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9/11: Bruce Springsteen's The Rising · The Twin History Podcast

0:01
The Twin History Podcast brings together 2 Black Scotsmen, 2
0:06
twins, 1 historian and one storyteller to explore the
0:10
moments that shaped our world. The show features Joe McCann,
0:15
the eldest twin and resident storyteller, the one always
0:20
asking why any of this actually matters, alongside Johnny
0:25
McCann, 13 minutes younger, and the historian.
0:29
Equipped with the dates, the fact and the receipt, Every week
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they invite listeners to pull up a chair as they unpack some of
0:38
history's greatest tales, The ones you think you know, the
0:44
ones you've never heard, and the ones that hit different when
0:49
told by them. Enjoy.
1:23
Hello and welcome back to the Twin History Podcast.
1:26
This is Johnny McCann. So I'm not sure if you guys are
1:30
following us at the moment. We're doing a six part series on
1:33
the American Civil War. So I'm not sure where this
1:37
episode is going to fall, whether it be during the Civil
1:40
War or after the Civil War, if that makes sense.
1:43
So Joseph and I are still deciding on the structure that
1:48
the episodes will take and whether all six episodes of the
1:52
Civil War will come out concurrently or whether we'll
1:55
have some episodes in between for you guys.
1:58
So however, and wherever this episode falls, I hope you enjoy
2:03
it and we're going to do something very different today.
2:07
So I'm not sure if you guys are aware at the moment there's a
2:12
spot or shall we say a political disagreement between the current
2:18
president, Donald Trump and my favourite musician, Bruce
2:23
Springsteen. So they've fallen out over
2:27
Trump's policies and Bruce has been very vocal in his
2:32
condemnation of Trump's America for.
2:36
I would go back and record something on one of Bruce's
2:41
Seminole albums, the Ryzen from 2002.
2:46
So that's what I recorded as a response to the terrorist
2:49
attacks in New York and Washington on September 11th,
2:52
2001. We're obviously a history
2:55
podcast, but Joseph and I, you may have noticed throughout some
2:58
episodes we speak about pop culture topics like film and
3:04
music. So that's why I thought I'd take
3:07
the opportunity today to do something what Joseph would call
3:12
a pop culture episode or a popular like topic episode.
3:19
That's why I'm going to do something on the horizon.
3:21
But we'll go into the background, the history, we'll
3:24
go into different things. We'll obviously go into 911 and
3:29
we'll just basically speak about Bruce and the impact of the
3:36
rising and the impact of Bruce's music in general, so on.
3:40
I hope it's something you guys enjoy and I'm going to go ahead
3:45
and record. But before I do, I just like to
3:48
say my main sources for today are Bruce Springsteen's
3:53
biography Born to Run from 2016. It's actually a very good book,
3:58
although there's fangs and messes I I wish they'd went more
4:02
into, but it's a very good autobiography.
4:06
We've got Bruce Springsteen, the definitive biography 1972 to
4:10
2003 by David marsh Springsteen, point blank by Christopher
4:15
Sanford delivered me from nowhere by Warren zanes, tougher
4:20
than the rest 100 best Bruce Springsteen songs by June
4:23
Skinner sawyers and two articles by yours truly.
4:30
One was called A Dream of Life, a review of the Rising that I
4:34
wrote for a small newspaper I was writing for way back in 2004
4:40
I think it was, and also born in the USAA 30 year retrospective
4:46
which I wrote for a magazine which is now like defunct, a
4:51
small magazine in Edinburgh. So I wrote a 30 year
4:56
retrospective on Born in the USA in 2014.
5:01
This was so exactly 30 years after the album had come out.
5:05
Also, we've got Niall Ferguson's Colossus, The Rise and Fall of
5:10
the American Empire. So let's go into some of the
5:15
background, shall we? So a lot of people have said to
5:18
me like how did I get into Bruce Springsteen or what brought me
5:23
to Bruce Springsteen? Obviously I'm 3 generations
5:28
removed from Springsteen's age, so how did I come to his music
5:32
or how did his music find me? So when I was in high school I
5:37
heard Born to Run, a song that came out in 1975 on the radio
5:43
and I don't know how it was by or like when the song had come
5:49
out. So I mentioned that in class to
5:52
my history teacher at the time, and he turned out to be a huge
5:57
Strangstein fan. So he, like, made a tape for me
6:02
with, I think about 30 to 40 songs.
