COLTS NECK, New Jersey. While protestors marched in Washington and women across the country mourned as Donald Trump took the oath of office as 45th President of the United States, another outspoken opponent of the man many think will usher in a long, dark night of fascism over the land was licking his wounds privately at his modest 378-acre farm here. “I honestly don’t know what I could have done differently,” says Bruce Springsteen, who played a benefit concert for vanquished Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton in the campaign’s homestretch. “I sang all of my biggest hits.”
“I’m thinking of bidding on the 2022 Summer Olympics.”
The New Jersey rocker, who regards himself as a spokesman for the common man even though he made $60.5 million in 2016, may in fact have turned the tide in Trump’s favor, according to exit polls in former Democratic strongholds that voted for Trump last year. “Springsteen’s the king of faux po’ boy rock, no doubt about that,” says music critic Lyle Abenhold of Screw magazine. “Not sure that’s a selling point outside of San Francisco, Cambridge and Brooklyn.”
Red = No Springsteen zones.
Springsteen appeals to very few of the working class types he sings about, but his fan base is bipartisan, as it includes both liberals and overweight Republican governors who consider an extra-large 42-ounce bag of M&M’s a single serving. His record sales mirror the precincts Clinton won, a bad omen for a candidate who needed to win a majority of electoral college votes. “You can literally walk from the Atlantic to the Pacific and not go through a town where anybody has a Springsteen album,” says Michael Mariaia of Election Strategies, LLC, a political consulting firm. “In retrospect, Clinton should have gone to Nashville instead of New Jersey for her musical accompaniment.”
“This is MY bag–get your own!”
Springsteen’s concern over income equality is evidenced by the $4,639 in real estate taxes he pays annually on 200 acres he owns, a dramatic savings he achieves by claiming to be a farmer. “Just listen to some of my albums,” he says. “There’s no way I could pack so much empathy into a song if I didn’t know how hard it is to make ends meet busting sod.”
O’Connor: Uh, no Bruce.
Springsteen has in the past compared himself to Flannery O’Connor, the unaffected Southern gothic writer known for the lack of sentimentality in her short stories of the south. When told that he did not resemble a devout Catholic spinster with lupus, Springsteen asked “Well, can I be Eudora Welty?”
Now all I can think about are M&Ms, which I never thought of as a political issue.