Archive for the 'Shit Song' Category

Great Band, Shit Song #3: “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen

Born in the USA album coverReleased in 1984, Born in the USA was arguably the pinnacle of Bruce Springsteen’s commercial success. It was my introduction to his ouvre, as an 11-year-old budding music lover in the deep southern USA. We were sold that album on the basis that it was about us, about where we came from and we should be proud of our country, even with all its faults. Strangely, as 11-year-old girls we took to it, even though it is an unbelievably bleak record about lost dreams and failed lives. As an album it felt real, like it was about life rather than esoteric gobbledygook like most of the other records we were listening to at the time – Duran Duran, Tears for Fears, A-Ha, etc. Ronald Reagan and the Republican party liked it as well, choosing the title track as the theme for their 1984 presidental campaign. I’m not sure they actually understood it was about how America had failed her working class, all they could hear was the chorus.

This album, even though I did not particularly understand it at the time, really did capture the essence of what the American dream had become, even if it’s not about my life today, it certainly strikes a chord about my parents’ lives. Brought up to believe that in America everyone can be a millionaire, that anyone can be president and all your dreams will always come true, the reality, especially in the Reagan years, was far different. University education was expensive, but without one a good job was impossible. Inflation and rising taxes meant that money was always tight and my whole childhood was a time where both my parents did jobs they did not particularly like in order to provide me with those opportunities that they had been promised all their lives and which had never materialised. Springsteen talking about, on tracks like “Working on the Highway” or “Downbound Train,” failed relationships, the weight of poverty, the struggle to drag yourself into a monotonous job you hated or, on “Glory Days,” the crushing weight of feeling that your best days were behind you when you left high school and became an adult really encapsulates the experience of generations of people for whom the American dream is nothing more than a myth designed to get people to work longer hours and accept less holidays and not unionize. What makes it so much more powerful is that amidst all the bleakness, he ends the album with “My Hometown” which shows a real pride in people’s ability to find hope and to carry on and to teach their kids pride about where they come from and to try to give their kids a better chance than they had.

About halfway through this album, however, sandwiched between “Downbound Train,” pretty much one of the bleakest moments on the record, a song about a guy who’s lost his job, his wife, and who is struggling just to get through each day; and “No Surrender,” a track about following your dreams and not giving up even in the face of diabolical adversity, sits “I’m on Fire,” a vile song, so remarkably out of place that I’m surprised it was included on the record, much less released as a single. In it, Springsteen, a sweaty, deep-voiced thirty-something man, sings a love song to a “little girl” asking her “Is your daddy home?” so he can come over and violate her in all sorts of ways which were somewhat unimaginable to me at 11 or 12 years old. In fact, he goes so far as to ask her if her daddy can “do to you the things that I do?” As a child all I could imagine was Bruce Springsteen, a man far too old for me, singing that song to a sixteen year old girl. Now, I’m sure that’s not what the intention was, the phrase “little girl” was probably meant as a term of endearment and the narrator is probably meant to be a teenager, but that’s how it always came across to me in my head. He sounded sleazy and lusty trying to get some young girl out of her house away from protective parents and into his bed where he wanted to do things to her that her parents would not approve of. Even now that is exactly the picture that creeps into my head when I hear it and all I can think of is “Eew! Gross!”

So, the song itself just seems wrong on many levels but I also question what it’s doing on the album. Was it added there to provide some levity in the middle of all the bleakness, to give a change of pace? If so, there’s far better and lighter songs on the record in the part of “Dancing in the Dark” and “Darlington County” as well as the aforementioned “No Surrender.” There’s another love song which is far more romantic in the form of “Cover Me.” This song is just padding, and kind of yucky, vaguely lecherous padding at that. Maybe it’s a sign of a difference in the times and as a track it would never have been written in 2007, and maybe I have far too vivid an imagination, but even taking out the ick-factor of the lyrics, it’s just a plodding, unmysterious and overtly sexual love song reminiscent of a drunkard chatting women up at the bar at 2am when he’s desperate and too inebriated to be subtle. It takes the fizzle out of the record, mid-play, kills the flow and deserves consignment to the dustbin of crap songs.

Born in the USA is a classic album, despite what The Ledge hates in regards to its cheesy ’80’s production, but it captured the mood of a nation. Shame about the one misfire.

Bruce Springsteen – “I’m on Fire”

Bruce Springsteen – “My Hometown”

Posted by JustHipper on 12th August 2007 at 1:18 pm | comments (8)
File under Great Band,mp3,Shit Song.