In Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott note that a “swell of nostalgia” characterizes many cultural responses to deindustrialization. Listen to Bruce Springsteen’s “Youngstown” and “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Do these songs evoke a “swell of nostalgia”? In your opinion, should we or should we not be nostalgic for the heyday of heavy industry in the United States when towns like Youngstown, Ohio (aka, “Steeltown”) and Flint, Michigan (aka “the Motor City”) thrived?
March 13, 2019 at 1:58 pm
New to Springsteen’s lesser known songs, I first listened to “Youngstown”. In the opening, his raspy voice cuts smoothly through the slight guitar chords for a gentle revisiting of a simpler time. As the first verse closes, some strings (likely a cello) join the arrangement the emotion of the piece swells and you can feel the yearning, the ache for a time and place that have come and gone.
The Ghost of Tom Joad didn’t resonate with me quite as much, though it was still a beautiful song. It rounded out some of the working-class narratives well, depicting their struggles and hopes in jarring fashion. In search of a better life, they suffered, “Got a one-way ticket to the promised land, you got a hole in your belly and gun in your hand, sleeping on a pillow of solid rock, bathin’ in the city aqueduct”. It reminds me a great deal of David Joy’s “Digging in the Trash”, which details the steely personality of his father and grandfather that the struggles of a working life smelted hot. Springsteen sings about the people who made the belly of America, about their struggles, and about how, by way of faith, will-power, or defiance, they lived on.
The nostalgic swells are powerful. They give life to the sad, gentle yearning for a time when the American dream existed as more than a disillusioned ideal. The question of whether this nostalgia has merit misses the point of Springsteen’s work. Sure, perhaps during the more industrial time Springsteen sings about, the working class had a fighting chance at upward mobility. Perhaps they had a better life when dirty work like coal mining could help them earn a much more livable wage. These songs signify the working classes refusal to bow down to life’s cruelest fates and willingness to trudge on in a merciless world. That message resonates through temporal boundaries from yesterday, to tomorrow, to the far-reaching future that waits.
March 13, 2019 at 1:22 pm
I definitely noticed a sense or “swell” of nostalgia when listening to Bruce Springsteen’s songs. First and foremost, the melody and tone of the two songs are incredibly somber and lethargic, in comparison to some of his other more upbeat songs. The lyrics follow this trend. In Youngstown, Springsteen sings of the memory of the Ohio town as a manufacturing hub before the downfall of industrialization and heavy industry in the US. He attributes much of the wartime success to the workers and steel factories of Youngstown while also reflecting in the desolate nature of the area after the war with lyrics like: “These mills they built the tanks and bombs/That won this country’s wars/We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam/Now we’re wondering what they were dyin’ for”. There is an obvious disconnect between the pre and post war sentiments of the blue collar workers of Youngstown.
This is consistent with the themes presented in “Collateral Damage”. Rubio and Linkon discuss how today Youngstown remains one of the nation’s leaders in unemployment, poverty rates, population decline, bankruptcies etc. These realities are coupled with a sense of loss that is depicted in Springsteen’s music and throughout the blue collar population of the rustbelt. This loss is both economic and a personal loss of identity, as communities face the normalization of deindustrialization and grapple with the shifting order and makeup of the modern economy. These communities also have to live with the media images and spotlight that has been put on their homes as economically impoverished and failing.
In a sense, I feel that the nostalgia encapsulated in this song and felt by working class America during the period of deindustrialization is warranted. The lyrics appeal to those that feel they have been the most disadvantaged by the deindustrialization of the US, while also creating a sense of shared history and identity. It is not only nostalgia for the past identity of Youngstown and other areas but a nostalgia for an equitable class system, one where blue collar workers found a multitude of opportunities and paths of upward mobility. With that being said, I believe in the strategy proposed by Russo and Linkon of reclaiming this identity and exalting it as a valuable next step forward for communities like Youngstown.
March 12, 2019 at 10:27 pm
Bruce Springsteen’s songs, the “Ghost of Tom Joad” and “Youngstown” definitely elicit a sense of nostalgia, a nostalgia of a difficult blue-collar life. In his recent broadway show (on Netflix), Bruce Springsteen tells the story of his gritty life through song and spoken word in a very genuine and emotional way. He begins with anecdotal songs and monologues about his own childhood, about his parents, about his father’s death, but eventually delves into grander issues and topics in America. He rose to fame for his blue-collar anthems, songs like “Born in the USA” and “Born to Run,” yet he reveals that he actually lives 10 minutes from his home town, so he’s not really born to run, and he said he has “never seen the inside of a factory and yet it’s all I’ve ever written about.” This year, he introduced “Ghost of Tom Joad” into the set list. The song is largely about inequality, and it’s said that he added that in as a protest to Trump separating families at the border. Bruce Springsteen wanted to capture the essence of America in many of his songs, although he may not have lived these realities himself. He’s from New Jersey, not Youngstown. Perhaps, in these songs, Springsteen was trying to appeal to this audience of blue-collar America, an audience from Youngstown, devastated by their own economic depression. It’s hard to say whether or not we should be nostalgic, and what the ‘right’ answer should be, but I do think that the lyrics of these songs speak to a certain American, and are just catchy to others.
In “Collateral Damage,” Russo and Linkon write about how the media uses the history of Youngstown as an example of what could happen in the event of economic devastation. It is troubling how the media can spin, perhaps, happy memories of a childhood living in Youngstown, into sad, bleak memories, through the stories and images that are shared. Russo and Linkon note in the end of the article,
“Further, such media representations do not simply define the community in the national view. They also have power to shape the way local residents think about their past and their future. In many cases, locals internalize the image of their community as a site of loss, failure, crime, and corruption. For some, this generates a sense of despair and helplessness, while others become defensive or engage in denial.” (217-218)