Springsteen crosses over into Mexico

In an America awash with leering cruelty, Inyo, a beautiful record by an extraordinary musician, is finally heard after two decades in the vault

- Richard Pithouse

In May, Donald Trump took a break from attacking South Africa on X to lash out at Bruce Springsteen, calling him “highly overrated”, “dumb as a rock”, “a dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker” and “a pushy, obnoxious JERK”.

He followed the tirade with a crude video showing himself, in a Make America Great Again cap, hitting a golf ball that hurtles off a fairway and knocks Springsteen down on stage.

Although younger artists such as Jason Isbell and Sam Fender both influenced by Springsteen continue to make compelling rock music, it's been a long time since rock held the kind of cultural power it once had in the United States. But Springsteen's vision of a generous, inclusive America, an America in which “the losers” are given deeply empathetic attention, still carries enough moral weight to threaten Trump’s narcissism as fragile as it is massive.

The four great records Springsteen released between 1975 and 1982 Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River, and Nebraska chart an arc from youthful passion and rebellion, a longing for escape, preferably driving into the night in a Mustang, to a gritty and often mournful reckoning with lives sinking into crisis.

This sequence comes to a head in the stripped-down sonic palette of Nebraska, an elegiac rendering of the underside of Reagan's America. The record reaches deep into economic desperation, unemployment, violence, moral ambiguity and the quiet ruin of domestic life through intimate portraits of people pushed to the edge. It is a desolate, haunting work, its emotional tenor distilled into the eerie, elemental howl at the end of State Trooper.