COLTS NECK TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Legendary musician Bruce Springsteen recently admitted that he made up the “American working class” during a creative dry spell.
“By ‘78, I had hit a wall with my songwriting,” said an entirely denim-clad Springsteen. “‘Blinded by the Light’ hadn’t charted. Hell, ‘Born to Run’ couldn’t even crack the top twenty. I had completely lost confidence in myself and was just throwing out ideas to the guys in the band. I pitched ‘a place where animals can talk and it’s always Winter,’ but Max Weinberg told me that was just Narnia. I tried writing this epic eight-minute ballad about how Belgians were all illiterate, and that upset Clarence Clemmons so much he almost quit. Then I just said ‘working…class…Americans,’ and the room changed. It was electric.”
Springsteen’s longtime manager Jon Landau heaped praise on his client.
“Bruce is a visionary,” Landau said. “No one but him could have come up with the idea of some mythical social caste of Americans who earn wages via labor, but are able to afford mortgages, car payments and the basic necessities of modern life. Frankly, I was blown away by even the concept of it. The man was basically writing science fiction, but in a way that connected with audiences who were hungry for concerts that last so long you can get fucking blasted and still leave sober.”
“He’s a genius and if you need proof, check out my house in Malibu,” Landau added.
Sociologist Brandon McCarthy viewed the musician’s work as a kind of magical thinking.
“Springsteen’s imagination was so powerful that it nearly created reality,” McCarthy explained. “Not an actual one, of course. America could never and would never support its own workers with a lifestyle remotely sustainable or humane, but songs like ‘The Promised Land’ and ‘The River’ built a kind of cultural shadow-memory that such a thing had ever existed and was remotely possible. Truly, the power of art is nearly limitless. Of course, it is very limited, but you know what I mean.”
As of press time, Springsteen was explaining how he came up with the idea of “New Jersey” after getting wasted in “a shitty part” of Delaware.