Attachments:	SPRINGSTEEN BOOK NOTES FOR MM.docx

Interview with Dr. Doug Morris about his participation in the book:
 Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul:  Essays on the Songs and Influence 
of an American Icon.

Q:  How did the Bruce Springsteen book come about? 

dm:  Most of the essays are expanded versions of papers presented at “Glory 
Days:  A Bruce Springsteen Symposium” held back in September 2009 in New 
Jersey.  David Izzo was responsible for gathering and editing the chapters.  
It was one of the livelier conferences I’ve attended, infused with a joyful 
sense of solidarity, and with scholars from very diverse fields, including 
physicists, psychoanalysts, cultural critics, literary critics, 
anthropologists, biologists, etc., all attuned to the importance of taking 
popular culture seriously as a powerful form of public pedagogy that shapes 
values, ideas and beliefs; constructs identities, allegiances and aspirations; 
and directs desires, dreams and possibilities.  In brief, people were taking 
seriously what it means to read and write the world in which they are living 
and learning.  And, of course, there was plenty of music to further enliven 
the proceedings (including a three hour session with Bruce and Elvis Costello 
over in NYC as part of Costello’s TV series).

Q:  What directed you to the conference and to participate in the book? 

dm:  Springsteen has always struck me as a musician deeply attuned to and 
deeply concerned about social struggles, working class concerns, unjust power 
relationships, and the many forms of rampant injustice and inequality present 
in the economic and political systems in the US.  He is a musician with a 
conscience and he has employed his music over the years to raise public 
consciousness about the state of the world in which we are living in terms of 
singing about the exploitation of working people, the horrors of military 
aggression, the degradation of imposed poverty, and the importance of people 
taking on a moral and political responsibility to try to overcome the root 
causes of so much human suffering and so much social injustice.  So, in that 
sense, there is always a celebration of human dignity and the human potential 
to overcome indignities and dehumanizing institutions. That is a basic 
responsibility of any public intellectual, i.e. to work to widen and deepen 
our understanding of the world, our roles and possibilities in that world, and 
to share, in dialogue, that knowledge and understanding with others in the 
hopes of activating our individual and collective agency so that we can 
construct a more sane and moral world. 

Springsteen’s Working on a Dream was released a few months before the 
conference and I was moved by the depth of the writing and several common 
threads that run through the music that suggest both the nightmare of the 
American Dream for all too many people (increasing as corporate power and 
finance capital continue their assault of working people in the US), and the 
possibilities present when we work collectively to construct a better world, 
grounded in forms of social love, solidarity and possibility.
I wrote a long commentary on Working on a Dream and sent it to a number of 
friends (fellow Springsteen fans) and we started a dialogue.  The initial 
commentary became the basis for the paper presented at the conference. But, 
while I was driving from PA to NJ for the conference, I kept listening to a 
particular tune Let Me Show You What Love Can Do, and had several new 
revelations.  I stopped on the Jersey Turnpike and wrote down a bunch of 
ideas.  When I got to the Hotel I spent a number of hours reformulating the 
paper to focus on the new theme:  “let me show you what love can do,” and in 
this case, I think Bruce is talking about social love (with a hint of romantic 
love).  That is a duality present in much of his work.  Folks at the 
conference enjoyed the paper, it stimulated a lot of conversation, and then 
David Izzo (the editor of the book) asked me to send an extended version his 
way for possible inclusion in the book.  The first version was about 10,000 
words, but it had to be cut in half.
I was also working through Istvan’s Meszaros’s massive and important tome “The 
Challenge and Burden of Historical Time” and also discovered that there were 
many ideas there that were expressed in a few lines by Springsteen on Working 
on a Dream.  So, in the midst of writing a long academic review of that book, 
some of those ideas started creeping over into the piece on Bruce, and that 
became the version for the Springsteen book, still focusing on the “social 
love” theme, which is also at the core of the work of Meszaros, and also on 
the notion of “pedagogies of possibility,” referring to the idea that history 
is not a determination but possibility, borrowing a theme from Paulo Freire.  
The famous quote from Che Guevara opens the piece “true revolutionaries are 
motivated by great feelings of love for humanity.”  Sounds a bit like Jesus 
and Buddha, yes? 