6:05
It was very different back then, wasn't it?
6:08
And it wouldn't be like that now.
6:09
It was Spotify, but he recorded a couple of tapes for me.
6:14
And I remember like always trying to, I didn't know the
6:17
name of the song. So I was trying to like write
6:19
down the name of the songs and remember Atlantic City, which is
6:23
a great song from Nebraska. I called it like everything
6:26
dies. And there are just some other
6:29
ones where I came up with stupid titles because I didn't know the
6:32
name of the songs. But I don't want to create like
6:38
rosy picture with that history teacher though, as you guys
6:41
know, I know teach history and I'm a historian and I write
6:47
academic papers. I, I can't say that history
6:50
teacher got me into history. He was very racist at times and
6:54
just he said things in class that if a teacher said them no,
6:59
they would be fired and struck off from the GTSC in Scotland.
7:04
The teacher's registration, just a couple of times he mentioned
7:08
racial eugenics, but he specifically asked Joseph and I
7:12
about it. What the hell do we know about
7:15
racial eugenics? We're like 13 years old at the
7:19
time and 1314 at the time. And also, he used to tell like
7:26
Marvin Gaye jokes just about Marvin Gaye being shot again.
7:32
It's not even funny. But if you said that now as a
7:34
teacher, you would not be teaching again.
7:37
So I'm not sure what that man's doing now.
7:39
I'm not sure if he's still teaching, but it was a very
7:42
different time in the 90s and people could be racist with
7:46
impunity. Essentially to trace the horizon
7:49
we have to go back to the 90s. So at the end of the 80s Bruce
7:55
Springsteen essentially fired his long term band, The Street
7:59
Band. So they completed the The Tunnel
8:03
of Love tour and about a year later Bruce phoned up each a
8:08
member of the band and said he wanted to go on a different
8:10
direction with his music. Apparently they all got paid $1
8:14
million each and Bruce went on his way.
8:18
In the early 90s he released 2 albums on the same day Round
8:22
about Easter and 1992, Human Touch and Lucky Town.
8:29
I think Lucky Tyne is slightly underrated, but it's not a
8:32
musical masterpiece compared to Bruce's work in the 70s and 80s.
8:36
But both albums were met with lukewarm commercial and critical
8:44
success. So Bruce then went on tour with
8:47
his new band. Dave Marsh mentions this in his
8:50
biography of Bruce, that a lot of Bruce's fans reacted
8:56
negatively to this band and Dave Marsh speculated that this could
9:01
have been because most of the band members were black.
9:05
Obviously their long running job with Bruce Springsteen as there
9:08
are more black people on stage than there are in his audience.
9:11
And I must say I can attest to this because of the four
9:16
Springsteen gigs I've been to, I've been the only person of
9:20
colour or only black person in the audience or certainly in the
9:24
section that we've been in at that time.
9:28
And Bruce has said it's one of the biggest disappointments of
9:30
his career that his audience isn't more diverse like his
9:35
band, like his some of his music.
9:37
He tries to be a bit more diverse with his music, but
9:40
obviously he's white and he's writer as a white musician and
9:46
he's very aware of that. When my wife and I went to see
9:50
Springsteen last time in May 2023 in Edinburgh, they played
9:54
Murrayfield. And when we got in the stadium
9:57
we were at the front and the Golden Circle, as they call it.
10:02
And as we were coming into the stadium, there were a lot of
10:06
security guards and most of them were young black men.
10:09
So one of them, the guys, as I passed, he looked at me and I
10:13
looked at him and we both just ordered.
10:15
Yeah, I know me. I know there are a lot of white
10:19
people. So yeah, I kind of stand out.
10:22
Springsteen gigs, that gig as well.
10:24
There was old white guy to our left and he was just dancing on
10:30
the, not that I'm making fun of how he was dancing, but he just
10:33
had his arm outstretched and Hitler salute the whole time.
10:36
But it was just how he was dancing, but only his arm was
10:40
moving and it was above his head, pointed straight into the
10:42
air. So I guess if Elon Musk had seen
10:45
that, he would have approved. So that's my experience.
10:48
And people have said to me, Johnny, how can you like Bruce
10:51
Springsteen because you're black and his music is white and his
10:56
audience is white? And it's just hard to say.
