New frontiers in textual interpretation
One of the first albums I remember ever dancing to is Born in the USA. (By "dancing," I mean "running around the living room and trying not to jump so hard the needle skipped.") One of the first CDs my parents ever bought, when they were making the transition from vinyl, was Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band Live: 1975-1985. This means I have been listening to performances of "Atlantic City" for nearly thirty years, and for nearly thirty years I have been hearing
Everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
and thinking, I love that melody, but the lyrics are all wrong, death means things don't come back. And for a lot less than that time, I have also been thinking, This is a weirdly optimistic refrain for a song on Nebraska -- which, for those of you not up on Springsteen, is one of the bleakest, most hopeless albums in the history of rock music. It is full of emotional and economic depression and people who have only bad choices and tend to make the worst of them.
And it only just occurred to me that the song is about going to Atlantic City, which is to say, it is about gambling, and the entire point of the chorus is that it is completely self-delusional. "Maybe everything that dies some day comes back" is the false hope of a man who goes out gambling to avoid thinking about "the kind of debts no honest man can pay," and who, if you actually pay attention to the rest of the song, is so despairing of finding honest work that he just signed up as a Mob enforcer.
What, the melody is energetic, it misdirected me, okay.
cups brewed at DW
Everything dies, baby, that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
and thinking, I love that melody, but the lyrics are all wrong, death means things don't come back. And for a lot less than that time, I have also been thinking, This is a weirdly optimistic refrain for a song on Nebraska -- which, for those of you not up on Springsteen, is one of the bleakest, most hopeless albums in the history of rock music. It is full of emotional and economic depression and people who have only bad choices and tend to make the worst of them.
And it only just occurred to me that the song is about going to Atlantic City, which is to say, it is about gambling, and the entire point of the chorus is that it is completely self-delusional. "Maybe everything that dies some day comes back" is the false hope of a man who goes out gambling to avoid thinking about "the kind of debts no honest man can pay," and who, if you actually pay attention to the rest of the song, is so despairing of finding honest work that he just signed up as a Mob enforcer.
What, the melody is energetic, it misdirected me, okay.
cups brewed at DW