Into The Music
Bruce Springsteen took the stage Saturday in St. Paul, Minnesota to perform his protest song “Streets of Minneapolis” at the No Kings flagship rally outside the Minnesota State Capitol. Thousands packed the grounds to hear the Boss deliver what has become one of the most charged political performances of this moment in American history.
This was the third time Springsteen has performed “Streets of Minneapolis” live, a song he wrote in the aftermath of the ICE shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti earlier this year. He debuted it in January at a benefit concert at First Avenue, performed it at Democracy Now!’s 30th anniversary event in New York, and now brought it to the steps of the state capitol for the No Kings movement’s highest-profile rally to date.
Before launching into the song, Springsteen addressed the crowd directly: “This past winter, federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis, but they picked the wrong city. The power and the solidarity of the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota was an inspiration to the entire country.” He named the two people killed, called their deaths a brutal and unjust act by what he described as a lawless government, and made clear he considered their sacrifice something that would not be forgotten.
The performance hit differently than a normal concert. This was not Springsteen as rock star slipping into a political gesture. This was a songwriter showing up for a movement that has grown into something larger than any single artist could have anticipated. The No Kings rallies have drawn massive crowds across Minnesota and beyond, and Saturday’s gathering was the flagship event of what has become a sustained, wide-ranging resistance effort.
The timing matters too. Springsteen and the E Street Band kick off the Land of Hope and Dreams Tour this Tuesday in Minneapolis. He told the Minnesota Star Tribune that the tour will be political and topical, that he deliberately chose Minneapolis as the starting point, and that he plans to end the tour in Washington. This is not a musician hedging. This is someone who has decided that art and politics are the same thing right now.
There is a long tradition of rock and folk artists using performance as a form of witness. What Springsteen is doing this week feels different because it is not performance in the theatrical sense. He is showing up to specific places, for specific reasons, about specific people who died. The song is good, but the act of singing it in St. Paul, in front of a crowd that has lost people and is still out there, is the thing that will be remembered.
The Land of Hope and Dreams Tour begins Tuesday. Minneapolis first. Washington last. Everything in between will apparently be exactly what it sounds like.
bruce doing protest songs at 76. respect. most guys his age are doing classic rock casino nights.
What strikes me here is the lineage Springsteen is drawing from , “Streets of Minneapolis” sits squarely in the tradition of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who understood that a rally song has to be both specific and open enough to carry a crowd. The blues has always done this too, though rarely with the same arena ambitions. Robert Johnson wasn’t playing for ten thousand people. But the impulse , naming names, naming places, telling the powerful what you think of them , that goes all the way back. Whether you think Springsteen earns it or not probably says more about you than him.
The Guthrie lineage Reggie mentions is real, but I’d push it further , what Springsteen has always done, and what makes “Streets of Minneapolis” land the way it apparently did, is that he doesn’t write protest songs in the abstract. He writes about specific people with specific addresses. Guthrie did that too. It’s the opposite of a slogan. Arcade Fire tried something similar on The Suburbs but Springsteen figured out how to make it not sound like a thesis statement, which is the hard part.
There’s something moving about watching an artist in his mid-seventies choose a rally over a residency. In Canada we have our own tradition of this , think Buffy Sainte-Marie, think Bruce Cockburn writing “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” , artists who never separated their music from their politics even when it cost them. Springsteen has always straddled the working-class poet and the stadium rock icon, and I think the No Kings rally is him choosing one over the other, at least for a night. I wonder if the new song will hold up outside of the context of the moment, or if it only works with ten thousand people around you in the cold.