10 songs by Bruce Springsteen for the workers' party

Bruce Springsteen told the working class like few others. He is the son of a worker, he grew up in the suburbs where the American dream was more promised than reality, he transformed that experience into music without ever expanding into qualunquismo. In the world of Springsteen every little hero, every disillusionment, every day of work matters. In a time when we forget the dignity of daily fatigue, his songs sound more true than ever. They are not nostalgic hymns, they are warnings, requests for justice, songs of resistance. Because as he says, nobody wins if we don't all win.

On the occasion of the workers' party, here are 10 essential songs of the boss who told, better than a thousand speeches, the dignity, effort and pride of working class. Good May 1st to everyone.

“At the end of the day, the siren of the factory whistles, men cross the gates with death in the heart”. If we had to choose a single song to photograph the silent effort of the workers, this would be this. In less than two and a half minutes, Springsteen tells his father Douglas who gets up every morning at dawn to go to work in the factory. A dry portrait, painful and full of love. No rhetoric, only reality.

“I made you so rich that I forget my name.” One of Springsteen's hardest and political songs, Youngstown It tells the story of a city in Ohio who gave blood and steel to the United States, and then be abandoned when he no longer needed. An elegia for sacrificed workers on the altar of deindustrialization, pure worker anger in the form of a folk ballad.

“If a dream does not come true, is it a lie or worse?”. One of Springsteen's most devastating ballads, a very bitter story of broken dreams: a young man who gets married too early, finds a modest job, loses him. Young loves that touch under the weight of unemployment, dreams that sink like stones in a river that becomes a metaphor for hopes that slip away. A ballad symbol of the difficulties of the American working class of the 70s.

“The judge got angry and immediately slammed me into jail, I wake up every morning with the sound of the work bell.” Under the rockabilly surface and the light -hearted rhythm, this song hides a bitter and dramatic story: the protagonist ends up working on a road after being arrested. Forced work, tragic irony, broken dreams. As always, Springsteen knows how to mix apparent joy and real despair.

In Nebraska Bruce strips everything, armed only with voice, guitar and raw realism. Johnny 99 It is the story of a worker fired by the factory that, desperate, performs a murder during a robbery. It tells of how the loss of work can disintegrate the life of a man in an America where despair is one step away from crime. It is not a justification, it is a photograph: when you remove everything to a person, sometimes even humanity breaks.

“I work five days a week, I load the coffers down to the pier, I take the wage earned hard and I see myself with the girl in the neighborhood”. If many Springsteen songs speak of the hardness of the work, Out in the Street Celebrate the moment of liberation: the exit from the factory, the encounter with friends, the beginning of the real life after the turn. Despite everything, the boy still manages to find joy in the community, in love, in the temporary freedom of the road. A simple, but full of heart celebration.

Here Springsteen sings of the slow agony of an American citizen – his Freehold, New Jersey – devastated by the economic crisis and racial tensions. Despite everything, the protagonist remains attached to his roots, trying to transmit the memory and pride to his son to belong to a place. As always, Bruce's gaze is ambivalent: on the one hand the sadness for the economic and social decline, on the other the visceral attachment to his city of origin.

The Ghost of Tom Joad It is perhaps the song that most of all Springsteen Lega to the tradition of Woody Guthrie and the Hobo of the Great Depression. Tom Joad, the protagonist of Fury of Steinbeck, here becomes the eternal symbol of the poor and oppressed. A song that speaks of those who fight in the shadows, who has no voice, but does not want to surrender. Springsteen masterfully describes the spirituality of work and survival with a secular prayer for those who remain invisible in society: workers, migrants, poor. “Where there is someone who struggles for freedom, look at him in the eyes and you will see me.”

A ferocious song on a family of unemployed who wanders from the city in the city in search of work. The sound and the raw text show the brutal impact of deindustrialisation on people's lives, without filters or illusory hopes. «We were in the first part of our American tour. We were down in Houston, Texas and there were a lot of people who had moved south in search of work on oil platforms. When they arrived there, the oil price collapsed and began to fire them. You saw them sleep at night at the edges of the roads, in their cars or in curtains, without a place to go, without anything to do, if not continue to move ».

“I had a job, he had a girl, I had something to do in this world. They fired me down to the timber deposit, our love ended badly, the times were tough.” A man loses his job and, together with it, the love and meaning of his own life. Springsteen masterfully tells the psychological collapse that accompanies the loss of economic stability, with devastating simplicity. The train is a powerful metaphor, a means that goes downhill without brakes, a life that falls without the protagonist being able to stop it.