10:59
We shouldn't be pigeonholed by race or ethnicity when it comes
11:05
to music. I think that's a very dangerous
11:07
path to go down. My wife, when she went to see
11:11
him, Kendrick Lamar, the audience full of black people.
11:16
So Bruce just hasn't attracted a diverse audience for various
11:21
reasons. And yeah, I have to say, after
11:25
that 2023 gig, I had an existential crisis just
11:29
thinking, do I belong in that space?
11:33
Do I truly belong in that space? And the Springsteen fans, I have
11:37
to say, the gigs I've been to, they're not always the most
11:41
welcoming people because I do stand out.
11:45
I've got an Afro, I'm obviously black and everyone else is white
11:51
over 50, so I do kind of stand out.
11:55
But it's an interesting argument, an interesting dynamic
11:59
to go into. Yeah.
12:00
As I said, Bruce has always stated as the biggest
12:04
disappointment of his career or one of them, that his audience
12:07
isn't diverse and it just isn't. And at this stage, it's never
12:10
going to be. So it's just, it is what it is.
12:16
Essentially, those double albums were critical and commercial
12:21
failures. Bruce then wrote one of the
12:25
songs for Jonathan Demme's Academy award-winning
12:29
Philadelphia with Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks won an Oscar for
12:32
playing a gay lawyer, and it was one of the first times a
12:36
mainstream actor and played a gay man in a Hollywood film.
12:42
And it's a very good film. But Bruce's song is incredible.
12:45
And again, going back to the kind of music he releases, there
12:49
is like a slight hip hop beat behind that.
12:53
Bruce won an Oscar. I wrote of the streets of
12:57
Philadelphia that the fact that Bruce sang as a gay man and
13:01
voiced the pain and social alienation that so many members
13:04
of the community had gone through showed that opinions
13:07
were changing. At the height of his success in
13:10
the mid 80s, Springsteen was viewed by many Americans as a
13:14
personification of the heterosexual male.
13:18
Certain songs were left off of Born in USA as it was felt at
13:22
that time that they may subvert the image he was gone for.
13:26
So there were songs that were written for Born in USA that
13:29
were left off the album because they were, shall we say,
13:32
sexually ambiguous. So the fact that Bruce had
13:36
chosen to embody a gay man who was suffering and dying of HIV
13:41
related illness, it was a landmark moment and the struggle
13:47
for the equality. The song, you take it for
13:50
granted because heard it so many times, been played so often,
13:54
maybe overplayed, but it is one of the best songs ever written.
14:00
So after that, Bruce apparently wrote an album in 1994.
14:06
So he finished the album and he played it for John Lando,
14:09
Springsteen's long time manager. He was his producer on an after
14:13
Born to Run up Until the Horizon and We'll Get There.
14:18
So apparently he played the album for John Lando.
14:21
He sat back, smiled, and John Lando looked at him and said,
14:27
Bruce, if you release that album, you're finished as a
14:30
studio musician. So all that meant was that
14:33
because Lucky Town and Human Touch had been failures to a
14:40
large extent, if another album dropped so quickly, studio
14:44
album, and it again went on to be panned critically and
14:49
commercially, then yeah, it would have been a huge dent to
14:54
Bruce's career. So Lando said no, like, just put
14:58
that album away and no one will ever hear it.
15:01
But the strange thing is, last summer Bruce released Tracks to
15:06
the last album. So he'd released the first
15:09
Tracks album in 1998. So this one from last summer had
15:14
the Streets of Philadelphia session album and this surely
15:19
must be that album from 1994. The time periods, right?
15:24
The production sound is for the time.
15:29
The album is actually very good. Out of the lost albums from last
15:34
summer as the one I've listened to the most, and I would
15:38
actually argue that is better than any studio album that Bruce
15:42
released in the 1990s. So I don't know, maybe it was a
15:47
different album, maybe it was, maybe Bruce just hasn't released
15:51
it as Lando suggested. I think at this stage of his
15:55
career, he's a little more flexible and a little more laid
15:58
back with what the public hear regarding this music.
16:02
He's in his 70s. He's reaching the end.
16:06
His album in 2020, his last studio album, Letter to You.
16:12
It's basically a meditation on a man who is looking back because
16:19
he knows he doesn't have much time left.
