"Brilliant Disguise" by Bruce Springsteen
On coming around to Bruce
“I hold you in my arms as the band plays / What are those words whispered baby / Just as you turn away / I saw you last night out on the edge of town / I want to read your mind to know just what I've got in this new thing I've found”
I’ve said in some other posts how much I hated Bruce Springsteen growing up. Of course I laugh about it now. It was a point of pride for some reason, and it took the efforts of several people close to me to bring me around. I might have been blinded by the light.
The crux of my difficulty was this: I told myself I had aesthetic, musical opinions about Bruce’s work. I was physically repelled. I didn’t like the sound, I didn’t like his energy. I didn’t like the sheer density of his lyrics. I didn’t like the bombast, the banal simplicity of his melodic hooks. I didn’t like how the chords just went back and forth, how they didn’t evolve harmonically.
I was into Brazilian music, I was into Bach. I was emphatically not into Bruce.
In hindsight it’s obvious that I only saw part of the picture. But the part that I was missing? I wasn’t just blind to it. It wasn’t just the manliness. There was a whole dimension of humanity that I resolutely refused to explore, and this avoidance held me back in life. It was a severe case of arrested development.
I might have derided Bruce, but the joke was on me.
“So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes / Is that you baby or just a brilliant disguise”
Some people love Bruce and other people hate Bruce. Both camps seem to feel sorry for the other. One of my lines used to be that “Bruce sings for the people who either are from New Jersey or who wish they were from New Jersey.” That was before I started fully appreciating New Jersey.
Like I said, I laugh about it now.
And it doesn’t matter what you or anyone thinks about New Jersey. It’s like telling someone you don’t believe in God and having them say back to you, “well God believes in you, so it doesn’t matter.”
Dear nonbeliever: Bruce believes in you. Trenton makes, the world takes.
“I heard somebody call your name from underneath our willow / I saw something tucked in shame underneath your pillow / Well I've tried so hard baby but I just can't see what a woman like you is doing with me”
Bruce is insanely popular in Spain. And the people in Spain are picky about their music. What do they see in him? Quite a lot. But I know some Broadway people, and the grumbling that took place during Bruce’s Broadway run was legendary.
The people who already love Bruce definitely don’t need me to sell them on him. And I don’t expect that any humble words from me would sway the ones who don’t. But my own journey led me to a place of loving Bruce. And the things that were in the way of my loving Bruce are sadly in the way of too many people loving life itself.
“Now look at me baby / Struggling to do everything right / And then it all falls apart when out go the lights / I'm just a lonely pilgrim, I walk this world in wealth / I want to know if it's you I don't trust 'cause I damn sure don't trust myself”
And the thing is, opinions and feelings are unquantifiable. I can’t just sit here and say something like, “I came around to his style of singing” or “my brain started being able to absorb dense lyrics” or “I decided I love New Jersey after all”. None of those things matter.
I didn’t just have to start looking past my own pretensions, I had to kill them.
Because when you start appreciating the sheer scale of what Bruce accomplishes, the continuity of his work, all the musical details just fade into the background. The audience at a Bruce show is an assembly of hearts beating as one. We are not just kicking it to some big tunes.
“Now you play the loving woman, I'll play the faithful man / But just don't look too close into the palm of my hand / We stood at the altar, the gypsy swore our future was right / But come the wee wee hours, maybe baby the gypsy lied”
“Brilliant Disguise” is the Bruce song that took me in. “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.” What can you say to a line like that?
Couples perform for each other, hiding things from themselves and each other. We’re all out here just trying to make it, and the ways people are revealed to each other in intimacy only slightly outpaces the ways we are revealed to ourselves.
We still have to live with each other, until we don’t.
“So when you look at me you better look hard and look twice / Is that me baby or just a brilliant disguise”
The 60s were famous for a cascade of broken social norms and revolutions in our behaviors. There was a huge culture shift. But the shift in the 70s and 80s mostly looked, to my young self, like an epidemic of broken marriages. I knew precious few couples from that time who actually stayed together, most of my friends were from broken homes.
But this was an important shift too: people discovering how to be true to themselves. Understanding that they were outgrowing their previous choices and circumstances, then letting the inevitable happen. Accepting that the common dictates of domestic order, dictated by macroeconomics rather than by nature, might leave something essential to be desired. Trusting their kids to be resilient and opening up a space for something better, many chose to let go of the fairy tale.
Sure, Gen X’ers like to bitch. Everyone craves order at home. But I believe there was a great gift in collectively acknowledging the impermanence of love. Because when you’re truly honest with yourself about what you need, you point yourself in the direction of something better.
And sometimes the better thing comes from inside you.
“Tonight our bed is cold, lost in the darkness of our love / God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of”
If I had to label the thing I learned that helped me start to love Bruce’s singing, it would be the lack of idealism. Picking up the pieces and moving on from the way you wanted things to be. Finding reality and the sound of your own voice inside it. This is what Bruce’s music embodies for me. Sometimes it sounds like a howl, as it should.
There’s a delicious freedom in that.