Into The Music
Bruce Springsteen took the stage in St. Paul, Minnesota on Saturday to perform “Streets of Minneapolis” at the flagship No Kings rally outside the Minnesota State Capitol, drawing thousands of protesters and cementing his role as the loudest rock voice in American political dissent right now.
The Boss did not waste words. Standing before a crowd that had gathered to protest the federal government’s increasingly aggressive actions in American cities, Springsteen addressed the Minneapolis ICE shootings head-on. “This past winter, federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis, but they picked the wrong city,” he told the crowd. He went on to name Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two people killed during the federal operations, by name. “Their bravery, their sacrifice, and their names will not be forgotten.”
That kind of specificity matters. A lot of musicians have gestured toward the current political moment with vague sympathy and carefully worded Instagram statements. Springsteen is writing protest songs and playing them in the cities where the events actually happened. “Streets of Minneapolis” was written in the immediate aftermath of the ICE killings, debuted live at a benefit concert at First Avenue on January 30, and has now been performed three times in as many months. Each performance has been more charged than the last.
Saturday was the song’s third outing. The first was that First Avenue benefit. The second came just this week at Democracy Now!’s 30th anniversary event in New York. The No Kings rally, with its massive crowd outside the state capitol, felt like the culmination of something that has been building all winter.
The timing is not accidental. Springsteen and the E Street Band kick off their Land of Hope and Dreams Tour on Tuesday, also in Minneapolis. “The tour is going to be political and very topical about what’s going on in the country,” Springsteen told the Minnesota Star Tribune earlier this week. He said he specifically wanted to begin the tour in Minneapolis and end it in Washington. That kind of deliberate geography is a statement of its own.
What makes this Springsteen moment feel different from the more performative political posturing that tends to surround major artists is the consistency of it. This is not a one-off gesture or a surprise appearance. He wrote the song, he has been performing it at rallies and benefits, he is building his entire upcoming tour around the political context of the moment. The man is 76 years old and he is still doing this.
The No Kings movement has been gaining momentum as a broad coalition of resistance to the current administration’s actions, and the St. Paul rally was billed as its flagship event. Having Springsteen there, naming the dead and telling crowds that America will not stand for this, added something that pure political organizing cannot provide. Music carries grief and anger in ways that speeches do not.
Whether the tour will maintain that political intensity across dozens of arena dates remains to be seen. But on Saturday afternoon in St. Paul, Bruce Springsteen stood up and said what he thought in the clearest possible terms. That still counts for something.
Respect to Springsteen for using his platform, genuinely. But I’ll say what I always say when these big rock moments happen , there were Tejano and corrido artists singing about exactly these struggles, naming these names, long before it became acceptable for mainstream rock to do it. Los Tigres del Norte have been doing this work for decades. Glad the message is getting out, just wish the credit and the spotlight spread a little wider.
Springsteen writing a song called “Streets of Minneapolis” and people calling it an anthem , and I’m not saying it isn’t, the man has earned that , but East LA artists have been writing protest music about their streets for fifty years and it doesn’t get called a reckoning, it gets called a genre. I’m watching this and feeling proud of the moment and a little tired at the same time.