The Bruce Jeep commercial

The presumptive core of his persona oozes from it

Weigh-ins on the Super Bowl night “ReUnited States of America” Jeep commercial have ranged from “what’s with the choice of a flaming leftie to be the spokesperson for an effort to reunite the country?” to “Quit reading so much into it. It was just an inspiring and uplifting little message.”

Those in the former camp tend to have Trumpist leanings to some degree, as evidenced by their mentioning of all the times over the last five years that Springsteen has made clear his views of the Very Stable Genius, perhaps most explicitly when he said he’d be on the next plane to Australia if Trump won re-election.

Jeep had actually been after Springsteen since 2011 to do a Super Bowl commercial. The late Sergio Marchionne, who was Jeep’s CEO until his passing in 2018, had a thing for landing pop-culture icons, and had succeeded in getting some, ranging from Bob Dylan to Eminem to Clint Eastwood, over the years. Still, he couldn’t get Bruce’s manager, Jon Landau, to ink a deal.

His successor finally did. It seems that the concept - the chapel in Kansas, the stark weather, the emphasis on the notion of meeting in the middle - was what sold Landau.

Springsteen actually started out shying away from overt political pronouncements and causy activism. He began wading into those waters by joining the roster of performers at the 1979 “No Nukes” concert. He soon was letting his leanings show quite overtly. After Reagan’s election, he was direct in his disparagement of the fortieth president. He didn’t take kindly to Reagan using “Born in the USA” at rallies.

It was an odd choice for the Reagan campaign to use. Once one looked past the bigness of the arena-rock sound that gave that song the power to instantly exhilarate, it was pretty clear that it was about how the Vietnam experience had damaged a lot of returning participants in that conflict. Its focus was on the nation’s shortcomings, not exactly what Reagan was otherwise emphasizing in his campaign. (Not that political campaigns have ever looked too far into what the music they played at rallies were actually all about. What, for instance, is the reason for playing the Village People’s “YMCA” except that it brims with that exhilaration factor?)

A lot of the criticism of the Jeep commercial has had to do with the fact that Springsteen has strongly bound up his persona with his native New Jersey, and here he was in a cowboy hat in the windswept middle of nowhere.

Some of us have not forgotten the strong New Jersey identification, and it makes the current trappings seem off.

His first album was called Greetings From Asbury Park, and the song “Sandy” off his second album is about a guy telling his girl that they ought to admit to themselves that they’ve outgrown the boardwalk scene. The 1975 Newsweek cover story about him when Born to Run came out emphasized Bruce’s handiness with a pinball machine.

But then he expanded his scope and set about making himself an explorer of the American landscape generally, delving into locales such as the Utah desert and the plains of Nebraska. One sensed that he was trying to insinuate himself into the lineage that included Walt Whitman, John Dos Passos and Jack Kerouac. He and and Mary - the girl in “Thunder Road” - had definitely left the front porch and were now out on that open highway.

He was growing older as this was happening to his artistic direction, and the theme of regret over having not taken that open road, about opting to get a union card and settle for life among high school classmates in the hometown also came in for exploration in songs such as “Glory Days.”

So he was simultaneously examining those who did settle the vast interior of the continent, as well as those who stayed in their gritty communities back east. The common element was a backdrop of bleakness, a message that America was a place of exhausted possibilities.

Something else that happened after the first two albums - certainly after the third one - was that the music became a lot more simple. The charm of Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle was the busyness of the arrangements, the grit of Clarence Clemons’s tenor sax delivery, the Latin flourishes, the tempo changes, the surreal imagery in the lyrics, and a general regard for atmospherics.

Those albums, consisting of extended cuts, were relegated to FM cult-favorite status, but he was building his reputation as a bar-band powerhouse as he relentlessly played clubs up and down the east coast. It was when he took on Landau as manager that the push to make him an arena-rock draw really began.

By the time of the Born in the USA album, he was wearing his penchant for a stripped-down yet huge sound on his sleeve. The title song is boneheadedly simple, a shift back and forth between a I chord and a IV chord over an unwavering, basic beat, with a melody line that doesn’t stray beyond the fourth, fifth and sixth scale tones of the key he’s in. In short, it’s as repetitive as a tune can get.

He seems to think that there was some kind of profundity to this immersion in simplicity, that a limited palette somehow made a greater range of thematic possibilities open to him.

I, for one, just found it mind-numbing.

But even when I look back over the entire arc of his career, including those first two albums, something becomes clear: he’s always been full of himself. In his early days, he was clearly aspiring to be some kind of encapsulation of rock’s development to that point. He’s always been out to make the Great American Rock Album.

So that’s why this Jeep commercial works for a certain type of viewer. Bruce gets to be full of himself in spades. That appeals to those who are likewise full of themselves, talking a good line about an underlying American essence that can be detected if one first repents of all the country’s supposed sins and its inherently tarnished institutional underpinnings. We can celebrate what really makes America great once we’ve dispensed with what our square old history teachers drummed into our heads.

You get to be patriotic if you first demonstrate contrition for what you’ve come to see as a phony image peddled by those who had utter disregard for the Little Guy in whom all American nobility rests.

He mentions freedom during his narration in the commercial, but it doesn’t come across as being borne of any deep understanding of the conversation throughout our history about what that term means.

Bruce has always been presumptive, and this latest project takes it to a degree that, for me, is met with an eye roll.

He’s missed the mark in his aspiration to be America’s bard.