16:22
It's a very good album. It's not a masterpiece, but it's
16:25
a very good album. Letter to you.
16:26
And that's mainly what it's about.
16:29
Just old friends gone. And yes, I'll be joining you at
16:33
some point. I'm sure Trump would talk sooner
16:37
around later, but I think the rest of us, we'd want Bruce
16:40
around for as long as possible. I would argue the 90s were
16:45
Bruce's worst period as a musician or as an artist.
16:50
Certainly there's no album during that period.
16:54
There's a masterpiece. And he decided, and it might
16:59
have been reluctantly, to reform the street bands.
17:03
Bruce without the street bands is not the same musician.
17:08
He's just not the same musician. And he does say in his biography
17:12
that is not a democracy. He has a final say on
17:16
everything. But you can't tell me that these
17:19
guys aren't coming up with great ideas in and out of the studio
17:23
that he'll then put into his work.
17:27
So finally, that's why Stevie Van Zandt left the band
17:30
originally in 1994 before the Burning USA tour, because he he
17:35
said he wanted more of a role in terms of songwriter and Bruce
17:40
just said no, that's not going to happen.
17:43
So that's why Stevie left. But Stevie came back for the
17:47
reunion tour in 1999 to 1000. So that year in 1999, Bruce was
17:53
being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
17:57
So Stevie spoke to Bruce and he implored them to petition the
18:02
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to let the street band being
18:07
inducted at the same time with Bruce.
18:11
But Bruce said at that time he was very proud of what he had
18:18
achieved as a soul artist. He said it was him in 1972 who
18:22
went to New York by himself on the bus, who went to Columbia
18:27
and played a demo session for John Hammond, who then signed
18:32
them. They signed them as a solo
18:33
artist because of the ridiculous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
18:38
roles, because Bruce had been signed as a solo artist and the
18:42
original E Street Band was not the E Street Band he'd played
18:45
with. By the end of the 80s, there'd
18:47
been a couple of changes. They couldn't be inducted
18:50
together because of those roles. But Bruce, with his power and
18:56
sway in the industry, he definitely could have got them
18:58
all inducted together. And it's just sad that he didn't
19:01
because by the time the Street Band were inducted into the Rock
19:06
and Roll Hall of Fame, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federisi were
19:10
dead by 2016. It's always played on his
19:14
conscience and he knows that he should have petitioned to have
19:18
them all inducted together, and it's just unfortunate that they
19:22
weren't. And Bruce also says that some of
19:25
the old grudges held from back in the 80s.
19:28
So he's basically saying he could still be unhearsal at
19:32
times. So it's just very unfortunate
19:34
that the boys weren't inducted into the Rock Hall of Fame with
19:39
Bruce at that time. And it's something that his fans
19:43
have never really, I don't want to say not forgiven him for it,
19:48
but it's just he should have got them inducted together and I
19:52
don't know why he didn't. And so we come to September
19:58
11th, 2001. We actually mentioned that on
20:01
our first episode of the Twin History podcast because 911, it
20:08
was our generations Kennedy assassination.
20:12
It's just one of those moments or one of those days where
20:15
you'll always remember where you were when you heard about it.
20:19
As I mentioned in that very first episode, I was at the
20:21
dentist. I wonder the joke I did in that
20:24
first episode after mentioning I was at the dentist.
20:29
So on that day, obviously, as we know, 3000 Americans died.
20:36
One of the interesting things is we teach 911 and history and
20:44
modern studies and a lot of our younger kids never heard of it,
20:49
which is very interesting. But anyway, on that day, members
20:53
of Al Qaeda, a terrorist organisation, hijacked planes
20:59
and they flew them into, I feel Sally telling others, everyone
21:04
knows it's like the Titanic, we all know it's sank.
21:07
But yeah, they flew them into the World Trade Centres and New
21:11
York City. 1 flew into the Pentagon and one apparently was
21:18
bound for the White House Flight 93, and that the passengers
21:24
overpowered the terrorists and the plane crashed in the field,
21:27
I think in Maryland. So at that time George Bush was
21:31
not in the White House. But obviously it would have been
21:38
a huge psychological shock if the White House had been
21:43
attacked in such a way. I'm not certain, but I think
21:47
that the last time the White House had been attacked was
21:51
during the War of 1812 by the British.
21:54
But I could be wrong on that. So many people died.
