As Bruce Springsteen begins the 2nd North American leg of his “Wrecking Ball” tour, it’s hard to think of an analog for the artistic, cultural and political project in which he’s engaged.  This isn’t a group of musicians touring on behalf of a cause (e.g., the Amnesty International tours of the 1980s) or a campaign (e.g., the 2004 Vote For Change tour).  It’s not an artist hitching his star to a candidate and appearing at rallies (as Springsteen did with Barack Obama in 2008).

Instead, he’s taking his entire song catalog (as well as the hundreds of other songs his band can cover), every bit of stagecraft he’s learned from 45 years of performing, and as much of the past 150 years of American popular music as he can gather, and bringing it all to bear on the central social, cultural, economic and political challenge of our day:  how to survive (and overcome?) our current depression, now nearing the end of its 5th year.

Take, for example, the 3 shows in Boston last week that kicked off Springsteen’s return to the U.S. after touring Europe for the previous three months.  He sang over 60 different songs.  The shows were all at least three and a half hours long.  Unlike most performers his age, at least a third of the songs—including most of the ones at the heart of any given show—were written in this century.

Here are some of the key elements that—in one observer’s view—Springsteen uses to create this unprecedented series of shows.  More (much more) after the jump.

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Spoken word artist Taylor Mali’s poem, “I’ll Fight You For The Library” is a battle-in-four-letters between a veteran teacher and an administrator over whether the school’s library will be available for the teacher’s students to conduct research for an assignment…or whether it will be used for a “Facilities Utilization” committee meeting.

It came to mind when I saw this (brutal, devastating) ad from the Obama campaign about Mitt Romney’s business career and personal finances.

For those who can’t watch the video, it takes as its “soundtrack” Romney singing a verse of “America the Beautiful” during a January campaign stop at a retirement community in Florida.  This was a regular feature of Romney’s campaign appearances earlier this year, and he’d often connect the lyrics to the state in which he was speaking—”amber waves of grain” for Iowa and Missouri, “purple mountain majesties” for New Hampshire and Colorado, etc.

In doing so, Romney was not only displaying his patriotic bona fides, he was also implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) making the case that many Republicans and conservatives have made against Barack Obama:  that he doesn’t really love America, and that he’s not really, fully American.  Often this is tied to rhetoric about “taking back” or “restoring” our country, with the implication that the current occupant of the White House somehow doesn’t legitimately belong there.

The Obama campaign ad marries Romney’s unaccompanied singing of “America the Beautiful” with a plain series of statements (and accompanying images):

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In the 40 years since Ray Charles first recorded “America the Beautiful” (on his album, Message from the People), it has become perhaps the best-loved and most widely known version of Katherine Lee Bates’ great patriotic hymn.  That’s not surprising.  In addition to his talents as a composer and bandleader, Ray Charles is arguably the most influential interpreter of American popular song over the last 60 years.

watch?v=TRUjr8EVgBg

In fact, Charles’ interpretation is so popular that it’s easy to overlook how radically he revamped Bates’ song—both lyrically and theologically. Read the rest of this entry »