"Tougher Than The Rest" by Bruce Springsteen

Singalong 008: True manliness has never been tried

Hi folks, thanks for all your lovely emails and other feedback! It really means a lot, you can see I’m digging into a very “beginner mind” place with this project. There’s a lot more passion here than polish on display at this point in the project, but we’ll see how I’m sounding once I hit 100 songs. I appreciate you following along.

Many of you tried to “upgrade to paid” during these first few weeks, and were unable to. There was an unfortunate issue that took Substack some time to fix. I’m happy to say that the issue has finally been resolved. This button is now fully functional:

It makes a HUGE impact for you to support this, even at the smallest level. When you kick in a few bucks for this project, you’re not just helping *me*. You’re also sending a signal that you value the natural musical connections between people, in a non-commercial way. This is not a music industry thing. I’m sharing my most personal relationship to these songs, in the hopes that you will see yourself in the story and feel yourself in the song in your own way. Like we’re hanging out together. Which I hope we can do soon! Because if Music is a country, I consider you all great patriots.

Thank you for your ears and for your subscriptions.

Here’s the next one:

“So somebody ran out, left somebody's heart in a mess”

Male absence and distance has figured heavily in my life. But for the most part it wasn’t the men who created the distance, it was my own resentments. My dad (who is still kicking at 80 and has a heart the size of a football field) and I barely spoke for almost a decade in my 20s. Because it’s easier to push something away than it is to face the hole inside yourself, that’s what I did for way too long.

"Well 'round here baby I learned you get what you can get"

Manhood. I think one of the things that wigged me out about Springsteen for so many years was his sheer manliness, because I was raised in an environment where "manliness" in the mainstream sense was meanly looked down upon. One might even say condemned.

I've since "become" a man, but it took me longer than I would have liked.

I won't pretend it was harder for me to embrace my identity as a man than it would have been to come out as queer or trans, the rails were pretty well laid out for me once I found them. But I took an embarrassingly long time to find them.

"Tougher Than the Rest" goes hard into the Man trip, the deliciously simple American role men feel so much pressure to inhabit. The mainstream "man" leans into the roughness of the world, takes responsibility, derides "lesser" men, assumes ownership of the theme and declares himself to be "tougher than the rest".

If only manhood were as simple as hanging a set of giant chrome nuts from my trailer hitch, we'd all be made in the shade. Drinking lemonade.

"Yeah the road is dark, and it's a thin thin line / But I want you to know I'll walk it for you any time"

I understand this song to say I Will Be There For You No Matter What Happens. Or as Bruce himself said during his visit to Howard Stern, "I'm the one who will last."

In a world of handsome Dans, good lookin' Joes and sweet talkin' Romeos, the man who'll Be There For You no matter what is exactly the opposite of who I was raised to be. There was a combination of factors, and I wouldn't point fingers at any one person. There were mysteries I couldn't unravel. But let's say that there were a number of people around me (definitely not just women) who'd been hurt deeply enough by men throughout their lives that they were not about to let me, the little prince in their midst, grow up without having big doubts about the value of old school manhood and manliness.

A voice in my head started saying: Men are a big bummer, don’t let yourself become one. It was a voice I hadn’t put there.

"Maybe your other boyfriends couldn't pass the test"

It's true, men are a big bummer for a lot of people, a lot of the time. Men slack off. Men abuse and abandon their families, men impose authority regardless of whether they've earned it, men destroy good things, men cheat. Men suck, and to top it off men also kill each other - or themselves - in disgust entirely too often. The ultimate dereliction. What's to like? Not a lot.

A righteous man might claim that real men don't do things like that, that a real man won't allow himself to be the cause of pain for people in his family and community. “The man who ruined your life was a Marginal man, a fink, a rat, in fact he was a Bum. Bums are not Men, Men are not Bums and that's that. We just need to get back to true, glorious Manhood, so get on back to your knitting while I go kill us some food.”

Comforting, no? True manliness has never been tried.

"Well, there's another dance honey / All you gotta do is say yes"

You might be tougher than the rest, but who'll clean up the mess?

This song is a monument to everything it doesn't say, that it doesn't have to mention. The Man is just here, the moment is simple. You can picture the scene at any bar in America, after a long day of working for The Man (in person, with his hands, not "from home"). The woman is dressed in blue, the man is there for her and he will stay.

If she will have him.

Earning that Yes is a start.