#3, “Badlands,” Bruce Springsteen (1978)

150 Favorite Songs: #3, “Badlands,” Bruce Springsteen (1978)

Bruce Springsteen has written a lot of songs about the despair and hopelessness that exists in pretty much every forgotten place. He mostly uses his native New Jersey as the stand-in for that. There’s a moment in Springsteen on Broadway where he talks about what Jersey felt like to him growing up. “New York was a million miles away from the Jersey Shore,” he explains. “In my little town as a child, we knew no one who had ever been to New York City. Jesus Christ, it was only an hour away—but no, you might as well have said you’re going to the fucking moon.”

I came from a place like that. Northwest Indiana is a lot like New Jersey—I remember the first time I drove the Jersey Turnpike and couldn’t escape how much it reminded me of 80/94, the stretch of Interstate that runs from Chicago through where I was born before going on to better places. Northwest Indiana always felt like a hopeless place to me. Like the Jersey Shore and New York, It’s forty minutes and a million miles from Chicago. It was a steel mill community, which if you’re familiar with the history of American industry in the latter part of the twentieth century doesn’t bode well.

The most famous person from my high school was a year behind me and has a Wikipedia page because he was the person who replaced Osama Bin Laden on the FBI’s most wanted list. Every kid was familiar with the names of the people who got out of what was referred to broadly as The Region and made something of themselves: Michael and Janet Jackson; a White Sox outfielder from the eighties named Ron Kittle who was mostly famous for wearing big glasses; Orville Redenbacher. I remember being a kid and thinking that it was amazing that the guy on the bag of microwave popcorn came from the same place I was from. It’s the sort of place that makes it seem like there’s not much for you anywhere. (These days, I suppose you can add John Roberts, Gregg Popovich, Jim Gaffigan, and Omar Apollo to the list of famous Region Rats.)

That’s a big part of why I connect with Bruce Springsteen’s music, I think. So much of it is about the tension between the need to escape the dead-end you were born into and the fear that once you get out, you still might end up nowhere. (That’s not the only reason, of course; I am hardly the first guy to address most of his complicated feelings about his dad by devoting himself to Bruce Springsteen fandom.)

Bruce wrote a lot of great songs about that tension. It’s the defining thing about his body of work, present in “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” and “Born in the U.S.A.” and “Glory Days” and “The Land of Hope and Dreams” and “Wrecking Ball” and on and on, over the course of fifty years of songs. But “Badlands” is, I think, his masterpiece.

The song opens with a joyful explosion of major-key noise, guitar and drums and piano and Bruce singing lyrics that are deeply incongruous with all of that. “Got a head-on collision smashing in my guts, man,” he sings. “I’m caught in a crossfire that I don’t understand.” He unfurls a litany of complaints about where he’s from—the same old played-out scenes, the in-betweens, the heart and soul he’s missing, the lack of control he feels—and then has a panic attack in the pre-chorus. you wake up in the night with a fear so real. you send your life waiting for a moment that just don’t come. Then, because he’s Bruce Springsteen, he finds a note of hope, such as it is, imploring himself, or the listener, or whoever: don’t waste your time waiting.

There’s wisdom in “Badlands.” Probably its most quotable line is in the second verse, where he observes that a poor man wants to be rich, a rich man wants to be king, and a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything. It’s an interesting sentiment to put in a song about trying to escape where you come from, a self-aware note that the yearning the song describes is coming from the inside as much as the outside. That’s not an easy thing to recognize when you’re angry.

And “Badlands” is angry, in a way that Springsteen is rarely angry in his music. It doesn’t necessarily read as anger, because Bruce’s music is joyful and exuberant even when expressing contempt, but it’s definitely there. When the song gets to its climax—after Steven Van Zandt delivers a blazing guitar solo, and Clarence Clemons counters with his sax, and the song does a quick breakdown, where Bruce hums his way through the song getting quiet, and then loud again—he delivers a dedication that’s also, implicitly and then explicitly, an epithet hurled in the direction of those on the other side of the badlands. for the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside—that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive, he sings, big-upsing the listener who relates to what he’s singing, and justifying his anger by being the optimist surrounded by doomed pessimists, before addressing the those people directly. i want to find one face that ain’t looking through me. i want to find one place—he starts, then stops himself, says what he really means. i want to spit in the face of these—and then the chorus rolls back around—badlands, he exclaims, running through it one more time, another release of joyful noise.

There are a lot of things I love about Bruce Springsteen’s music, but if I had to try to pin it down to a single overarching theme, it’s the combination of joy and defiance that’s never more present than it is on “Badlands.” Bruce gives the distinct impression of being someone who recognizes that the world should be better than it is, but whose reaction to that fact is generous and life-affirming. Yes, the fact that the world is like this is unbelievably disappointing—but also, the reason it’s disappointing is because the people who live in it deserve better lives. The anger is always tempered by love and hope, and while that’s not always something I feel capable of, I hold that aspect of Bruce’s music as something of a north star—it’s not simplistic, it’s not built on false hope, there are no easy answers in it. It’s just the conviction that you gotta live it every day, your broken heart the price of admission, and keep pushing till it’s understood and these badlands start treating us good.