Many songwriters have a fixation with Americana, which shouldn’t be confused with America, the rich nation that runs everything.  America is a country, Americana is an existential concept filled with empty highways, waving fields of wheat, smoggy skylines of industrial decay, Graceland, wood-paneled taverns, and rustic characters who never have any money.  America is wealthy and powerful, Americana is struggling and underdog.  The Western world doesn’t really like America very much but it loves Americana, which is the real reason the nations of Europe have never invaded the US, for fear of breaking Elvis figurines.

 

Bruce Springsteen is as Americana as it gets, no matter that he’s rich enough to buy Madagascar, and nobody dons a wife-beater and poses unshaven for a photo better than he does.  The Boss has been a working-class hero for some thirty years now, curious when you consider how lousy he makes blue-collar life sound.  He’s spun countless stories about simple folks with complex problems, all of them involving a car, a job, and a girl name Mary (most girls in Springsteen songs are named Mary).  Downbeat themes have frequently been his template for songwriting and they work to varying degrees of success, "The River” not being one of them.  The song is the title track from his 1980 double album, a work that addresses loss of innocence, heartbreak, disillusionment, and so on, themes that one must drone on about in order to be considered an "artist”.  I know Boss fans are having a hemorrhage that I dare call him to task for writing this godawful depressing song but, frankly, I’d rather drag my scalp over a cheese grater than listen to it again.

 

"The River” begins with Bruce playing a twelve-string while mournfully wailing on a rack-mounted harmonica.  I’ve never understood the harmonica rack.  What mechanical De Sade invented that thing?  ("Attention, musicians: I have a device that allows you to play the harmonica even shittier than you already do!”)  It’s all very earnest and coffee house; you can practically see the "Open Mike Night” sign behind him.  The song is Springsteen’s 473rd first-person account about an unemployed dope with an unhappy wife (named Mary, of course).  In "The River,” we hear how a guy started dating Mary in high school, likely after going out with Mary Jane, Mary Ann, and Mary Lou.  As The E-Street Band kicks in at the chorus, the relevance of the river is introduced.  In their free time, he and Mary liked to go "down to the river” where they dived in, swam, frolicked, laughed, had sex, got pregnant, and ruined their lives.  With Mary preggers, the guy brings her over to the courthouse to get married so he can make an honest woman out of her.  For his nineteenth birthday, he sadly tells us how he received "a union card and a wedding coat.”  The scenario is revealing itself to be rather dreary, but then again, this is what he’s supposed to do.  See, where he lives, they bring you up "… to do like your daddy done.”  If this is true, then Asbury Park, New Jersey, has got a lot of explaining to do.  The chorus returns again, bringing the hapless young newlyweds back to the river where all their troubles started.  This time, all the splashing in the water isn’t nearly as much fun because Mary doesn’t look so hot in her swimsuit as she did before.

 

So now what?  What does the young Jersey misfit with no education and a new wife and baby do in this idyllic situation?  Naturally, he’s going to get stuck in a crappy job because no protagonist in a Springsteen song ever works anywhere cool.  In "The River,” he starts a construction job for the Johnstown Company, but soon gets laid off because he’s in a Springsteen song.  So now things that were important before (like not being married) are gone forever and he’s stuck at home on a cold Asbury Park morning with a screaming baby and a grouchy wife who cannot fathom why she agreed to let him nail her out on the banks of that stupid river a year earlier.

 

A musical bridge lets him reminisce about those swell times back at the river, when he and (sigh) Mary used to lie out by the reservoir where he could check out her pre-motherhood figure.  But now the river’s dry and he wonders "is a dream a lie if it don’t come true.”  Keep in mind this guy is, like, twenty now yet he’s feeling nostalgic for fourteen months earlier, a young and free time when … he wasn’t married with a kid.

 

Springsteen has written far better blue-collar anthems than "The River” over the years so why critics and fans hold this boring, depressing song in such high regard is beyond me.  It’s nothing more than the pathetic grumbling of a guy wearing a Cat Diesel baseball cap, denim workshirt, and wispy mustache who you had the misfortune of sitting next to at the bar.  He peaked when he was seventeen and it’s been all downhill since, something he’ll be more than happy to tell you about since you’re on the adjacent stool.  I know the chimp-simple lyrics are intentionally written that way to give a voice to a guy with limited education but are we really that interested?  Just once I’d love to hear Bruce sing about somebody getting plastered on Cristal and driving a Bentley into a swimming pool.

 

"The River” goes to a lot of trouble to tell us about two of the most uninteresting people to ever fail the rabbit test and end up getting hitched at city hall while simultaneously showing how much it bites to be a member of the working class.  It is not a deep, profound, and touching song by any means, nor is it even necessary.  Many of us went to school with kids like the hapless couple in Springsteen’s song and we kept them at a guarded distance back then.  "The River,” on the other hand, brings their dreary life story into our car radio time and again, so no matter how much you yell at the receiver, you’re still going to have to hear it.

 

Let’s face it, why would anybody want to star in a Springsteen song?  You’ll just end up unemployed with a resentful wife (named Mary), bratty kids, and a broken-down car while spending every waking day wondering how your life got so screwed up.  Evidently, nobody in Springsteen’s blue-collar hell ever gets promoted to manager or is able to afford a Lexus.  They instead exist in a proletarian hell where mortgages are foreclosed, transmissions leak, and wives have a "headache” every night.

 

It’s enough to make you want to go to college.  If Bruce will let you.