The search for something better defines us, and will always do so. The only way to cope is to tell the world itself to fuck off. We can rise above our fates only if we spit fate itself in the face and live in the moment.
“Badlands” isn’t my favorite Bruce Springsteen song. A perennial at his concerts, one which has been played at the over thirty shows I’ve attended, even in Europe, and a long-time fan favorite, but I am not sure it would make my top ten or even twenty – for that matter, don’t even ask what songs would when I’d find it impossible to compile such a list in the first place. Perhaps it’s been overplayed, or perhaps I am slightly insane because my opinion doesn’t make it any less of a masterful song. On some level, it contains some of his finest lyrics, and most insightful observations about life itself, building from his usual starting point of a relationship at the end of its rope to a radical statement of defiance of all things, transitioning effortlessly from the personal to the universal. We start in the speaker’s head, where the typical Springsteen automobile-inspired imagery is applied to an emotional state. Rather than the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets haunting a dusty beach road, the “Light’s out tonight, There’s trouble in the heartland, Got a head on collision, Smashin’ in my guts man.” Somehow, this man, whom we know nothing about beyond his feelings on life, has found himself “Caught in a crossfire” that he doesn’t understand, but he does know one thing with absolute certainty: He wants more than the relationship and the world has given him so far, slipping between the two extremes from statement to statement in a single, defiant verse:
I don’t give a damn
For the same old played out scenes
I don’t give a damn for just the in-betweens
Honey, I want the heart, I want the soul
I want control right now
Springsteen doesn’t reveal the details. Indeed, this particular song is lighter on specifics than most. There is no worker in a factory, no mention of a wedding coat, or the other little tidbits he frequently uses to build a character, but the choice of words suggests a man who has, to quote another classic “been around a time or two.” The life he’s been living and the women he’s been sharing it with are “old,” “played out.” The result is like being condemned to purgatory, neither ascending to something more or descending into ruin, not black, nor white, merely spending your days in the muddy gray. Given Springsteen wasn’t quite thirty when he wrote this and the general tenor of the song overall, we can imagine someone who hasn’t quite grown up the way he should or the way he anticipated. He’s done the party scene well past its expiration date, likely wasted too much time and money on booze, and wants something much more. There has been a dramatic shift in the nature of his desires recently, however. Previously, the speaker references the physical world – using the imagery of cars and party scenes – but now he wants more ethereal, spiritual, intangible things: The heart, the soul, control. He doesn’t come out and say it, and yet it’s easy to imagine a person weary of physical pleasure, realizing that he needs a life with deeper meaning.
The speaker isn’t naive, however, and he knows these things will not come easy, if they come at all. He spends the next verse revealing his deepest fear, only to defy it once again. The language is personal – he wakes “up in the night With a fear so real,” and we can imagine it an extension of the earlier “smashin’ in his guts” – but the fear he ultimately shares plagues us all: You spend your life waiting for a moment that “just don’t come.” Late last year, I encouraged everyone to celebrate Christmas by simply enjoying the magic of the moment, remarking how truly strange it is the amount of time we spend worrying about both the past and the future, rather than living the only thing we have, the present. Here, Springsteen encapsulates that sentiment into a single, universal statement, saying so much in just a few words. No one is guaranteed the future, however well you plan, however hard you work, whatever lucky breaks you may have, the moment you believe you’re waiting for might never arrive and you might have no control over it. It’s a topic he would revisit in various ways over the years. The unreleased “Car Wash” phrases it in terms of a menial worker who believes she should be a famous singer. “Well someday I’ll sing in a night club, I’ll get a million-dollar break, A handsome man will come here with a contract in his hand, And say ‘Catherine, this has all been some mistake.’” In 1992’s “Better Days,” he phrased it as, “just sittin’ around waitin’ for my life to begin, While it was all just slippin’ away.” Many, if not most people, are likely to succumb to this temptation, wasting their lives waiting on some better life to arrive, but the speaker – in “Badlands” and “Better Days” at least – chooses not to, if he can find someone to make the same choice. Rather than insist that he will no longer waste his time personally, he phrases it at his lover, “Well don’t waste your time waiting.” From there, the speaker launches into the chorus, perhaps one of Springsteen’s most rousing, combining rhythm guitar and piano in a beat as brutal and driving as the lyrics, accompanied by thousands of fists in the air at every concert, where he makes clear that the choice to live in the moment is not going to solve all of their problems, far from it.
