Legendary singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen has weighed in on the debate around whether or not musicians have a responsibility to speak out about politics and current affairs.
Speaking on the Home of the Brave podcast, The Boss — widely recognised as one of the world’s most impactful and emotive political songwriters — talked about freedom of expression, the state of America, and how artists can change the world.
“I’m not someone who necessarily believes every artist has to be political. I don’t think that’s so,” he said. “Elvis, James Brown, or Curtis Mayfield, you can make an argument that they changed the world as much as Woody Guthrie, just by what they exuded and what they performed.”
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Asked about what inspired his recent anti-ICE protest song Streets of Minneapolis, he said: “Anger, anger, anger at at what we at what is going on out there. You know, it’s an American tragedy, and I’ve written really about America for 50 years.”
Elaborating on the difficulty of penning verses that do justice to these kinds of tragedies, he added: “That doesn’t necessarily always translate into a song. You still got to get your craft together, and you got to make the art. You know, I’ve been angry about plenty of things I couldn’t write about before. In this particular case, I was able to write that song.”
He continued: “To me, music and politics… on some level, has always been intertwined because what is rock and roll or hip hop, you know, it’s an expression of freedom. That expression of freedom has implications: cultural implications, political implications, just by its nature. So, in my work, I’ve simply tried to follow those implications.”