21:58
And my wife and I, when we were on the US East Coast a couple of
22:04
summers ago, we went to what is now the Freedom Tower.
22:07
If you go on to the into the Plaza, there's a memorial to the
22:12
victims and it's very moving. It's got their names carved into
22:19
the metal, everyone's name, and they've kept part of the
22:21
structure within the Plaza where the planes hit.
22:27
So it is a very moving memorial and a very sobering place When
22:34
you go there. There wasn't much talk, and I
22:36
remember, and some people were crying, some people weren't, but
22:41
it was very respectful. So obviously out of 911, we had
22:47
the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US just
22:53
pulled out of Afghanistan. And what was it 2022 like during
22:58
Biden's first term? So again, this was as a
23:03
consequence of George W Bush's reaction to 911 and a million
23:11
people died in Iraq. And our spineless Prime Minister
23:14
at the time, Tony Blair, got the United Kingdom embroiled in the
23:18
Iraq war when we had no right being there in the 1st place.
23:21
And yes, I'm not going to defend Saddam Hussein and what he had
23:25
done to the Iraqi people, but you can't just go in and
23:29
unilaterally do a regime change because you're not happy with
23:33
how a country is being run. People might look at the US just
23:37
now or the United Kingdom, and yeah, see, we're not happy with
23:42
how things are going and how the government is running things,
23:45
but it doesn't mean that a foreign power then swoops on and
23:49
changes the government or changes the political system.
23:54
So, yeah, that that's my faults of 911.
23:57
And I'll just read from Niall Ferguson's Colossus.
24:02
It has a conventional wisdom that September 11th, 2001 was
24:06
one of the turning points of modern history.
24:09
It is not to diminish the magnitude of the suffering the
24:12
terrorists inflicted on thousands of families, or of the
24:15
shock to the American collective psyche to suggest that it was
24:19
nothing of the sort. Without a doubt, Osama bin Laden
24:24
and his acolytes perpetrated ghastly crimes for which they
24:28
must be held accountable. This was obviously written
24:30
before Bin Laden was killed, but that would be true regardless of
24:34
their motives. The crucial point in the eyes of
24:38
the historian is that those motives were the product of long
24:41
term historical forces, the origins of which laid decades
24:45
earlier, and the direction of which was almost entirely
24:48
unchanged afterwards. On that bright late summer's
24:52
morning, the history of America's relations with the
24:55
Middle East only seemed to reach a turning point.
24:58
Like March 1848 in German history.
25:01
September 2001 was in many ways a turning point in which that
25:06
history failed to turn. Very interesting quote from
25:09
Ferguson, one of my professors at university, he absolutely
25:14
loved Niall Ferguson, and he loved them with a personal
25:19
passion. So I always thought maybe they
25:21
met a convention or something because he was very critical of
25:26
Ferguson as a historian and as a man.
25:30
And Ferguson, he's one of the fewer Western historians who
25:34
believe that the British Empire was a force for good and the
25:38
world. So we list 10 virtues of the
25:40
British Empire. One of them is they brought
25:44
sports to sports games to the globe.
25:48
They brought financial institutions.
25:51
They brought the English language, which is the language
25:55
of business and other things. Look into it.
25:58
The whole debate over the British Empire is more nuanced
26:01
than it was bad or it was good as more nuanced the argument,
26:06
and we'll get into that at some point on the Twin History
26:09
podcast, imperialism as an entity cannot be defended.
26:16
But as a more nuanced argument than this was evil, this was
26:22
righteous, this was somewhere in the middle as a more nuanced
26:25
argument. So let's get back to Bruce,
26:28
shall we? During 9/11 on the morning,
26:32
Bruce said, And I think this is a hyperbolic story, but it
26:36
probably did happen in some shape or form.
26:39
He said he was driving out of his house in New Jersey and
26:44
someone went by and shouting, Bruce, we need you, the country
26:47
needs you. So whether that happened or not,
26:50
Bruce said he interpreted that as him having to make a response
26:57
to 911, obviously not political and military response, but the
27:01
only way he could respond as a musician and as an artist.
27:07
During the reunion tour, Bruce had written 2 new songs.
27:11
One was A Land of Hope and Dreams.
27:13
Another one was American Skin. 41 shots about the slaying of
27:17
Amadou Diallo by New York City police officers.