Additionally, I’ve attended plenty of Bruce concerts that remain seared into 
one’s consciousness because of both the intensity of the group’s performance 
and, perhaps more importantly, the sublime experience of participating in what 
often amounts to a 3 ½ hour collective sing-along.

Q:  You mentioned the importance of popular culture in education.  What do you 
mean? 

dm:  Well, my academic training was with Henry Giroux and Pat Shannon, both 
key figures in the world of critical literacy, a wing of reading and literacy 
education that works to expand the often very narrow and narrowing views of 
reading and literacy one finds in the world of academia and in public 
education in general, especially among administrators, politicians, and the 
business folk who are increasingly dominating the discourse around reading and 
literacy, and education in general.  For some strange reason, too many of them 
think that reading and literacy is something that only happens in school as 
though schools (and students in schools) exist in some mysterious realm 
outside of the rest of the world.  It is a very regressive way of looking at 
reading and literacy, and at education in general.
If we work on the assumption that reading is about making sense of the world 
in which we are living and assume that we make sense by bringing sense in 
order to give and take sense from that world (always including us, of course) 
then we can conclude that the more forms of literacy we bring to our 
engagements with the world, the more profound will be our readings and levels 
of understanding.  If we also work on the assumption that we are always being 
conditioned by the world in which we are living, as well as conditioning the 
world, then the question arises about the forces that are conditioning our 
lives.  Among the many forces that shape our lives in terms of forging 
identities and aspirations, directing desires and allegiances, conditioning 
ideas, values and beliefs is popular culture and a crucial component of that 
popular culture is music culture.

Springsteen’s been around now for close to 40 years as a prominent cultural 
force and he has influenced hundreds of other musicians over the years.  He is 
an artist who recognizes that music is not simply something we use to escape 
from our problems, but it is also something that can assist us in 
understanding our problems and crucially a force that can help us overcome our 
problems.  In short, popular music is always more than simply a form of 
entertainment, it is also pedagogical.  It is, in various ways, a mirror on 
the world, a window into the world, and when it is revolutionary (to borrow 
from Brecht), it is a hammer that provides us tools to positively transform 
the world.
When Springsteen released Working on a Dream, I was immediately struck by how 
the music was serving as a mirror, a window and a hammer.  So, Springsteen is 
offering people tools for reading the world in critical ways, bringing 
different literacies to the engagement so that people have hammers for 
reshaping the world.  All of that seemed worth thinking about, writing about 
and discussing.

Q:  What would you say is the main theme of your chapter in the book?

dm:  The implicit power of human social love and its capacity to inspire 
people to mobilize in cooperation and solidarity to struggle against 
injustice, inequality, tyranny, and dehumanization, and for a society grounded 
in substantive forms of freedom, social justice, equality and democracy.

Related is the dialectical relationship between working and dreaming evident 
on Springsteen’s Working on a Dream,” where our work influences our dreams and 
our dreams influence our work.  When we have knowledge of a better world 
operating with, through and out of the activated imaginations of social 
individuals then it is possible to work collectively to bring that knowledge 
into material reality through systemic transformations.  The transformations 
in the material reality, i.e. positive changes in the social conditions and 
institutional imperatives, in turn nurture and nourish our dreams in a 
constant dialectical dance of mutually informing, influencing and inhabiting 
categories of working and dreaming.  We might say that we need to learn how to 
dream differently in order to work differently and we have to learn how to 
work differently to dream differently.  In some sense, Springsteen’s long term 
project has been to chart the connections between ideals in the US and 
realities in the US.  He believes we should hold the society accountable for 
its promises and principles of freedom, equality, justice and democracy, even 
in the midst of all the racism, sexism, classism, imperialism and capitalism, 
and work to bring the promises and principles in line with a new reality.

So, there is a conflict between promises and attainment of those promises 
(promises are empty without the material conditions required to actualize the 
promises), but also crucially, there is a tension between the systemic 
negative determinations of the existing “blood for blood” and “eye for an eye” 
dominant social order (under the ownership and control of corporate power and 
finance capital) and our human capacities to struggle for qualitative 
transformations in the objective conditions of social and individual 
reproduction in the domain of labor (working), accompanied by transformations 
of consciousness (dreaming), that provides the engine for dreaming of and 
working to “make real” urgently necessary alternatives founded in “what love 
can do,” where love is the grounding and vehicle for the human spirit of 
compassion, solidarity and justice, and any serious form of substantive 
democracy.