By Jesse Cataldo
The cover of Nebraska is a bleak, leaden landscape, with snow piled up on the wipers and the open road stretching out interminably in the distance. The grayness of the black and white photograph is further accentuated by the bright red typeface of the album title. Staring into the mass of hanging clouds, it’s impossible to tell whether the sun is poking through or fading away. This snapshot is the first of those presented to us by Springsteen, who paints dusty relief and tragic character sketches on the canvas of Midwestern farms and North Jersey highways over the course of 10 songs.
Nebraska marked an important juncture in Springsteen’s career, capturing him at a rare moment after the success of the two-disc set, The River. Dropping the eager showman pose and shedding the strident bombast of his earlier work, Springsteen created Nebraska with only a guitar, a harmonica and a four-track recorder. The result is compositions which are skeletal in their musical accompaniment, lending Springsteen’s words a ringing, claustrophobic quality. Springsteen’s theme has always been the plight of the working class. Recorded at the dawn of the Reagan years, Nebraska captures the lives of blue- collar characters struggling with bills and walking both sides of the law.
“Atlantic City” is the album’s only obvious single, rising above the tempo of the other tracks with a nervous urgency, which fits its lyrical base. The chorus, which features the haunting couplet: “Everything dies baby, that’s a fact / but maybe everything that dies someday comes back” symbolizes the hope that the struggling protagonists seek in the casinos of the city. Hope is a recurring motif onNebraska, as the children in “Mansion On The Hill” and “Used Cars” set their eyes on higher ideals. Sadly, it is an unrealized hope, as the child, now a man, finds himself “down here in Linden Town I watch the cars rushin’ by home from the mill.” The same idea applies in “My Fathers House” which is saved from becoming a clunky religious metaphor by the cold disappointment the character meets in the end.
Specifically, Nebraska captures the travails of a specific economic class at a specific point in time. It is the universal quality of the character’s struggles however, that keeps it relevant now, and will keep it so, as long as there are those who struggle each month to pay the rent.
