I’m in no position to complain about it, but I don’t like it when my heroes do commercials. I didn’t like it when Bob Dylan did a Chrysler ad during the Super Bowl in 2014 and I didn’t like that Bruce Springsteen did an ad for Jeep during the Super Bowl on Sunday. In both cases, it was a dramatic shift away from their reputations for anti-commercialism.
The ad is inspiring, to be sure, but also certain to raise eyebrows. Springsteen is not known for taking part in commercials. Indeed, the only example one Springsteen expert could find is of the artist jokingly reading a promotion for wine while visiting Philadelphia radio station WMMR in 1974 before his landmark album, “Born To Run,” became a cultural phenomenon. “Since that moment, I don’t think he’s ever endorsed a commercial or a product,” says Louis Masur, a professor of American studies and history at New Jersey’s Rutgers University who teaches a course called “Springsteen’s American Vision.”
In Springsteen’s case, it appears that he simply liked the message. Olivier Francois, the chief marketing officer of Stellantis, the new conglomerate that owns Jeep, had been pursuing The Boss to do a commercial for a decade. Springsteen only relented in this case because he saw the ad as “a prayer.”
That might seem far-fetched until you watch it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2XYH-IEvhI
The musician known as “The Boss” will command two minutes of commercial time in Super Bowl LV Sunday night, all part of a mammoth Jeep ad meant to reflect a national mood of coming together after four years of politics and polarization…
…The commercial is designed to spur viewers to mend the various rifts that have erupted in the nation in recent years. “We just have to remember the very soil we stand on is common ground,” Springsteen says as he holds forth from a small chapel in Lebanon, Kansas, with his own 1980 Jeep CJ-5 in the picture. He adds: “Our light has always found its way through the darkness. And there’s hope up on the road ahead.” The ad ends with the tagline, “To The ReUnited States of America.”
The message is pure Bruce, and some of the complaints show an obvious lack of familiarity with his work. For example, Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist, finds it a bit phony that an artist “who is extremely well known for being from New Jersey” is “wearing a cowboy hat and boots.” I’d refer her to Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad to disabuse her of the idea that Springsteen limits himself to songs about the Jersey Shore. It’s also notable that he lives on a 400-acre horse farm in Colts Neck, which is about the most stereotypically Republican thing you can do in the Garden State.
But Hemingway is correct when she says that Springsteen is no fan of Republicans. His long record of supporting Democrats certainly makes it a challenge for him to be an effective messenger for national unity. On the other hand, it’s significant that he’s making an explicit case for finding common ground and meeting in the middle. My wife had a negative reaction to this message precisely because we just witnessed a white nationalist coup attempt a month ago and it seems a little too soon to be talking about reconciliation. How about some accountability first?
Hemingway recoiled for a different reason. For her, the conceit of the ad is “when Republicans win a national election, that’s divisive, but when Democrats win one, that’s unifying.” And, it’s true, the ad ends with the “To The ReUnited States of America” tagline, which clearly implies that Joe Biden’s presidency is the agent of reunification. Obviously, the division occurred during the presidency of Biden’s predecessor.
Clearly, the corporate world sees things much like my wife does, and not at all from Hemingway’s perspective. Trump’s presidency and particularly the January 6 insurrection have created deep wounds that need mending. That precludes any view that Trump was a good or unifying leader. Yet, even if you liked Trump’s style and agreed with his policies, the insurrection should compel you to concede that our divisions reached a dangerous point.
In the end, this ad is about selling Jeeps, even if that probably has nothing to do with why Springsteen agreed to participate. Some people are not going to react by buying a Jeep. Some people will be less inclined to buy a Jeep. No advertisement has universal appeal.
In this case, Jeep went with an explicitly anti-Trump pitch so Trump supporters are going to complain. But if you listen to Springsteen’s message, it’s an olive branch to the other side. Maybe they don’t deserve an olive branch, at least not yet. Maybe the olive branch won’t be received in the spirit in which is was offered.
For me, this is really just Bruce being Bruce. I just wish he could have had two minutes during the Super Bowl to make his case without it being about selling Jeeps, but I guess that’s just not how things work.
I admire what Springsteen is trying to do here, but I’m on the side of accountability first and reconciliation later.
“when Republicans win a national election, that’s divisive, but when Democrats win one, that’s unifying.”