The reality of the space he is confined to will continue to intrude and nothing in this life comes without a cost, but his change in perspective will change the underlying dynamics:
Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
Keep pushin’ ‘til it’s understood
And these badlands start treating us good
The song changes direction after the chorus, as it segways into the break before the solo and the final denouement. The change in tone and perspective makes it difficult to say whether the speaker is still voicing his own opinion on those underlying dynamics or Springsteen himself is speaking to the audience directly at this point, breaking the fourth wall, musically speaking. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter and to some extent it can be read both ways. The result in either event, is a statement about the fundamental nature of ourselves and the world we inhabit whether we like it or not, what drives us and what scars us, in a few neat, powerful, evocative, and memorable lines. Both verses take the same form, general statements followed by specific comment. In the first, the speaker or Springsteen himself describes lessons we all must learn as a result of our experiences, fundamentally asserting that no experience comes without a corresponding impact on our physical and mental states, frequently permanent. “Workin’ in the field, You get your back burned,” and “Workin’ ‘neath the wheels, you get your facts learned.” The speaker could actually have performed both jobs, working as a farmer or on a railroad, or it could be seen as purely figurative, references to the labor we all must bear, knowing that everything we endure will sear us and everything will also teach us, such is the way of the world. The sentiment suddenly switches to the personal at that point, as the speaker’s defiance rises up within. “Baby, I got my facts Learned real good right now, You better get it straight darlin’.” The next few lines can either be seen as a summation of what the speaker has learned, a revision of his prior lessons, or simply a statement on the nature of humanity, but whatever the case, few sextuplets contain so many truths:
Poor man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And a king ain’t satisfied
‘Til he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight
I wanna find out what I got
If you were to ask a philosopher, sociologist, priest, or politician to describe the insatiable nature of the human spirit, our fundamentally restless, forever unsatisfied nature, what is responsible for so much of the inequality we see in the world, the deception and downright thievery at times, they would not summarize it as perfectly as a poet. Springsteen captures the circle of our own avarice and inability to enjoy what we have right now in three simple phrases, reflecting on how our station in life influences our innermost desires, both driving us forward and preventing us from ever being fully satisfied with the moment we have right now. I’m reminded of something someone told me early in my career: When I made $40,000 per year, $80,000 was rich, but once I made $80,000, $160,000 suddenly became rich, and it only goes up from there. Material wealth is not enough, however, as we satisfy our physical needs and then some, we start looking for something else, a new world to conquer as Alexander the Great was said to have remarked – weeping after conquering the whole world, for there was nothing left to rule. This is what compels a billionaire like Donald Trump, who could have retired years ago and lived a life of leisure on a desert island, to compete for the Presidency three times while approaching 80 years old. It’s why Bill Gates never goes away, even after his company, Microsoft, transformed the world in the 1980s and 1990s, he seeks to exert his influence over farming, public health, and more, even when many of his ideas are borderline outlandish. More importantly in the context of the song, the cycle of poor men wanting to be rich and rich men wanting to be king stands in stark contrast to the previous notion of refusing to wait for a moment that never arrives. Implicit in this cycle, is living your life seeking something better, obsessed about the future at the expense of the present. The speaker has already acknowledged that changing this dynamic is not going to be easy given the environment he inhabits and human nature itself, but still he tries to by limiting the scope of his ambition to going out that very night and finding out what he has right now, nothing more, nothing less, and it will have to do either way.
The next verse restates the importance of this belief in relation to his lover – his belief in her specifically and what it means for their future. He “believes in the love” that she gave him. He “believes in the faith” that could save him. He “believes in the “hope,” but still, he must “pray” that all of these things will “some day…raise” him “above these “Badlands, You gotta live it every day, Let the broken hearts stand, As the price you gotta pay.” Rarely do so many contradictions combine into something meaningful, contradictions that lie at the heart of all of our experience. To survive, all of us (or at least those of us that aren’t sociopaths) need love and faith and hope, but even then we can only pray that our moment will come, and even if it does we’re still going to be “pushin’ ‘til it’s understood and these badlands start treating us good.” A decade later, Springsteen would sum this up in another way in his often overlooked “Tunnel of Love,” claiming “you’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above.” The contradictions might seem irreconcilable – how can you love, hope, and pray full knowing none of it might come to pass – but what other choice do we have? The world is what it is. There are things we cannot change, even if we are rich or a king. We must, however, survive and to do that, we need to defy, and to defy we need to find those moments that matter most, or as Springsteen puts it in the final verse, one of his most defiant ever:
For the ones who had a notion
A notion deep inside
That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive
I wanna find one face
That ain’t looking through me
I wanna find one place
I wanna spit in the face of these
Badlands…
In one sense, the song ends where it began, the lover of life as in the lover of the moment is not a sinner, indeed it’s the only way to survive. The search for something better defines us, and will always do so. The only way to cope is to tell the world itself to fuck off. At the same time, the layers and connections that have developed over the course of the song, not to mention that driving beat with a hint of triumph, give life to the conclusion, expanding on why the moment counts so much, the endless and inescapable cycles of human behavior, and what it takes to defy it all. Typical of Springsteen, we do not know if the speaker and his lover ever escape the badlands they inhabit, but at the same time, the song makes it clear that it doesn’t matter. We can rise above our fates if we spit fate itself in the face and live in the moment. On second thought, maybe it should be in my top ten, at least.
BADLANDS
Light’s out tonight
Trouble in the heartland
Got a head-on collision
Smashin’ in my guts, man
Caught in a crossfire
That I don’t understand
But there’s one thing I know for sure, girl
I don’t give a damn
For the same old played out scenes
I don’t give a damn for just the in-betweens
Honey, I want the heart, I want the soul
I want control right now
To talk about a dream, try to make it real
You wake up in the night
With a fear so real
You spend your life waiting
For a moment that just don’t come
Well don’t waste your time waiting
Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
Keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood
These badlands start treating us good
Workin’ in the field
You get your back burned
Workin’ ‘neath the wheels
You get your facts learned
Baby, I got my facts
Learned real good right now
You better get it straight, darlin’
Poor man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And a king ain’t satisfied
‘Til he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight
I wanna find out what I got
Well, I believe in the love that you gave me
I believe in the faith that could save me
I believe in the hope
And I pray that some day
It may raise me above these
Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
Keep pushin’ ’til it’s understood
These badlands start treating us good
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
For the ones who had a notion
A notion deep inside
That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive
I wanna find one face
That ain’t looking through me
I wanna find one place
I wanna spit in the face of these
Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you’ve gotta pay
Keep pushin’ til it’s understood
And these badlands start treating us good
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa badlands
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa badlands
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa badlands
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa badlands
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa
Images maybe subject to copyright.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 