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Bruce Springsteen Is an Excellent Radio DJ. And It’s Not Just His Playlist.

On the day that three additional Minneapolis police officers were charged in the killing of George Floyd, Bruce Springsteen—rock and roll icon, writer of protest songs (listen to “Born In the USA” again), and old white guy (he’s 70)—spun the song “This Is America” by Childish Gambino for the listeners of SiriusXM radio.
If you happened to be listening, it was probably the best part of your day.
To explain:
Something bad happens in your world, or in the world, and you think: What can I do to help? Sick neighbor, death in the family, tsunami, global pandemic—you think: What do I have to offer?
Money. Sympathy. Baked ziti.
This is always tricky territory for celebrities. Sometimes there is greatness (“We Are the World”). Sometimes there is not (“We Are the World: 25 For Haiti”). And sometimes Gal Gadot gets her friends to sing “Imagine” into their phones.
In the category of inspiring, uplifting, and appropriate for the moment, may I point you to Bruce Springsteen, nascent radio deejay?
It seems Bruce, stuck on his farm in Jersey, saw the coronavirus crisis and thought, What can I do? He first did something very good and expected, joining other famous Jersey people to start the New Jersey Pandemic Relief Fund. But it’s his new radio show on SiriusXM, “From His Home to Yours,” that wins for Best Use of Celebrity to Entertain Us During the Pandemic.
And then he kept going. As one crisis bled into another, and the murder of George Floyd swept a different kind of fear and pain across the country, he clung to what he believes: that music can help. But while other artists’ at-home quarantine concerts wouldn’t translate during racial unrest, Springsteen’s format endures.
He has long been a believer in the power of radio as a shared, simultaneous experience that can bring strangers together.
He takes it seriously.
And for this show, which surfaces on E Street Radio (channel 20) about every two weeks, Springsteen assembles a journey of musical discovery unmatched by any algorithm that tries to guess what You Might Also Like. He chatters thoughtfully between songs, all of it seeming breezy, but only because he plans each episode with such care. (Springsteen is not known for half-assing anything.)
He pulls songs from every corner of rock, pop, soul, folk, punk, reggae, country, and rap. There is stuff I don’t know how to classify. For the premiere episode, the virus still rising, the first song he played was “Turn On Tune In Drop Out with Me,” by Cracker.
It felt like an invitation.
If you were to listen to the songs as a playlist, minus Springsteen talking, they wouldn’t strike you as being a curated set about COVID-19 or, in the most recent episode, the Floyd protests. But he sets up each one so it fits into the experience we’re all having. He talks, for example, about “not being able to see, hug, kiss your loved ones,” and reports that his own three kids “claim they don’t want to come and visit in order not to kill us.” This leads into a song about “being away from the people that you love, and living through it:” the beautiful “Gone till November,” by Wyclef Jean, which I hadn’t listened to in a long time.
He wonders aloud, during episode 4, what sex and dating are like during COVID-19 (“It must be happening—I guess?”), then plays a cool song I’d never heard, “Kiss Me Only with Your Eyes” by Future Bible Heroes.
In Courtney Barnett’s “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party,” he notes the lyric “I wanna go out but I wanna stay home,” which Springsteen says is “perfect for the times—and my ambivalent life story.”
Episode 5 of “From His Home To Yours” takes a turn, as the country has. Springsteen starts it with a song he wrote after the 1999 shooting by four New York City police officers of Amadou Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, in front of the building where Diallo lived. They mistook Diallo for a rape suspect and shot him 41 times after they thought they saw him reaching for a gun.
It turned out to be his wallet.
The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association called for a Springsteen boycott. When he performed the song at Madison Square Garden in 2000, some people turned their backs. Some booed. Springsteen played on.
On SiriusXM he plays “Burning and Looting,” the great Bob Marley song. Nappy Roots, rappers from Louisville, doing “Work in Progress” (“Got us believing we heathens, uncivil soldiers of evil/Reach up and assume the position, you know the procedure”).
Billie Holliday, “Strange Fruit:” “one of the darkest songs in the American canon.”
The set is at once solemn and rousing.
Springsteen’s radio shows are worthwhile because you’ll discover songs through the ears of one of the great interpreters of sound for the last fifty years—and because of the small, resonant observations he makes between them. He’s not knee-jerking this.
I had never heard of the Magnetic Fields or their song “Andrew in Drag,” which Springsteen introduces as an “ultra-fantastic masterpiece.”
I knew the Pogues and I knew “A Rainy Night in Soho,” but I rediscovered both when Springsteen played it during one episode, saying, “With the exception of Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry—I don’t know about the rest of us, but I know they’ll be singing Shane MacGowan songs one hundred years from now.”
When Dylan released his new song “Murder Most Foul,” it appeared to be about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And, some people wrote, it also seemed to be about America during the pandemic. Now Springsteen plays it, and when Dylan intones, “Shoot him while he runs, boy/Shoot him while you can/See if you can shoot the invisible man,” its meaning grows.
Bruce Springsteen doesn't need to be recording radio shows from his house, or doing this good a job at it. He could have helped set up NJPRL.org, recorded a PSA, and taken a walk. But he looked at what was happening in his country, and thought, "What else can I do? What else do I have to offer?"
https://www.esquire.com/entert...aLkZmIIGNCzTn4KZDEWY

 

Last edited by CrookedCrutch
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