Over the course of 500 concerts, five studio albums, two presidential campaigns and one manic Super Bowl performance, Bruce Springsteen proved himself again and again this decade to be his generation’s most vibrant, forward-looking artist: rock & roll hero to everyone from Barack Obama and Jon Stewart to Brandon Flowers and Win Butler; living symbol of an openhearted, egalitarian set of American ideals.
“I think politics comes out of psychology whether we like to think so or not,” Springsteen, 62, says during a flying visit to France to promote his new album Wrecking Ball.
“My experience growing up was that my mother was the primary breadwinner, she worked very hard every day.
“My father struggled to find work and I saw that was deeply painful and created a crisis of masculinity.
“Lack of work creates a loss in itself. Work creates an enormous sense of self. I saw this in my mother, she was an inspiring figure to me. I pick up a lot of the way I work from her. I also picked up a lot of the fallout when your father doesn’t have those things.
Springsteen – his surname is Dutch for “jump stone” – reflects that the struggles his family faced during his youth still continue.
“Those conditions are present in the United States right now where you have the service economy overtaking the manufacturing economy,” he says. “You have quite a few homes where the man is no longer the primary breadwinner.”
"I actually never worked in my life. The only honest work I’ve ever done in my life was at 14"
Bruce has told at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival with actor Tom Hanks for a conversation about his life and music.
The Boss has spent much of his career writing songs about the working class. But Bruce Springsteen is the first to tell he hasn’t done much in the way of hard work himself.
Little by little, he will become a symbol of the American working class, despite the fact that he himself is in many ways the personification of the American dream. Bruce Springsteen grows up in a working-class family, takes a class trip and manages to do what no one thought possible.
P3 Music documentary about Bruce Springsteen is the story of the guy who became a symbol of the working class, but who himself has never had a regular 9 to 5 job.
The main sources used as a basis for the documentary are Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography Born to run (2016) and the documentary film Asbury Park: Riot. Redemption. Rock n’ Roll (2019) by Tom Jones.
Sources: Mirror, ICELAND NEWS, the NEW YORK POST and tribecafilm.com
