Today is Bosses Day so we figured we'd better come up with something pay homage to Editor in Chief Emily Wittman in a jiff. Conveniently, she happens to hail from New Jersey, home to a Boss much more familiar to our readers: Bruce Springsteen. Conveniently again, few performers have represented the working class and all the crap we put up with (by "we," we're totally not referring to Music Times...please don't fire us. Kids/cats to feed!) like he has.
Check out a list of tracks that feature their protagonists actually working. Not a song about the factories closing, nor about a worker's strike, but about about the workday itself.
"Working On The Highway" from Born in The USA
"Working On The Highway" is far from the most iconic track on Born In The USA but it's among the most clever and underrated on the set. The song opens with a bored state employee monitoring traffic during construction projects. He meets a pretty young thing (too young, if we understand the context correctly) and runs off with her to Florida. When the law catches up to him he gets put in the big house and begins his new career...of working on the highway as part of a chain gang. It's a humorous twist and a nice piece of dark humor, but it could also carry the message that blue collar work amounts to slavery...a theme that Springsteen has certainly implied before, with tracks such as...
"Factory" from Darkness on The Edge of Town
Although many see Springsteen as a hero for the working man, it's no secret that it took quite a while for the rock icon's father to accept his son's profession. The Boss loves rock 'n' roll but he understood where his dad was coming from. The ol' man had worked in a carpet factory among other menial—and in the long term, hazardous—jobs. "Factory" relates the "mansions of fear" that the title buildings could be, and the "death in their eyes," reflecting a hard life of hard work, with no safe return guaranteed. It seems odd that Springsteen laments the closing of town factories in later tracks, considering the pall that seems to hang over them in this track.
"Jack of All Trades" from Wrecking Ball
No Springsteen album features more songs about working and the working class than 2012's Wrecking Ball and yeah, that's saying something. The best instance is "Jack of All Trades," a soundtrack to the economic downturn the country was facing around the time of recording in 2011. The track is just a long list of odd jobs that the narrator is qualified to take—from fixing cars to mowing lawns—as he tries to comfort his wife, presumably following the loss of many jobs in the town. The death of towns following the loss of a factory or industry is a sad but true story that's come with the development of technology, a trend that Springsteen is all-too-aware of.
"John Henry" from We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
No, Springsteen didn't write "John Henry." Nor did Pete Seeger, the legendary folk singer and icon of The Boss that he was paying tribute to with this 2006 collection. However, as "John Henry" is the single greatest representation of the working man in music, it's only appropriate that Springsteen takes a shot at it. We all know the story or some variant of it: Legendary steel driver Henry challenges a mechanized train to a race through the West Virginia mountains to see who is truly the superior. He barely edges the steam engine and emerges victorious, but dies from his effort. The moral is twofold: A) The passion of man can never be matched by machine but B) you'll probably find your doom at the hands of machines anyway. Both are fairly popular themes in Springsteen's music.
"Balboa Park" from The Ghost of Tom Joad
This is far less conventional Springsteen track for many reasons. First of all, it occurs far from Springsteen's home region of New Jersey/New York City, in Balboa Park, a public area within San Diego. The working man's narrative also strays far from the standard factory life of the common Springsteen protagonist. "Little Spider," a nickname, is an illegal immigrant and homeless. That doesn't keep him from working as a drug mule for local gangs however, smuggling cocaine across the border. It might not sound like a sympathetic character but we find out that he sends most of his money back home to Mexico...putting food on the table for his children just like the rest of the men we've met in this list. Alas, it's implied that he too meets his demise. It's Springsteen giving us his views on immigration reform while using the same blue collar themes we've come to expect from him.
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