27:22
He first performed it in Atlanta during the tour in 2000.
27:29
And there was a huge reaction in New York City to this song being
27:34
performed. So we had ten straight nights at
27:39
Madison Square Garden. And during one of those nights
27:42
he performed American Skin and the Audience.
27:47
If you go back and watch it, it's on YouTube.
27:49
Start Burn and Let. The song, bizarrely, was seen as
27:56
controversial. So Diallo had been shot at 41
28:00
times by these four officers. I think it was struck 19 times
28:04
by the bullets, 20 times. The officers were indicted, but
28:09
the trial was moved from the Bronx.
28:11
It was moved to Albany, NY, in early 2000.
28:15
The officers were acquitted. So a lot of people in New York
28:21
said it's finished, the trials finished.
28:24
These men have been acquitted, they've been seen as doing
28:27
nothing unlawful. So any more comment on the case
28:33
is socially irresponsible, which for me just didn't make any
28:37
sense. Diallo, he didn't have a gun.
28:41
He was working 14 hour days. He's trying to make a life for
28:44
himself in America and he gets shot when he's coming home one
28:49
night. Apparently in the American
28:52
police are notorious for this. Apparently he fit the
28:56
description of a suspect and they always say that, don't
29:01
they? After an unlawful police
29:03
shooting. So Diallo died instantly.
29:08
Bruce wrote the song as an amazing song and if you listen
29:13
to the guitar solo at the bridge, this is meant to
29:20
represent the anguish that Diallo's mother felt.
29:23
And the second verse is sang from her point of view.
29:26
And again, going back to some of the sexually ambiguous lyrics or
29:31
songs from the Born in the USA period.
29:34
I love that for that second verse, Bruce takes on The Voice
29:39
of a woman and takes on The Voice of the mother.
29:42
And when my wife and I, when we went to a Black Lives Matter
29:47
protest in Edinburgh after the murder of George Floyd, one of
29:53
the boards we made, I just wrote George was killed for 11 and as
29:57
American skin, and I saw a lot of people looking at it at the
30:00
protest, they wouldn't have known what it meant.
30:02
But it was a tribute to Diallo and a tribute to Bruce and a
30:08
tribute to Floyd. It's a great song and it does
30:14
not make any sense. That song was controversial.
30:18
After he wrote those two songs, Bruce said he finally felt he
30:21
had the confidence to write a great album.
30:27
So when he went back into the studio, he went in with a new
30:31
producer, Brendan O'Brien, who'd produced Rage Against the
30:35
Machine and Pearl Jam. And one of the key changes he
30:40
made in the studio was he shifted the focus from the
30:44
keyboard LED sound of albums like Born in the USA to guitar
30:48
and guitar sound. And also very importantly, this
30:53
was Bruce's first studio album with the Street Band since Born
30:58
in the USA. We have to remember most of Born
31:02
in the USA was recorded during the Nebraska sessions.
31:06
So this would have been 1982. The album came out in 84.
31:10
Obviously it went stratospheric, but so this was the early 80s
31:15
when Bruce had really last worked with the full complement
31:20
of the E Street Band in the studio.
31:22
They all recorded bits and pieces with them for the Tunnel
31:27
of Lava album, but most of that was like one-on-one with Bruce.
31:31
And also that album was largely recorded than Bruce's garage,
31:36
but obviously his garage is a bit different.
31:39
Tower garages. So this was important that the
31:44
street band we're back in the mix just to say about the
31:47
Nebraska sessions just quickly delivered me from nowhere came
31:52
out last September and I really liked it.
31:55
I was never going to capture the essence of Warren Zen's book.
32:01
I actually read that one Sunday morning all the way through and
32:05
one setting as an incredible book.
32:08
But what the film does capture as the sound Bruce was looking
32:12
for one of my best friends, he was best man at my wedding.
32:17
He works in the music business. He's sound engineer and the
32:21
music producer. So I told him you would probably
32:25
really appreciate a film like Deliver Me from Nowhere because
32:30
it goes into how the album was made sonically, technically.
32:36
What I would argue though, is even though the film inevitably
32:41
falls prey to many of the tropes of music biopics, and there's a
32:47
huge 1 coming out soon, the Michael Jackson one, but I don't
32:50
think we'll speak about that. But I felt Jeremy Allen White's
32:53
performance deserved an Oscar nomination, certainly more so
32:57
than Leonardo DiCaprio When 1 Battle After another.
