Bruce Springsteen is hitting 60

You know what? Also rock stars get old. They dye their hair and keep singing the old anthems, but time ticks for them too and this week Bruce Springsteen will be hitting 60.

The difference between rock stars and normal people is that rock stars do not retire, they earn way too much to take retirement into consideration. They rather prefer producing overrated records instead: they know too well that there are always some deluded fans willing to buy them. What rock stars, though, have in common with normal people, is the desire to talk about things they don’t know much about and trying hard to be popular. Bruce Springsteen and his fiddle with politics is a typical example.

The guy, as per his own admission, was never much interested in politics and he had never read a proper book until he was in his mid-twenties. In fact, he had spent most of his younger days making music, great rock music if you ask me and millions of people who bought his records.

“The Boss” was so much disinterested in politics that many people even thought that he could even be a bit of a Conservative. I thought it too, after all most of his songs were about getting on with it.

I remember my Leftie friends hated the guy because of the American flags flying everywhere at his concerts and because of him looking as a “white trash” without a clue about the issues of the world, but what they despised more than anything, was that “Born in the USA” song, so damn patriotic.

But that was then, now Bruce Springsteen is the prodigal son of the Liberals. He has been bashing George W Bush in the past five years with so much hatred that from listening to his interviews and songs you must think Dubya must be the reincarnation of the Devil.

Springsteen is entitled to his own opinions, but there is more than just “patriotism” in his passion for politics. In the 80’s he was keeping a bit quiet about politics because those were the Reagan’s years and many of his fans loved the then President of the USA as much as him. With the arrival of the ‘90s though, “The Boss” started to lose followers and in order to keep afloat (aka making money) he needed a way to come back into the spotlight, and what a better way than to receive an ovation from the political Left?

The first pivotal moment was the song “American Skin”, written in 2000, in which Springsteen was condemning the NY police for having killed an innocent immigrant, Amadou Diallo. The song was the kind of bad white cops kill innocent black immigrant and was a condemnation of the “zero tolerance” approach of Rudolf Giuliani and a call against anti-racism. Of course, Springsteen never wrote a song about all the policemen killed while on duty or praised Giuliani’s policies that made New York City much safer. Instead, he preferred to concentrate on a tragic episode in order to make himself a “hero” and get some publicity (aka making more money).

September the 11th was the second and more important pivotal moment. The Boss was always known for his tedious attention to details in producing a new album, but with “The Rising” (the album that followed 9/11) it didn’t take him long to produce it. In less than a year, in fact, the album was ready. America was still shaken by the atrocities that happened in New York and the old blue collar hero (who, by the way, has never worked in a factory) was ready to be back at the right time in the limelight.

From then on, it was all about Bush did this and Bush did that. Listening to Springsteen you would think that America was at risk of becoming a dictatorship run by a dick, a bit like Zimbabwe.

President Bush was not for everybody’s taste but it doesn’t take a genius to realise that if you want to save your citizens from further atrocities you have to take some though decisions, whatever that takes. After all, if the terrorists do not care about out rights why should we care about theirs? Does Springsteen really believe that leaving the terrorists alone, they will be leaving us too? Does he really think the US government is imprisoning random people? A man who spent his life singing songs what does he know about the security of the country? Not a word came from Springsteen since 9/11 about the Islamic threat, not a word about the number of Islamic terrorists’ plots that the CIA has stopped from happening.

Thankfully for Springsteen though, now Obama is the President of the USA and he is already “Working on a Dream”.

I am guessing “The Boss” is having a very happy 60th birthday and I am wishing him so, and at least now, with Bush out of the picture, he will hopefully stop talking about what he doesn’t know.