Bruce Springsteen’s Lecture Tour

He’d rather talk politics than play the hits.

By Kyle Smith

Bruce Springsteen in New York on May 11. Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/Associated Press

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Bruce Springsteen wraps up his tour this week with what was planned to be a final, thunderous show, on that hallowed ground of Bruce lovers, Washington, D.C.

Wait, what? The Paris, Rome and London of his art are East Rutherford, N.J. The mighty musical Meadowlands. Swamplandia. So why is he concluding his tour (except for a May 30 makeup show in Philadelphia that had to be postponed because of an NBA playoff game) in Washington?

The answer appears to be that he wants to troll Donald J. Trump. Those four syllables that have changed so much about American life have unfortunately done their work on Mr. Springsteen’s otherwise admirably steadfast character. For more than 50 years, as glam rock, punk, disco, electronica and every other musical craze came and went, Mr. Springsteen held to his style. His music was never timely, which is why it’s timeless. I’ve been a fan since 1984 and attended so many of his legendary concerts that I’ve lost count of how many. I think it’s 11 or 12.

Reports that Mr. Springsteen was turning portions of his “Land of Hope & Dreams Tour” into a Rachel Maddow monologue gave me pause, but the man is 76, and you never know when you’ll get another chance to see him perform. Besides, Madison Square Garden is 20 minutes from my apartment. So I found $700 lying around in my children’s college fund and went down to 33rd St.

The Boss opened with his cover of “War,” made famous by Edwin Starr in 1970. That was pretty exciting because although Starr’s version reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, I don’t think I’d heard Mr. Springsteen play it before. He added to the song a little speech about Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran.

Fine, I thought. He’s gotten it out of his system. But it turned out to be merely the first of four political speeches Mr. Springsteen delivered that night. For the last one, he unspooled his thoughts like a talk-radio host. It would have been witty if he had followed up with “Yakety Yak,” but he didn’t. He closed the show with Bob Dylan’s lament “Chimes of Freedom” and sent us all staggering out to Seventh Ave. in a cloud.

“This White House is destroying the American idea and our reputation around the world,” Mr. Springsteen has been saying on the tour. “We are no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are now, to many, America the reckless, unpredictable, predatory rogue nation. That is this administration’s and this president’s legacy. This is happening now.” He adds, “Go out and get in some good trouble. Say something, do something. Hell, sing something!” One of his guitarists, Tom Morello, has the words, “Arm the homeless” spelled out on his instrument (as he has for many years). At what Mr. Springsteen evidently considered a high point, he screamed, “ICE out now!” three times, urging the audience to join him.

As someone once said, it’s hard to be a saint in the city, and the audience response to all this was mostly polite, not boisterous, even in an overwhelmingly Democratic metropolis. I looked around at my fellow ticket holders and saw maybe 30% of them sitting quietly, waiting for all of this to be over. Their faces said, “OK, boomer.” We all have a senior relative who gets way too excited watching those shouty TV news channels, don’t we? The guy next to me in Section C, Row 21, whose haircut said, “Military, and not to be messed with,” folded his arms and took on a sullen expression.

As did I. I would never tell Mr. Springsteen, or any other artist, to “shut up and sing.” Mr. Springsteen is entitled to his views. Nor would I suggest that a man who is so rich that his daughter was able to grow up to be an equestrienne on their 400-acre horse farm is out of touch. Rich people are entitled to be angry about the excesses of ICE.

The problem is that Mr. Springsteen writes political diatribes about as well as I play guitar. He added nothing to the discourse. He simply repeated talking points we’ve all heard many times. He was like the guy at the Thanksgiving table who brings up politics when you ask him to pass the stuffing. Mr. Springsteen seemed even to design his playlist around titles intended to annoy Mr. Trump, even though the lyrics have nothing to do with the current situation (“No Surrender,” “Wrecking Ball,” “Murder Incorporated”). He weighed down the mood with many lugubrious picks such as the endless 2001 sermon “American Skin (41 Shots)” (which is about an accident, not a policy, and anyway concerns an illegal immigrant, not an American, who was mistakenly shot in 1999 by New York police who thought he had a gun). Even worse is Mr. Springsteen’s current follow-up, “Streets of Minneapolis,” a topical clunker that is unworthy of one of the great songwriters. It’s the opposite of timeless.

In the concerts I’ve attended over the years, Mr. Springsteen has almost always made the walls shake with the same core of classics, including “Backstreets,” “Thunder Road,” and “Prove It All Night,” each amounting to a rock ’n’ roll epiphany. Yet toward the end of the show, as Mr. Springsteen uncharacteristically parked himself on the steps to give us yet another talk, 20,000 fans who had paid for a concert, not a “Pod Save America” taping, waited in disbelief. Was he really going to give us none of these, instead spending five minutes on speechifying?

Trolling political leaders can be satisfying, but to Mr. Springsteen’s admirers it looks pretty self-indulgent. If he wants to shout at the TV, perhaps he should do that when he’s on that 400-acre horse farm rather than in front of the fans who paid for it.

Mr. Smith is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.