In recent years scholarship on the music, performance and place of Bruce Springsteen in the history of American rock music has gathered pace. There are numerous biographies, analytical monographs, articles, an occasional academic conference and a journal devoted to Springsteen studies. Springsteen himself continues to have commercial success and maintains a regular touring schedule, attracting thousands of devoted fans to the stadia and arenas of North America, Europe and Australasia. As well as writing, recording and performing, Springsteen has been politically active in supporting a number of progressive causes at home and abroad and publicly endorsed the Democrats in the US presidential elections of 2004, 2008 and 2012. His songs have explored the personal politics of relationships and how they are both strengthened and undermined by external economic pressures. This book attempts to place Springsteen and his career in historical context, mapping his development as an artist against the backdrop of the shifting economic and social structure of the USA. This approach is a complemented by a close reading of the characters, themes and narratives of particular songs and how they reflected and challenged notions of the ‘American dream’, conceptions of masculinity, religious belief, social identities and particular forms of political organisation and power.

The first three chapters provide an overview of American history since the 1950s, Springsteen's working-class background in New Jersey, the musical genres that shaped his identity and how such factors shaped the sonic and lyrical content of his recordings and performances. The 1970s are unsurprisingly characterised as the crucial decade in which the optimism of the 1960s was shattered by rising unemployment, deindustrialisation, social conflict and the fading of the mythology of the American dream. Yet within Springsteen's music, among the perceived bleakness of small-town America that is depicted on albums such as Born to Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), there is a sense of hope, redemption, transcendence and the resilience of working-class spirit. The historical narrative and the reading of Springsteen's songs does not always mesh, but the analysis of class, economic crisis and its impact on the characters that Springsteen creates is explored with nuance and sophistication. Here we find Springsteen reacting to social crisis and speaking for the poor, the alienated and the dispossessed. This process is evident in songs on The River (1980), and reaches its apogee on Nebraska (1982). The album is read as being ‘as desperate from start to finish as the lives of many of the people who bought it’ (p. 57). Familiar tropes, imagery, situations and narratives reappear on every Springsteen album that follows: the mixture of politics and pop on Born in the USA (1985) through to his updated and contemporary reading of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath on The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and Wrecking Ball (2012).

The second half of the book is more ambitious in setting Springsteen's music against contested conceptions of masculinity, patriotism, social justice and American political culture. The rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and the impact of depression on industrial sectors of the economy meant that some men ‘lost direction’ and could only define themselves through ‘the patriarchal structures of the past’ (p. 74). The males that populate songs such ‘The River’, ‘The Promised Land’, ‘Darkness of the Edge of Town’, ‘Tougher than the Rest’ and ‘Youngstown’ are white, working-class and described by the author as ‘patriarchal yet egalitarian … traditional yet progressive’ (p. 86). The patriotism that has been misinterpreted by others in songs such as ‘Born in the USA’ and ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ draws on the industrial struggles of the interwar labour movement, civil rights protests of the 1960s and the new-left politics that underpinned the progressive pressure groups of the 1970s. Although it is never made explicit, Springsteen is defined as a New Deal Democrat and a supporter of European forms of social democracy, union representation in the workplace, redistribution of wealth and socialised health care. Since the late 1970s he has become increasingly vocal in his political positions: campaigning against nuclear weapons and police brutality; supporting striking miners; and critiquing the treatment of African Americans and Mexican migrants. The America that Springsteen constructs through song and imagery is one built on the struggles of the past, the spirit of solidarity and hope for the future enshrined in his ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’.

Attempting to write music into the fabric of social and political change is a difficult task. Context, intentionality, causality, autonomy and connection raise complex questions in terms of the performer's role in reflecting or determining identities, trends, politics and events. Deardorff makes a decent attempt to do this, but the result is not always convincing. Many of the episodes that punctuate the chronological narrative have been contested and revised by historians, but the author tends to accept conventional orthodoxies. The text also assumes that the songs were received and decoded by consumers in a particular way, but there is little evidence provided through documentary evidence or oral testimony. Springsteen clearly engages with the experiences of the working class, yet his failure to attract an African American audience is not considered. Some chapters also suffer from repetition, with cross-referencing of particular songs such as ‘Rosalita’, ‘The River’ and ‘We Are Alive’. There is also a tendency to see Springsteen as an antidote to ‘an entertainment culture that functions to “drug” Americans into a kind of distracted amnesia’ (p. 110). Yet some critics of ‘corporate rock’ would see Springsteen as part of this problem. The majority of his fans surely consume his product and performances in the same way as others would engage with less celebrated artists. Similarly, Springsteen concerts are presented as having a ‘spiritual function’ for the audience. Again, this could be the case for some fans, but for others it is probably just another great rock ‘n’ roll show.

The book is a worthy addition to the literature on the relationship between rock music, social change and political protest. It makes a convincing case for the importance of Springsteen in articulating a progressive political agenda through his music and reflecting the personal and collective struggles of the American working class. It will take further studies to confirm whether Springsteen's artistry can be linked to a shift in voting alignments and political and social identities.