The biggest rock star in America today is Donald Trump, especially after his epic greatest hits set at the State of the Union; the only thing missing was the GOP singing along to his version of “Freebird” and holding up lighters. But there are some rockers trying to make a comeback as they tour the county fair circuit while opening for the political equivalent of a puppet show. Your dad is going to be excited to hear that U2 and Bruce Springsteen have returned with brand-new songs about… wait for it… what was happening in Minneapolis. Sounds promising! Some leftists choose to either run over a cop or get in a fight with a cop while they’re carrying a gun, and they get gacked and, suddenly, music fans of a certain age – 65+ – are in luck! These beloved troubadours, who started rocking about the same time Gerald Ford was pardoning Richard Nixon, are on the job, adding their powerful insights and making important new art!
Now, if you excuse me, I need to projectile vomit.
We often hear conservatives tell leftist artists to shut up and sing, and that offends the artists when it really shouldn’t. After all, we’re only looking out for them. Not because their stupid politics are going to turn us off. I can deal with their stupid politics – I’m a huge fan of The Clash, and they’re not exactly MAGA. What I can’t deal with is sucking. Their political songs are uniformly terrible. Shut up and sing, because when you artists start doing politics, you almost always look like idiots.
Oh, and your political songs are always bad. If they rocked, that would be one thing. But it’s another thing.
Take Bruce Springsteen, please, back to New Jersey and leave him there. This insufferable phony has been singing the same song for the last 50 years, with the only difference between iterations being that they get worse and worse over time. “Yeah, I’m out driving on the streets tonight, and there’s rain, and I got a car and a girl at my side, and I’m out on the streets, and oh yeah. Mmmmmm.”
Whatever, but his aging audience lapped this crap up for decades. Actual Springsteen fans are even more insufferable than Grateful Deadheads. They insist he’s got the greatest live shows in all of human history, and apparently, they last four hours. I’d rather be waterboarded. He’s done politics before. Remember “Born in the USA,” and how everyone was like “Yeah, USA, USA!” and he was all, “No, wait, it’s about how America sucks!” but The Tosser still pocketed the royalties he earned because no one bothered listening to his inane lyrics past the title?
Well, he’s got a new song out called “Streets of Minneapolis,” and, well, yikes:
"Oh our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis"
That’s just the chorus. It gets worse, much, much worse. It’s a hack cliché wrapped in a hack cliché and tied up with a bow that’s also a hack cliché. I do appreciate how he rhymed “mist” and “midst,” but my favorite part is the “our Minneapolis” part. Yeah, Bruce is a real Twin Cities resident, a man of the people. True story – I was on a cruise, and we put into Monte Carlo. They were having a dressage event there, you know, fancy rich people riding horses? Springsteen‘s daughter was one of them. Lots of working-class heroes have daughters competing on their stallions in Monte Carlo. Hard to believe she’s not driving out on the streets tonight, in the rain with her boyfriend, and trying to make it in a world of broken hearts and broken dreams. Oh yeah. Mmmmmm.
Well, U2 took one look at the Boss and decided they weren’t going to get left behind in this race to humiliation. Now, the difference between Springsteen and U2 is that U2 was once good, or at least OK, you know, back when Reagan was president. I saw them twice during college. They were definitely in my Top 50 concerts during college, and, coincidentally, I saw about 50 concerts during college. By the way, the best concert I saw during college was The Replacements as part of their legendary 1986 tour, and their idiot bassist would later get mad at me on Twitter over politics. Shut up and strum, Tommy!
Anyway, Bono imagines himself to be a white savior of people from the Third World, so naturally, when stuff went down in Minneapolis, he felt compelled to join in with the other pretentious white saviors who were already there hassling the working-class heroes of ICE for deporting invaders from the Third World. If your last memory of U2 is “The Unforgettable Fire” or “The Joshua Tree,” I regret to inform you that time has taken its toll. Here are some lines from their new anthem, “American Obituary,” and you may want to have a bucket handy.
Renee Good born to die free
American mother of three
Seventh day January
A bullet for each child, you see
The color of her eye
930 Minneapolis
To desecrate domestic bliss
Three bullets blast, three babies kissed
Renee the domestic terrorist???
What you can’t kill can't die
America will rise
Against the people of the lie
Oh dear. Perhaps the most troubling part is that Bono wrote these lyrics on purpose.
Why do artists insist on weighing in on political discussions in the most embarrassing way possible? Well, because they are artists. You need to understand that many of these artists are crazy. A lot of them are also stupid. It’s not that most of them didn’t get a lot of formal education – in fact, attendance at the University of College in these troubled times is more likely to indicate that you’re a quarter-wit rather than a genius. It’s that artistic temperament correlates, in many cases, with being neurotic. They are generally unstable, unsure, always doubting themselves, and always terrified of what others think. And one of the ways that they try to mitigate this fear is by figuring out what the consensus in their little social circle is and taking the lead in demonstrating their unabashed, total, unthinking obedience to it. You can be sure that every single person Bruce Springsteen or Bono encounters in a day is going to tell them that their sentiments are genius. But they’re not geniuses. They’re stupid.
Not all artists are like this. A significant number of them are pretty normal and resist the temptation to ideologically prostitute themselves by bringing their money back to their political pimps at the end of the night. The late Robert Duvall was probably conservative, judging from some of the things he did, but he didn’t need to tell you that because he didn’t care what you thought. Further, it would have gotten in the way of his work, which was incredible.
Conservatism’s own Nick Searcy went in another direction, confronting the stupid people in his industry, but that was after he came under attack. I’ve hung out with Nick, and I guarantee he doesn’t care what anybody else thinks. He doesn’t need to prove anything. And if you really want to be entertained about this stuff, just ask Townhall’s own Larry O’Connor about his years in the legitimate theater. Be sure you mention how much you loved and respected Val Kilmer.
Larry would agree that the key factor in all of these public political posturing performances is the innate neediness of most artists. They need the attention, and they need the validation, and they get it by doing exactly what they think the audience wants. Of course, the audience we’re talking about is the hangers-on, clingers, and parasites surrounding them. It’s not people out there in America. This is true from the A-list superstars (“Oh boy, Harrison Ford has an opinion!”) to the guy waiting tables at Canter’s Deli by day and trying to talk his way into five minutes on stage at an open mic at night. During the years I was doing stand-up comedy, I hung around a lot of comics, and I liked them. They were fun to be around. Their lives were in complete chaos. They were absolutely unfit to function in society. I was a marvel to them because I held down a real job and a marriage, and I never forgot to pay the rent or got a DUI after gobbling mushrooms or lost my shoe or did any of the other kinds of things they did. They were a lot of fun. They, and most artists, just never need to be in a position where they have any authority over anything, nor should anybody they would elect to such a position actually hold such a position.
So shut up and sing, but not crappy songs about dead communists.
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