Challenging times give rise to a musical response from artists of conscience. They realize their place in society at a critical time requires some cultural response, declaration, or call to action. Bruce Springsteen has been consistent about that throughout his half-century career, playing rallies and the occasional campaign event, crafting songs that subtly or very specifically reflect our era, urging action while providing uplift.
Springsteen did so, reacting to the ICE aggression and murders in Minneapolis with an obviously quickly written song that mentioned the specific headlines in a way that Woody Guthrie might have done 80 years ago. With a title that suggested his much more subtle “Streets of Philadelphia” from the AIDs era, “Streets of Minneapolis” was a more direct, almost a weary wail mourning the murders of good people while excoriating the corrupt powers behind it all.
It was telling that Springsteen chose to open his terrific tour at the Target Center with that site-specific anthem. Because of the head-spinning blur of bad news and misguided decisions from what’s left of the White House, there was a current war on Iran to address.
So, when choosing which two songs to start, which were also streamed live to his social media channels and YouTube, he began with an exclamation point: Edwin Starr’s version of “War,” which he and the E Street Band slammed through during the Gulf War, just as effectively, followed by “Born in the U.S.A,” referring perhaps to the outrageous Supreme Court challenge to birthright citizenship (the song was lent to the defending ACLU for TV ads).
“Streets of Minneapolis” came a little later, in a sandwich of two Darkness on the Edge of Town classics. Springsteen has always spent a lot of time crafting setlists for his memorable shows, ensuring they contained not only pacing, tension, and celebratory release but also told a story.
The Minneapolis show was expertly paced to contain potent political messages embedded in an array of his best-loved songs—like a powerful weapon baked into a particularly delicious cake. That meant all the fist-pounding and dancing along to “Out in the Street” and “Hungry Heart,” but with a strong, underlying pull toward his topical songs, expected and unexpected.
He pulled “Death to My Hometown,” the Celtic-powered track about the 2008 financial crisis, about “the greedy thieves who came around, and ate the flesh of everything they found, whose crimes have gone unpunished now,” early in the set. Even deeper was an affecting solo reading of “House of a Thousand Guitars” with the startling line “The criminal clown has stolen the throne, he steals what he can never own,” written during the first Trump administration.
A menacing “Youngstown” reminded us of the rustbelt’s economic downturn and a country’s callous indifference, and the stirring “My City of Ruins,” rolled out just after 9/11, still speaks to us today. It was the song he sang in Europe a year ago with a carefully written preamble he repeated (and updated to include the war). Like all the lyrics, the three or four speeches were as carefully written and loaded onto the teleprompters.
On recent tours, he’s been introducing “A Long Walk Home” about a hollowed-out city of strangers as “a prayer for my country.” However, that connection is not clear until one of its final chorus recalls when “everybody has a neighbor” and “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone: Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”
“The Ghost of Tom Joad,” his retelling of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, was always effective in affirming the power of quiet resolve and individual resistance, but paired with the absolutely incendiary guitar of guest player Tom Morello, it was spectacular, maybe the best moment in rock I’ve seen this century.
Nearly as good: their pairing on a superlative and sadly timely revival of his “American Skin (41 Shots)” that made Springsteen an enemy of trigger-happy law enforcement figures a quarter century ago. In all, Rage Against the Machine’s Morello, with a message on his guitar that read “Arm the Homeless,” played on about a third of the songs in the generous, nearly three-hour setlist.
As in his last outing, Springsteen came with a huge entourage, with a five-piece horn section, a quartet of backup singers, an extra percussionist, and Soozie Tyrell on fiddle, augmenting the sufficiently mighty E Street Band that already boasted some stellar guitarists—Nils Lofgren, Little Steven Van Zandt, and Springsteen himself. Of them, Lofgren got the biggest showcase on a few songs, adding a light lyricism to his power.
They had a big, wide stage on which to perform, with somewhat basic lighting and some reliance on overhead video screens to aid those in the nosebleeds. Toward the end, Springsteen took a stroll along the perimeter of the GA standing section, but stayed moored to the center microphone. His voice was strong and powerful at 76, his manner energized by the importance of his underlying purpose.
But amid all of this political intent were some of the best-loved anthems from “No Surrender” and “Because the Night” to “Badlands” and the song that gives the brief tour its name, “Land of Hope and Dreams.”
And following the cream of his encore—“Born to Run,” “Bobby Jean,” “Dancing in the Dark” (whose famous video was shot in the Twin Cities) and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” that had a momentary clip of the late sax man Clarence Clemons—he closed with a couple of songs that were just as site specific as his terrific show was topically targeted.
The first, a surprise, was Prince’s “Purple Rain” by the hometown hero; the second, a ringing 62-year-old anthem from the bard of Hibbing that Springsteen first sang during the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! Tour in 1988, Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.”
The country cries out for this inspiring, energizing tour that continues through May.
