Notes on "Darkness On the Edge of Town"
Author’s note: I missed the 45th anniversary of Darkness on the Edge of Town. I’d been kicking around a couple of vague ideas about that album for a little while, and I thought I might try to organize them into something coherent in time for its 45th anniversary. That was in June of this year. So, as 2023 fades into 2024, you’ll have to make do with…whatever this is.
Just as the Replacements went from an ethos of “isn’t it fun to be drunk and stupid all the time?” to “I have destroyed my life through alcoholism” within the span of about five years, Bruce Springsteen took seven years to go from “it’s time to get the hell out of Dodge” to “escape is impossible and life is meaningless.” The former is represented by Born to Run (1975), the latter by Nebraska (1982). In 1975: It’s a town full of losers; I’m pulling out of here to win. In 1982: Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact.
Pretend for a moment that all Springsteen songs take place in the same universe and a narrative begins to take shape. The focal character is a young man. He’s not a boy, but despite his protestations to the contrary, it doesn’t feel right to call him a man, no qualifiers attached. Growing up, he learns to desire certain things, chief among them a kind of amorphous sense of freedom, freedom from and freedom to. If pressed, he couldn’t really tell you what he wants to do with this freedom. What he knows is this: he wants freedom, and the only way to get this freedom is to get the hell out of his hometown, yesterday if possible. It’s a town full of losers, it rips the bones from your back, we gotta get out while we’re young.
We know how the story ends. The thing he wanted so desperately—freedom, escape—turns out to be a lie. It was never possible. He was always going to get a job working construction for the Johnstown Company. It wasn’t a question of if, only of when. Escape? What escape? Now I just act like I don’t remember; Mary acts like she don’t care.
But there’s a middle phase between “get out while we’re young” and “working construction,” and that phase is Darkness on the Edge of Town. The young man hasn’t realized that his hopes and aspirations are lies. Hope is still a potent force in his world. But this isn’t a continuation of the ragged optimism of Born to Run, either. He’s gotten a bit older, and he’s starting to realize there are some holes in his plan. In particular, he still doesn’t know what he’ll do with his freedom once he gets it. In Born to Run, he didn’t know that he didn’t know what he would do with his freedom. Now he does know that he doesn’t know—but the other thing he knows is that he wants his freedom.
What, then, is freedom for him? To have “the heart, the soul, control right now”; to “find one face that ain’t lookin’ through me.” Okay, you can imagine some skeptical listener asking, but what will this look like? How are you going to get it? What will you do with this control? To this, he has two responses, both of which are dramatized in “The Promised Land.” The first response is to reaffirm his masculinity in one way or another. Maybe he doubles down on the performance of the whole thing, getting into a fight or beating someone up: “explode and tear this whole town apart”; “find somebody itchin’ for something to start.” Maybe he comes right out and says it: “Mister, I ain’t a boy; no, I’m a man, and I believe in the promised land.” (Who, I wonder, is he talking to here? The narratee [forgive me] is a man who doubts the young man’s maturity and probably his masculinity, but apart from that, we don’t have any other clues. Why does the young man need to prove himself to this other man? What did the other man do or say that made him respond this way?)
The other response is to get into his car and go somewhere. The destination doesn’t really matter as long as it isn’t here. As long as it’s out. In both Born to Run and Darkness, driving makes escape feel real for the young man. But the relationship between driving and freedom isn’t quite as linear as it was in the world of Born to Run. Back then, it was a simple cause-and-effect relationship: get in the car, drive for a few hours or a few days, become free. All of the car songs end before anyone can actually test this hypothesis: “Thunder Road,” for example, ends with the young man about to get on the road. But it feels like basic common sense; it feels only natural that driving out of town once and for all would only lead to freedom.
In Darkness, by contrast, we get a glimpse of a possible future for the young man. Imagine for a moment that the young man gets involved in drag racing and it’s difficult not to see “Racing in the Street” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” as a two-part vision of the man he is at high risk of becoming. Drag racing, after all, is the purest form of getting in your car and just going.
This is an act in which the narrator of “Racing in the Street” still sees something freeing, even redeeming. “Some guys,” he tells us, “just give up living,” but he’s not one of them. Of course, hearing his vivid and unsparing descriptions of how they “start dying little by little, piece by piece,” it’s difficult to avoid the sense that he’s met a few of them—the sense that this is the kind of guy he would have become if he weren’t so good at drag racing. And we know he’s good. We know, for one, that he and his partner “shut ‘em up and shut ‘em down” on the strip. More importantly, we know he stole another racer’s girlfriend—you know, the girl he “met […] on the strip three years ago in a Camaro with this dude from L.A.” This is the Monaco Grand Prix of North Jersey drag racing.
That was three years ago. Today, trouble seems to be brewing. Now the girl “cries herself to sleep at night”; now she “hates for just being born,” because “all her pretty dreams are torn.” For the narrator, hope isn’t completely lost: tonight, he tells us, they’re going to “ride to the sea and wash these sins off [their] hands.” But just as “Thunder Road” ended with the young man about to get on the road, the narrator of “Racing in the Street” is only about to ride to the sea.
We never learn what comes of this. Maybe it saves their relationship. Or maybe it doesn’t; maybe he ends up like the guy in “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” the last song on the album: racing, still chasing after something, but now with no wife, no girlfriend, and, if we’re being honest, no real hope to speak of. He’s still racing because it’s the only thing he knows how to do and it’s the only time he feels free, the only time he can pretend that there’s such a thing as hope. And then he gets to the end of the track and it’s back to Death Trap, NJ, where all roads inexorably lead.
In Born to Run, there is hope; in Nebraska, there is no such thing; in Darkness there is hope, but not for us. That’s what makes Darkness his best album. It holds hope and despair in an unresolvable tension. It does so in large part by dramatizing the cruel optimism—the pattern of desiring a thing that is preventing you from flourishing—of contemporary life, and particularly the cruel optimism of masculinity in deindustrialized America. But it’s never preachy or supercilious; there’s not even the slightest hint of hand-wringing or didacticism. True, we might learn a lesson or two from watching these men’s lives unfold. Maybe there is a road that really does lead out of Death Trap. Maybe there is such a thing as freedom that doesn’t center around freedom from obligations to others. But we must discover it ourselves.
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