Bruce Springsteen
Darkness on the edge of town

THE REVIEW

Springsteen's poetic theme of escape and redemption from the everyday mediocrity of any desolate American province found its definitive expression in ‘Born to Run’: from then on, the Boss became the ‘hero of the road’ for all those people for whom a ‘Thunder Road’ seemed to have ripped a piece of their own life, lost as in Bruce’s lyrics between sweet dreams and bitter realities.

It is precisely with these latter realities that ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ is populated, almost an awakening by the author to the idea that the journey to adulthood corresponds to an inevitable and painful loss of innocence spawned by merciless ‘Badlands’ that it would be better to escape from forever, but which not everyone has the courage to leave. And perhaps, those who try still seek a promised land (‘The Promised Land’) to believe in, even though Mary has learned over the years that paradise doesn’t exist, while still carrying with her the liberating and aware scream of ‘Adam Raised a Cain’; where the words ‘choked’ in the throat of our protagonist and the angry guitar riff make clear a certain autobiographical discomfort and the disillusionment present in the entire album – reflective of the marked optimism and will of his previous 1975 work.

The celebration of the night as the keeper of myths and memories of a faded adolescence returns in ‘Something in the Night’, in what will remain forever closed in ‘Candy’s Room’, in the ‘Streets of Fire’, a dark refuge of a directionless loser, now annihilated by too many swallowed lies and the invitation to face a reality that also means defeat, in the price to pay for ‘a gold ring and a pretty blue dress’ of ‘Prove it All Night’ (‘You hear the voices telling you not to go, they made their choices and they’ll never know what it means to steal, to cheat, to lie – what it