33:01
I thought Jeremy Allen White deserved an Oscar nomination for
33:04
playing Bruce Springsteen because it is absolutely
33:07
outstanding. As I said, the film doesn't
33:10
quite capture the depths of Bruce's depression and how the
33:15
album recording of Nebraska brought him out of that
33:20
depression. You're not going to in a film.
33:23
I still think Jeremy Allen White is such a great performance and
33:27
one that deserves reconsideration, I would say.
33:33
Anyway, back to the horizon. So many of the victims on
33:39
September 11th were from New Jersey.
33:41
Firemen, policemen. Who knows, maybe some of the men
33:46
who protested Bruce in summer 2000 when he released 41 shots.
33:52
Doesn't matter if they were from one of the towns in New Jersey,
33:57
one of the small towns, there were 200 victims or close to 200
34:00
victims. Bruce's music was ubiquitous at
34:05
funerals at that time, so Bruce heard about this and he also
34:11
spoke to the families of the fallen officers, firefighters,
34:18
the victims of 911. So from this he wrote the two
34:25
centrepieces of the album, the title track The Horizon and Into
34:31
the Fire. He said the image that stopped
34:34
from that day, Bruce said this was the firefighters ascending
34:39
and ascending as everyone else was descending from the World
34:45
Trade Centre trying to get to safety and they're ascending.
34:48
And as Bruce said, what are the ascendant or the ascending to
34:53
paradise or the ascending to heaven or the ascending to a
34:57
better place? And it works so well live.
35:00
It's an amazing rock song. The bridge that leads to the
35:03
final verse is incredible. And for me, it's one of the best
35:09
rock songs I've ever written on social media.
35:12
A lot of younger people and a lot of the right wing in
35:15
America, they say that Bruce hasn't had a good album since
35:19
the 80s, but they obviously haven't heard The Horizon and
35:25
yes, Sentence, Tunnel of Love, which for me, as a masterpiece,
35:29
that was 1987. There haven't been many truly
35:35
outstanding albums, but that happens.
35:37
He's still writing relevant music.
35:40
Magic from 2007, good album. Letter to You, very good album.
35:45
Western Stars, good album. They're not masterpieces, but
35:48
they're very good albums. So he's still relevant as an
35:52
artist. So a lot of people on the right
35:55
wing who see Bruce almost as an Antichrist figure or anti
36:00
American even though he's couldn't be further from that.
36:05
They say he's not been relevant since the 80s but he's got sold
36:10
out to hers. He's a huge live act.
36:12
He's still writing and producing very good albums.
36:17
So of course he's still relevant.
36:19
He's not part of pop culture. Is he that relevant where
36:25
everyone knows what he releases, what he's doing?
36:28
Is he like a Taylor Swift? I'm not saying I like her music,
36:31
my wife likes her, but I don't think I could name a Taylor
36:34
Swift song. But she is what Bruce would have
36:37
been like in the mid 80s. She's the biggest artist on
36:41
Earth and when she played Edinburgh in 2024, my wife said
36:47
she was expecting me to get her tickets.
36:50
I know we're going to America summer 2024.
36:53
That has cost enough money. So I'm not getting you tickets
36:56
for Taylor Swift as well. So you can watch the thing on
37:00
Disney, 'cause she released something over to her, didn't
37:03
she? So anyway, obviously Bruce
37:07
Springsteen, Taylor Swift, they're galaxies apart when it
37:11
comes to songwriting. How important their music as in
37:17
50 years, 50 to 100 years, I don't think they'll be listening
37:20
to Taylor Swift, but they'll still be listening to Bruce and
37:23
I'm sure they'll still be listening to the Rising and to
37:28
the fire. I would argue along with maybe
37:35
Western Stars, the title track is the Best Song that Bruce has
37:39
written in the 21st century is such incredible song.
37:45
And if you've not heard that there's a live version from 2003
37:50
when he played Barcelona with the street band.
37:53
Watch that version. And if you don't have goosebumps
37:57
listening to that song, you're not human.
38:01
When I listen to that live performance, it's a
38:03
transcendental moment. It is absolutely astonishing.
38:06
And all I can say is track it down on YouTube.
