Nebraska
Bruce Springsteen
Columbia
"The more I looked at people, the more I hated them because I knowed there wasn't any place for me with the kind of people I knowed."
This was a statement made by Charles Starkweather after being arrested in the late '50s when he and Caril Fugate went on a killing spree. Bruce Springsteen's 1982 album, Nebraska, begins with their story. "I saw her standin' on her front lawn / just twirlin' her baton / Me and her went for a ride sir / and 10 innocent people died" are the first words of the album.
Throughout, we are introduced to characters who are unrelated to each other in every way except for their nothingness. They understand their place in the country and either accept it or fight and kill to get away from it.
On "Used Cars," a boy watches his father being toyed with by a used car salesman and then teased by the neighbors for the car he buys. The boy vows, "Now mister the day the lottery I win / I ain't ever gonna ride in no used car again." It's not that he dreams of winning the lottery for vengeance, he talks as if it is truth, an event that is actually going to happen.
A cop named Joe Roberts in "Highway Patrolman" has, "...got a brother named Franky / and Franky ain't no good." After Franky commits murder, Roberts lets him escape to the Canadian border because "man turns his back on his family / well he just ain't no good."
Springsteen recorded these 10 songs as demos in his New Jersey home planning to work them out with his band later. Eventually he realized the brilliant album he already had. In a way, it has helped the music date better than his bombastic rock albums. The sparse guitar, vocal, occasional harmonica or backing vocal evoked the ghosts of Woody Guthrie at a time when he couldn't have seemed more insignificant.
Springsteen showed that Middle America still had an inferiority complex to suffer through, the difference was that Nebraska never affixed blame onto anyone. Lots of critics at the time thought of the album as a swipe at Reagan, but it's not so transparent. No solutions are brought up by Springsteen or his characters; they are just their stories.
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