The Far Right is Coming for Springsteen

New No. 1 Country Song Attacks Bruce

It started this morning with a Twitter post from Caitlin Rose, one of my favorite Nashville singer-songwriters. She posted the bizarre news from Billboard that a new song making its debut at No. 1 on the Country Songs Chart is "Am I the Only One" by Aaron Lewis, former singer of the undistinguished hard rock band Staind.

The lyric featuring the title makes its case clear:

"Am I the only one who quits singing along every time they play a Springsteen song/Watchin' the threads of Old Glory come undone, I'm not the only one."

The Billboard article notes that behind the song's success was "buzz in part via Fox News, SiriusXM's Patriot Radio and social media platform Telegram."

All of these media organizations are perpetuators of "the Big Lie," that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. But the number one song in country music embracing the Lie by impugning the patriotism of Bruce Springsteen? This is sick, and not in the way that hip-hop culture embraces "sick" the way soul music embraced "bad," meaning good.

I took this to Facebook, where the comments and the angry emojis came thick and fast. In my Substack about being careful what you say on Facebook, I did not heed my own message, because I was not cautious enough in wording my post. At first I wrote "Country music has hit a new bottom." But that was not good enough for some "Anything you can say, I can say better" in my Facebook cohort.

"Country music hit rock bottom a long time ago," wrote one guy, who probably does not listen to much country music. And I wonder what is worse than an artist with a number one country single attacking Bruce Springsteen by name as lacking, in the singer Lewis’ estimation, appropriate patriotism. Anyway, that wasn't the point! Another, who over more than 40 years never fails to remind me he thinks he's the smartest smartass in the room, posted: "One thing I've learned is to never expect that the new or current bottom is the actual bottom..." I wonder if this person knows what it feels like to really hit bottom: I do, I almost lost everything, including my family, and I will be writing about the day that changed in this column very soon.

So I rewrote the beginning of the post, to read: "Country music has hit a loathsome low." Just so that people weren't wasting their time with excess verbiage about who gets to decide what anyone's bottom is. As someone in recovery, I am aware that everyone has their own bottom, so bottom was the wrong word for the tedious word police on Facebook. It's why I hardly ever visit there, and have put my account on pause many times. The purpose of keeping a FB account is to wish people happy birthday and promote something. Did I mention that I have a newsletter on Substack to which I'd like you to subscribe?

But it's clear to me that right wing cancel culture has declared war on Springsteen.

The pseudo-Christian cult erasing voting rights in the name of Trump's lie, who are not educated enough to understand that the Holocaust was real, who don't want slavery to be taught in public schools, who think it's bad to be "woke," that is, to wake up and see that our history is not perfect ... I try not to be political here, but the divisive phrase cancel culture has become entirely the tool of the anti-democratic right.

But there were quite a few comments saying essentially that "bro country" was a right-wing club anyway. Which isn't true, or to the point. One of the biggest country hits in 2012 "Springsteen," by Eric Church, in which the title character was aspirational, a fond memory and an enduring symbol of a kind of integrity Church admired. And in 2003, the country duo Brooks & Dunn released what I think is their best album, Red Dirt Road, which couldn't have been more Springsteen-like in its songwriting structure. The arrangements couldn't have been more Springsteenian if they had been backed by the E Street Band.

(Google asks: "Who died of Brooks & Dunn?" I don't think anyone ever died of Brooks & Dunn, not nearly as many as those who have died of the flu. In fact, the answer was a different Dunn altogether, Holly Dunn, cancer, age 59, 2016.) Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn are alive and touring again, beginning September 2 in Indianapolis.

I am grateful that Chuck Eddy, former Village Voice music editor, expert in all music from country to death metal, Texas resident, military veteran, entered the conversation to set the record straight about country music's politics.

"Nashville country's actually struck me as fairly apolitical, or at least moderate, the past few years -- certainly compared to the Toby Keith/Montgomery Gentry/Daryl Worley '00s. I can't think of any chart songs, off hand, that have embraced Trump. Toby Keith barely charts at all anymore. Meanwhile, a number of Black artists do. The Staind dork's an outlier."

Alec Cumming, program director at WPKN/89.5 in Bridgeport, CT, wondered what the immediate source of the Springsteen backlash is. He mentioned the strange Springsteen Super Bowl commercial that didn't appeal to anyone, and then asked:

"I'm just trying to wonder what the breaking point was for the country bros. Was it his podcasts with Obama?"

That makes sense to me: I mean, I love both guys and felt resentful, in that awkwardly jealous sort of way, that they were doing a podcast. The demonstration outside the Broadway theater one Springsteen's recent opening night by a surprisingly large contingent of anti-vaxxers, who opposed the requirement of proof of Covid vaccination to enter the theater, makes sense to me too. Anti-vaxxers come from all sides (I have a friend who is a staunch anti-Trump progressive who won't get a vaccination, because they read some stuff...) I said, you're entitled to your beliefs, but I'm afraid I won't be able to visit you this summer. You're a person of principle, fine. But Covid changed our world, and it isn't the nanny state impinging on your rights: It's about not dying, and not killing your neighbors and family because you won’t take a shot.

Springsteen is a symbol of the tolerant, liberal democracy we thought this country was heading towards, before and during Barack Obama's eight years. We heard the lies on Fox News (I sometimes watch Fox so you don't have to) and on talk radio, but we did not feel the seething, the rage, that a black man was standing at this country's highest secular pulpit. Mitch McConnell’s pinched, angry face said, and continues to say, it all.

The Big Lie and those who perpetuate it is growing, not fading. Anti-democratic purveyors of anti-factual propaganda (I'm talking about you, Tucker Carlson) terrorize the gullible who want to believe that things were better in these United States when only white people, heck, only property owning white males, were allowed to vote.

Meanwhile, there were signs of progress in country music. Against all odds, a black woman, Mickey Guyton, broke through in 2020/2021, and even co-hosted the Academy of Country Music awards, with Keith Urban.

One step forward, two steps back.

The online magazine Blabbermouth heard Aaron Lewis mouth-off from the stage of a concert in Virginia in June.

"I watched the Joe Biden speech the other day...I don't even know why I do it, but I do. And I heard him tell the story about this massacre that happened in Oklahoma a long time ago. And I listened to him throw out all these facts and spit out all this information about the KKK and about systemic racism and everything else. So, I'd like to point something out that is very obvious yet no one seems to bring it up or talk about it, that every racist law that's ever been put into place, every scar on America was the Democrats. All of it. It's there if you go and look. Every racist law was come up with and voted through and unanimously passed by fucking Democrats. The KKK was fucking Democrats."

Lewis does not have the intelligence to understand that around 1948, when Strom Thurmond of South Carolina broke away from the Democrats to protest civil rights, as a “Dixiecrat,” the parties began to reverse roles. By 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrat from Texas, passed the most sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation in our history. The parties continued to reverse roles: The Democrats were abandoned by the segregationists that were once part of their uneasy coalition. The Republicans, after Richard Nixon's Southern strategy in 1968, became the party of white resentment. The KKK did not change the color of its robes; it just switched parties.

But the Republicans of Nixon's era, even during the Reagan 1980s, remained a rational, if unappetizing to me, political party. Six months after the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters, Republicans say the camera angles were all wrong. The people who think Democrats are conspiring to "defund the police" went to the Capitol building and killed and beat police officers. And now they've got a theme song, implying Bruce Springsteen is their enemy, number one on Billboard the country music chart. I tell you one thing: Hank ain't done it that way.