Streets of Minneapolis

Bruce Springsteen’s Oscar-winning theme for “Streets of Philadelphia” (1993) was so memorable because it was a hymn for America as the opening credits montage that director Jonathan Demme laid out under it evoked. Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” on the other hand, written, recorded, and released in the span of the last five days, is not a hymn. When the band comes in, it reminds me of something off his 2012 record “Wrecking Ball,” which was a protest album, and “Streets of Minneapolis” is a full-throated protest song, though without even a hint of nuance or subtext. Now, there is a school of thought that protest music is better without a flagrant message, without “lyrics that are afraid to admit to the element of uncertainty and unpredictability that gives art,” as the esteemed Greil Marcus has written, “the tension that opens up the senses.” That’s what Springsteen did in another protest song, 2001’s “American Skin (41 Shots).” A reaction to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, Springsteen utilized multiple viewpoints and invoked empathy for all involved, allowing for just the sort of tension to which Marcus refers, so much so that “American Skin (41 Shots)” was inevitably misread like “Born in the U.S.A.” two decades before it. And in the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, whose names he uses in “Streets of Minneapolis” rather than changing them as he did with Diallo’s, Springsteen decided such tension would not be an effective tool. Though he occasionally editorializes, like calling the President a King, for the most part, in the manner of Minnesota’s own Hüsker Dü once filing an objection with the state of the nation by imploring us to, simply, “Turn on the News,” I hear Springsteen turning on the news and, simply, writing about what he sees unfolding on the streets of Minneapolis. There is no uncertainty in the streets of Minneapolis, no real tension between what is happening and what the administration wants you to believe is happening, not even if White House Spokesperson Abigail Jackson predictably deemed it a song with “inaccurate information.” Indeed, that only goes to show that sometimes protest music has no choice but to tell it exactly how it fucking is.