be Born to Run. Springsteen was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek in the same week, back when that meant something.
He was suddenly a star. The next obvious step was to take it up a notch, to broaden his appeal even more. This, of course, is what the record company and everybody around him wanted. It’s the natural progression. If you’re a beginner, you become a star. If you’re a star you become a superstar.
What followed was the crucial moment in Springsteen’s climb to mastery. Instead of going outward and national, he went down and local. His next album would be a deeper dive into his own people, the people on the margins of small towns in central New Jersey. He would pare back the music to make it reflect the solitary characters he was writing about. There’s a moment in many successful careers when the prospect of success tries to drag you away from your source, away from the daemon that incited your work in the first place. It is an act of raw moral courage to reject the voices all around and to choose what you have chosen before. It looks like you are throwing away your chance at stardom, but you are actually staying in touch with what got you there.
“Here was where I wanted to make my stand musically and search for my own questions and answers,” Springsteen writes. “I didn’t want out. I wanted in. I didn’t want to erase, escape, forget or reject. I wanted to understand. What were the social forces that held my parents’ lives in check? Why was it so hard?”
Here was the paradox: Springsteen grew up in the height of the “I’m Free to Be Myself” era. Rock music was the classic expression of that ethos. Springsteen himself sang about escaping and running away to total freedom. But personally, he never fell for that false lure. He went back deeper into his roots, deeper into his unchosen responsibilities, and to this day lives ten minutes from where he grew up.
“I sensed there was a great difference between unfettered personal license and real freedom. Many of the groups that had come before us, many of my heroes, had mistaken one for the other and it’d ended in poor form. I felt personal license was to freedom as masturbation was to sex. It’s not bad, but it’s not the real deal.” Springsteen felt accountable to the people he’d grown up with, few of whom had been to college, most of whom were struggling, and so he went back and planted himself in that ground.
A few decades later, I watched him perform to sixty-five thousand screaming young fans in Madrid. Their T-shirts celebrated all the local central Jersey places that pop up in Springsteen songs and lore—Highway 9, the Stone Pony, Greasy Lake. It turns out he didn’t really have to go out and find his fans. If he built a landscape about his own particular home, they would come to him. It makes you appreciate the tremendous power of the particular. If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific imaginative landscape, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up on the far-flung networks of eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft commitments or none at all.
One of my students, Jon Endean, once told me about a college professor he had at Rice University named Michael Emerson. Emerson, who is white, is a sociologist who taught about racial justice. To demonstrate the power of identity, he invented a label for each student in the class: “Kentucky Guy,” “Fried Pickles Gal,” and the like. He called himself “A Common Guy” or just “Common.” He walked them through a series of exercises to show how labels shape lives. For example, they created black and white online dating profiles so they could observe the differences in how people reacted. Endean told me that Common was one of the best teachers he ever had, and his work, on the role of race, religion, and urban life, is prominent in the field.
Common not only taught about racial justice, every house he and his wife, Joni, have ever bought was in a black neighborhood. As a result, every one of those houses lost value