UCLA Journal of Radiation Oncology SUMMER 2024 - Flipbook - Page 41
UCLA RADIATION ONCOLOGY JOURNAL
W
hen Bruce Springsteen released
his 昀椀rst solo album, Nebraska, in
1982, he was already a household
name due to 昀椀ve albums with the E Street
Band. And while there were already ample
literary allusions in his songs (his youthful
obsession with Flannery O’Connor, among
others, is well documented), Nebraska
proved in ten tracks spanning just under
41 minutes that he was not simply a great
singer-songwriter who read books, but a
poet with literary chops.
In 1995, Springsteen released his 11th studio album, the
acoustic The Ghost of Tom Joad. His usual tropes of the
common man and class struggle took on an introspective
quality, and, coupled with unadorned language, the
songs reverberate with emotion and ask questions
without providing answers, share prickly situations and
misadventures without judgment. My father used the
album’s liner notes as a textbook in a college poetry course
he was teaching, and he wasn’t the only creative writing
professor doing so. The Ghost of Tom Joad made it
clear that Nebraska had not been an anomaly and that
Springsteen was indeed a poet.
Since then, Springsteen has joined Bob Dylan as a
musician often written about academically as a poet and
published alongside literary and academic poets. The
Norton Introduction to Literature’s Eleventh Edition
(as well as several subsequent editions), edited by Kelly
J. Mays, includes the song “Nebraska” as an example in
the poetry section, and notes, “Nebraska (1982) and The
Rising (2002), for instance, consist mainly of dramatic
monologues.” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Coles’
2003 book, Bruce Springsteen’s America: the People
Listening, a Poet Singing, also digs into the poetic
elements of his songwriting. In HBO’s documentary
on him, High Hopes, Springsteen says of the work of
the poet, “Fundamentally, we’re repairmen. Everybody’s
broken somewhere. You can’t get through life without
it. You’ve paid your artists and your 昀椀lmmakers and your
poets and your novelists to be basically your handymen.”
Is it possible that we could all do this for ourselves and
each other? Recent advances in Neuroaesthetics would
posit that we absolutely can, and Springsteen’s concept of
creator-as-handyman 昀椀ts neatly into this 昀椀eld, especially
when we consider how storytelling is such a natural way
for the brain to process both self and the world around the
self.
In exploring di昀昀erent personas and situations through his
songs, Springsteen 昀椀nds humanity in unlikely places and
gives no solution or resolution at the end of songs, thus
imbuing his work with a enduring quality. The human
condition has not altered in the last three or even four
decades. While his work, including (or perhaps especially)
The Ghost of Tom Joad, would have been seen as iconic
had the world become more utopiatic, it instead remains
as relevant as when he wrote it. But the open-endedness
of his work also provides a glimmer—if the story is being
told, change for the better is still possible. The narrative is
still open for a happy ending.
The album’s title song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” added
Springsteen’s voice to the national and international
conversations on social justice, and in using John
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Woodie Guthrie’s
song, “The Ballad of Tom Joad,” as a launch point, he
was able to contemplate the 1930s while writing from
what he witnessed being experienced by people in the
1990s. Working mostly in tetrameter (four beats per
line), “The Ghost of Tom Joad” is arguably—as Guthrie’s
song was—a ballad. This is important to note if only
because ballads were traditionally passed down orally
through generations and told a valuable story. It didn’t
take long for the song to be passed down a generation;
Rage Against the Machine’s 1997 cover sounds and feels
aggressive, is blatantly used as a protest. Springsteen,
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