OPINION: WHY SPRINGSTEEN HAS ALWAYS BEEN AHEAD OF HIS TIME
In the light of the recent Black Lives Matter movement, Ida reflects on how Springsteen’s protest song ‘American Skin (41 shots)’ is still as painfully relevant today.
I discovered Bruce Springsteen as a pre-teen on a musical treasure hunt, listening through my big brother’s old mix tapes; I was hooked by an electric guitar riff and reigned in by a voice that cut to the bone; somehow filled with anguish, anger, fighting spirit and hope all at once.
Springsteen never did quite fit in with the other bands and artists I would come to stack my shelves with, building my young identity through album choices, finding that perfect balance between punk, rock, glam and grunge, and later metal and opera. He didn’t quite fit, yet he fit in perfectly; by the time I discovered him he was already an old-timer, yet he’d remained current. He still does.
In 2000, Bruce Springsteen wrote a protest song called ‘American Skin (41 shots)’ which he and the E Street Band premiered during a concert in Atlanta on June 4th, 2000. The song tells the story of Amadou Diallo, the 23-year-old black man who was shot to death on his own doorstep when a NYPD officer mistook his wallet for a gun — and shot him 41 times, in so-called self-defence.
The song starts with a barely-there beat, a whisper of a melody that cautiously creeps out of the darkness and ventures into the spotlight. When Springsteen starts singing, it’s from the perspective of the police officer and his voice carries strongly, almost overpowering the music: “Forty-one shots, and we’ll take that ride, cross this bloody river, to the other side / forty-one shots, cut through the night, you’re kneeling over his body in the vestibule / praying for his life… is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? / This is your life… It ain’t no secret, no secret my friend: you get killed just for living, in your American skin…”
As the perspective shifts from the police officer who pulled the trigger, to that of a mother getting her boy ready for school, reminding him as she does that, if the police should stop him, he has to be polite, he must never run away and he always needs to keep his hands in sight, the music gradually rises up and back-up voices join in, repeating forty-one shots, as if to imply that if we hear it enough times, it will start to make sense to us. But of course it won’t, because it doesn’t and never can.
At the time, the song sparked lots of controversy and resulted in protests from the New York Police Department and the Police Benevolent Association. Springsteen stressed that the song was not anti-police, but anti-tragedy.
In June of 2020, exactly two decades since the song was first performed to the public, it became painfully apparent that it’s a tragedy with a seemingly endless number of acts. Something that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band acknowledged by opening their weekly SiriusXM program on June 3rd 2020 with this song, noting that the song ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’ plays for almost eight minutes, which is about the same amount of time it took George Floyd to die.
”That’s how long he begged for help and said he couldn’t breathe. The arresting officer’s response was nothing but silence and weight. Then he had no pulse. And still, it went on.”
“You get killed just for living in your American Skin.”
A lonely saxophone takes us to the outro of ‘American Skin (41 Shots)’ and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that it sounds like a lament. In it, I hear the echoes of Kadiatou Diallo crying for her son. But I also hear those cries morph into the rallying battle cry that sparked the movement that would later be known as Black Lives Matter.
We love Bruce Springsteen for his voice, which is the voice of the people, a kind of Pete Segers of his generation; we love his songs for giving that voice to those who have none, that tell the stories of the marginalised and under-priviledged, that were relevant when they were written and continue to be relevant for decades later; we hate them for the same reason, we hate that they’re relevant and we hate them for reminding us that they are.
When I first heard Bruce Springsteen sing I couldn’t make sense of the conflicting emotions I heard in his voice, the anguish and anger and fighting spirit and hope, all compressed into one gravelly battle cry; I get it now.