I know I don’t need to belabor the point here, but there’s an objective reason for this: when Republicans win a national election they almost never get as many votes as Democrats. In a democracy it is inherently divisive to have the side with fewer votes win.
this is true, but it’s also true that Democrats accept losses with more dignitude.
Yeah, I have to agree. It was Bruce being Bruce, which is an awesome thing, but in the context of selling a car it diminishes the impact of those fine words. But, as you say, maybe in our Crocodile Capitalism moment that’s the way you have to get a message out. I agree that accountability comes before reconciliation, but I am not holding my breath that the Republicans would agree to anything as foundational as truth.
Springsteen did his best work on his first two albums. I hated the “Boss” persona he adopted in the 1980s. And why is a working-class hero called “the Boss”?
In my opinion, his best album is his fourth (Darkness from the Edge of Town) from 1978, and after that it’s a tie between Wrecking Ball (2012) and Born to Run (1975), his third album.
Should read: Darkness On the Edge of Town.
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Oops. Tried to delete a comment. Apparently that’s not a thing.
I love Bruce, but right now the whole unity thing is just not front and center for me, or for a whole hell of a lot of other people. I have said over and over, until I am blue in the face, that there is only one sequence of events that works here. It is:
(1) Accountability
(2) Justice
(3) Reconciliation
And this sequence is most certainly not a guarantee of success. We simply cannot have unity until there is accounting of what took place, and adjudication and punishment for those who tried to permanently destroy democracy in this country. If we don’t do those things, then we are just resetting the clock for some undetermined time in the future when democracy in this country will fall to fascism. After that, we will never recover or restore what existed for multiple centuries. The Great American Experiment will have died, and all we will be able to do is see what comes after it, and work to adjust accordingly. We will not be able to rebuild the original model. It will be permanently broken and irretrievably gone to history, like so many dynasties over the history of mankind.
It is a wonderful ad with a great message. I don’t mind that a Jeep was featured in many of the shots, because the visuals were really good. The music – fantastic. The ad-copy (if you want to call it that), superb.
But (and there is always a “but”), talking about finding common ground is great, but how do I find common ground with people (republicans) who belong to a political party who wants me to die? Literally die. I am living with cancer, and the persistent republican attacks on the ACA (including the provision precluding denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions) are a direct threat to me, personally. How do I find common ground with that?
I have learned as I have aged that some things are non-negotiable. The republican party has morphed into this “thing” that at its center involves a whole hosts of “ideas” that are non-negotiable for me.
Common ground is great, but it will not happen if there cannot first be common agreement on the basic facts that we are looking at. The most obvious one is climate change. Racial equality and racial justice are high on the list too. Democrats and republicans are no longer working with a common set of facts. And I don’t know how to change that when very powerful and well-funded forces find it to their advantage to keep it that way.
Good post, Martin, as usual. Thanks for providing a space where we can vent from time to time.
I despise commercials like this. Where some multinational creates a paean to a great cause and tries to capture and appropriate its idealism. Such complete hypocrisy. As for Springstein, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and consider him snookered. I don’t like the alternate interpretation that he finally sold out, though I guess it’s his right. How many of the guys who played in Sunday’s game sell their names? In any event, I can’t anyone’s heart so I believe in assuming a benign motivation whenever plausible.
Lebanon, Kansas (pop. 218) is in Smith County, which is 96.1% white and has a median age ten years older than the US as a whole. The county population is 3603 (5 people per sq mi) and has been falling since 1900, when it was 16,000.
The tiny chapel is just a roadside attraction and has no congregation.
In 2020, Smith County voted 1729 Trump/Pence, 326 Biden/Harris.
This place is not the middle of anything. It’s not a place to come together. It’s the failed past, a place that young people leave and never return to, a place so far out on the right wing of America that it’s about to fall off.
Other than the meaningless coincidence that Lebanon is the “geographic center” of the lower 48 (Alaska and Hawaii don’t count?), this failed, hollowed-out farming community has literally nothing to offer as guidance to the country in the 21st century.
What is it with this nostalgia for the clapped-out past? It’s as phony as the chapel. And it’s harmful because it gets in the way of the changes we really need. Kind of like Jeeps do.
Don’t worry about cowboy hats. I’m a proud cowboy hat wearer and have nothing to do with conservatism or the Republican Party. Wearing a cowboy hat doesn’t mean you’re all-in on the R nonsense.
That sucks. What a bummer. Glad I don’t watch sports much so I didn’t see it in real time. That would have ruined my day.