Into The Music
Bruce Springsteen did not have to show up. His tour starts tomorrow. He could have saved his voice, kept his head down, focused on the business of selling out arenas. Instead, on March 28, he drove to a Capitol lawn in St. Paul, Minnesota, and played a song about a city that watched two people die at the hands of federal agents.
The No Kings rally in St. Paul drew tens of thousands. Organizers had anticipated roughly 100,000 people. Joan Baez was there. Jane Fonda was there. And Springsteen stepped up and played “Streets of Minneapolis,” the track he wrote in direct response to the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents earlier this year. The moment was not a scheduled arena show. It was the opposite of that. It was a 76-year-old man with a guitar standing on a lawn telling a crowd that what happened in Minneapolis was not an accident and was not acceptable.
The song, and the performance, carry a different weight when you know what comes next. On March 31, Springsteen and the E Street Band kick off the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour at Target Center in Minneapolis itself. The tour name is not subtle. Neither is the timing. You do not open a tour in Minneapolis right now unless you mean something by it.
Springsteen has never been great at pretending music exists outside of politics, and his fans have generally respected him for that, even the ones who occasionally wish he would dial it back. This moment does not read as a calculated PR move, and the context makes it hard to frame it as anything other than what it was: a working musician using the only tool he has, in the place where it would land hardest, at the exact time when it might mean something.
The E Street Band has been through a difficult few years. Clarence Clemons is long gone. Danny Federici has been gone longer. The last major tour saw Springsteen battling a peptic ulcer diagnosis that wiped out a substantial stretch of dates in late 2023. Returning now, with a new tour and a new political moment, is not a small thing.
What Springsteen said at the rally, according to reporting from the scene, was brief. He told the crowd they had given him courage. Then he played the song. Then he left. That is about right. The point was the song and the place, not a speech. The Land of Hope and Dreams tour runs into the summer. Whatever happens between now and the last date, it started with something that was not just a warm-up.
OK I don’t know much about Springsteen’s whole history but the fact that he didn’t have to show up and did anyway?? That’s the ENERGY!! That’s what separates an artist from a celebrity , artists show up for the moment, not just for the money. This gave me chills even from over here!!
There’s a long tradition in West African performance culture of the artist as communal servant , the griot doesn’t choose when to perform based on commercial calculation, they perform because the community needs it. Springsteen showing up unannounced is very different culturally, but the underlying logic , that artists have obligations that exist apart from their career interests , is something highlife artists from E.T. Mensah onward would have recognized immediately.