poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king
In support of taking it four minutes at a time
Last week I started watching Pretend It’s A City—the Fran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese documentary mini-series on Lebowitz’s life in New York. In it, she states that she knew only one writer (spoiler: it was Toni Morrison) who was both great at what they did (writing) and who also enjoyed doing what they did (writing) on a regular basis. As you can imagine, this made my day.
In this curfewed world of brisk walks and Bailey’s coffees, I had begun to worry that my scatter-gun approach to writing on this here Substack was a tell-tale sign that I simply wasn’t cut out to make it in the cut-throat world of digital storytelling. I feared that I didn’t have the discipline or intellectual curiosity needed to succeed as a viral essayist (a what?!) in 2021, and at my lowest ebb, I even worried that I may be little more than a fraud to this most revered of art forms. Thankfully, with Fran’s words of wisdom reverberating deep within me, I have been able to shed this momentary sense of uncertainty and stride forward safe in the knowledge that when it comes to the perils of procrastination, laziness and self-doubt, I’m in good company. But enough about that.
As with the previous stories that I’ve written here, you won’t be surprised to learn that this latest installment of Tales for the Algorithm Generation also centres around the music that I have been listening to while walking around the frozen tundra of a city that I call home. During the past few weeks, Bruce Springsteen’s Badlands has featured a lot and I’m pretty sure it’s now my favourite song. I don’t say that lightly. After all, I’m acutely aware that Lay All Your Love on Me, E-bow The Letter and Y Control all exist and could rightfully be put out by such a statement, but I stand by it—at least right now, with the pandemic and the snow and the curfew.
I’ve been listening to it on the two-inch cubed speaker that I borrowed from my sister six years ago while my vintage record player sits idly be wondering what it’s done to offend me. I’ve been listening to it on my $25 Sony headphones while buying milk and toilet paper before the 8 PM nightly lockdown. I’ve been listening to it while concocting scenarios in my head where I was living in New York in 1974 during one of those freezing but sunny winter days that Irish people only know about from TV shows. I’ve even been listening to it as I struggle to berate my French-speaking neighbours for not wearing a mask in the lift of our building. En bref, a lot of listening.
On their own, the lyrics of Badlands are sufficiently superb to justify my recent fascination with them. From the perfect, if unintentionally poignant, opening line “lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland” to the subtle nod to Elvis in the second verse “poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king”, the song is stacked with the seemingly simple words that have come to define Springsteen’s writing.
Not only do they effortlessly conjure up the sights and sounds of what I imagine New York City to have been like in 1977 (with the black-out and the corruption and the rats), they also feel more relatable than ever when paired with the existential crisis currently engulfing the United States. However, despite the prescience of the lyrics on Badlands, it’s the song’s music that has had me hitting repeat over and over again.
From the opening drum roll that I’m pretty sure Best Coast ripped off on Boyfriend (right?) to Clarence Clemons’ sumptuous sax solo that leaves you wanting more (and more), Badlands is incessant and unrelenting. It doesn’t request your attention, it demands it, and ultimately, isn’t that what we all want from a pop song?
You may be aware that some songs are Verse Songs (John Lennon’s #9 Dream or I’m A Cuckoo by Belle and Sebastian, for example) while other songs are Chorus Songs (say Gigantic by Pixies or Weezer’s Say it Ain’t So). What makes Badlands different is that it resides in the rarefied air of being both a Verse Song and a Chorus Song, with a killer pre-chorus to boot.
To me, Badlands feels like the perfect can of coke or a really good chicken sandwich with too much salt and butter; it feels like walking down Parc in April when the snow’s melting and you’re four beers deep; it feels like the type of person you might have been if you had been a teenager on the Lower East Side in the early seventies and didn’t care about cancer or the Internet.
In a world that is increasingly being measured in four-year election cycles, five-month winters and two-week quarantines, Badlands is four minutes of unadulterated bliss. That’s enough for me, for now at least.