Jersey governor
Rex Ryan Chris Christie loves the Bruce The Boss Springsteen,
who doesn't care much for him:
...it strikes me that this is the moment to ask the governor a trick question: “Do you think Mitt Romney could relate to this? To a Bruce Springsteen show?”
He looks at me like I’m from France. “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” he screams over the noise of the crowd, and then screams it again, to make sure I understand: “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!”
Springsteen turns to a song from the new album. Christie wanders back into the crowded suite, stopping to dance with his wife. I think about what he said: no one is beyond the reach of Bruce. There is something odd about this assertion, beyond the obvious, which is that there are, in fact, people who don’t like Springsteen, who find his singing akin to hog-calling; others find his Tribune of the Downtrodden persona a bit of a pose. But what is strange about this statement is that it is an inversion of a central, dispiriting truth of Christie’s life: Bruce Springsteen is beyond his reach.
1 comment:
Great article. I liked this:
Christie calls over to his brother, Todd—who made his money as a Wall Street trader—and says, “Attention please, it’s a lecture. Lecture time.” Springsteen begins to mumble in what the music critic Jody Rosen calls his “flat Dust Bowl Okie accent,” and I can’t make out a word he’s saying. I ask Christie if he understands him.
“You want to know what he’s saying?,” Christie asks. “He’s telling us that rich people like him are fucking over poor people like us in the audience, except that us in the audience aren’t poor, because we can afford to pay 98 bucks to him to see his show. That’s what he’s saying.”
Wait a second, this is Bruce Springsteen we’re talking about, the guy you adore?
“I compartmentalize,” Christie says.
He told me once that he accepts Springsteen’s “limousine liberal” politics the way a spouse accepts an annoying tic in her partner. “There is some of his work that is dour and down,” he says, “but the thing that attracted me to his music is how aspirational it is—aspirational to success, to fun, to being a better person, to figuring out how to make your life better—and you can’t say that about most people’s music. They become successful and then they become self-consumed and then boring and narcissistic.”
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