

They destroyed our families, factories

And they took our homes”

The above is only a very brief selection from the large body of songs of Bruce Springsteen[i]. In nearly a half century, he has created a unique and rich tapestry of images of contemporary life in the United States. In a very positive review of his autobiography Born to Run, The Economist dubbed Springsteen “the bard of deindustrialisation”. One could also say that he is the human geographer among the great songwriters of post-war pop music.

[i] This is summary of Robert C. Kloosterman (2019), ‘”My Hometown”;  Bruce Springsteen, Chroniqueur van de Amerikaanse stad”, Agora (2019:1): 16-19. A longer English version is in preparation.