38:09
And as I said, if you're not moved by that, it's hard to
38:14
believe that you like music, even if you don't like Bruce
38:17
Springsteen. Another great song on the album
38:20
is Nothing Man, which funnily enough was written for that 1994
38:25
album I mentioned earlier, which never got released.
38:29
It's odd because it's anonymous. The themes, the lyrics, the
38:34
imagery of the song with what happened on 9/11, what was a
38:39
part I don't think it's a great song, but Bruce including
38:42
singers from Pakistan on that song because he wanted other
38:47
voices on the album. He didn't want it to be a purely
38:50
American album. Although as David Marsh argued,
38:54
a lot of people saw is that almost saw it in some sense as a
38:59
born in the USA moment where born in the USA written during
39:04
Reagan's America huge from and a lot of people saw it as an
39:10
endorsement of Reaganism. But obviously it was an
39:14
indictment of Reaganism. Again, some people thought the
39:17
Rison was a similar kind of album or some of the songs were,
39:21
but it's just not like that at all versus American.
39:26
He's writing from the point of view of being an American, but
39:30
even listen to something like Lonesome Day, which kicks off
39:35
the album, there's one point he says you better ask questions
39:37
before you shoot, saying yeah, your basic human instinct is for
39:42
revenge after what happened, but maybe think of the consequences.
39:47
And maybe if George W Bush had fought more of the long term
39:50
consequences, he wouldn't have got America, and Britain by
39:54
extension, into the quagmire that was the Middle Eastern war
39:59
from the early 2000s. So again, 9/11 is an American
40:04
tragedy, but there are other people affected, other voices.
40:08
At that time, Muslims would be targeted, American Muslims who
40:14
law abiding citizens who lived in America and been born in
40:19
America were essentially American and they were targeted
40:24
in their communities by people who just were xenophobic.
40:29
They were racist, They fought. Every single Muslim was in
40:34
support of what happened on 9/11 when we know that was not the
40:39
case. So yeah, I would say that again,
40:45
Words Apart is not a great song. I don't think it's a great song,
40:48
but it's important that there were other voices on the album,
40:55
Dave Marsh writes of the Rison. The rison in Bruce Springsteen
40:58
could not be entirely digested in 2002 America.
41:02
In 1984, Bruce Springsteen stood out as a symbol of humanist
41:06
culture and anti Reagan. After four more years of Reagan,
41:10
eight years of Clinton and both of the Bushes, that culture had
41:15
no popular context for always litany and references to life
41:20
after death. For all his moral courage, the
41:23
horizon could not sync up with the spirit of the day.
41:26
And that's one of the best things about it.
41:29
So again, it's just going into Bruce, even at that stage, he's
41:33
not part of popular culture. If you're under 30 in 2026,
41:39
you're not listening to Bruce Springsteen.
41:41
His audience has grown old with him.
41:43
And I mentioned I've been to 4 gigs earlier.
41:47
I'm one of the youngest people there when I'm at his gigs and
41:50
I'm in my early 40s. So that just tells you the make
41:54
up of his audience. But at the end of the day, for
41:58
me, what Marsh is saying, that doesn't matter.
42:01
And Marsh says it himself, it doesn't matter.
42:03
That's one of the best things about it because it was a heads
42:07
of the zeitgeist that's ahead of his time.
42:10
It transcends popular culture and the impact commercially may
42:16
not be huge, but artistically for me, it's the best response
42:23
to what happened on that day, best creative or artistic
42:27
response in any medium to what happened that day.
42:32
So that is the end of our episode on the horizon.
42:35
So I hope you guys have enjoyed this episode and I hope you're
42:38
enjoying listening to our Civil War episodes.
42:42
So we'll see you next time on the Twin History podcast.
42:45
Take care. Goodbye.
42:46
The Twin History Podcast is a Lost Cosmonauts production
42:50
produced by me Virag Estertout. Additional producers are Dale
42:56
McGoldrick, Johnny McCann and Joe McCann.
42:59
Written by Johnny McCann and Joe McCann, Original music and score
43:05
by Kevin McCloud. The podcast is available
43:09
wherever you get your podcast. You can find us on Instagram,
43:13
YouTube, Twitter and TikTok under the handle the Twin
43:17
History Pod. You can e-mail us at the Twin
43:22
historypodcast@gmail.com. Thanks for listening.
44:40
Yeah.