My Glory Days presentation
Heading to my 15th show tonight…
A few people have e-mailed to ask about what I presented, and I owe the doc to a few others from the symposium whose business cards are languishing on my (now much cleaner) kitchen counter. I thought for a long time this summer about writing a paper, real academic-like, but I succumbed to Powerpoint. "A bear in his natural habit, a Studebaker…"
Anyway, got some time to write down what I may or may not have said aloud. Here's the doc (scanned and virus-free). Notes in brief:
"Springsteen and the struggle with the distributed narrative."
My argument is about the crowd more than it is about Springsteen.
Keep the crowd in mind. In that big crowd watching Springsteen at the Lincoln Memorial show — and in any crowd now — there are masses of people singing/projecting along, talking to bystanders, calling relatives, text-messaging their friends, tweeting updates, publishing pictures to Facebook, and taking on so many other methods of communication.
Now, zoom on Springsteen for a minute. Consider how his storytelling has evolved. Early on, with Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. through The River, you have deeply personal storytelling, with characters from the real Jersey Shore or Springsteen speaking as a true first person. In the middle period, as you move into Nebraska through Lucky Town/Human Touch, characters remain personal but often take on broadly thematic qualities. In the most recent stretch, Joad through Working on a Dream, Springsteen is separated from the characters, working alongside them, creating composites, archetypes or grabs from the news, or sometimes beyond them entirely, omniscient and omnipresent. Where Springsteen once found characters in himself, he now finds himself in characters.
The stages of his narrative development fit well into the development of media. And when I say media, I mean the news media but also our information-sharing at large. Our narrative moves from the personal — back fences, unrestrained voices — to mass, monopolistic, collected audiences to now, a world where everyone has in a sense become a character. More often than not, through the disparate nature of our personal publishing — not just Web 2.0, but human interactions overall — every person around us has to establish a unique composite of who you or I are. To the world, we are a collection of our composites.
How did we get here? The technology was part of it. Audio tape, video, printer, e-mail, discovery, Web production, discovery again, sharing, mobile. Information collection grew into publishing into aggregation into spread, repeat, and we all grew into the circle of storytelling. But social factors contributed as well. For everyone to be able to express a narrative, the country's universalizing of public schools at the turn of the 20th century led to national literacy, and the civil rights movement at mid-century and later the education credential movement followed. The masses now learn, consume and project themselves diversely.
How has this played out for us personally? We're surrounded. A great graphic from Jeff Jarvis shows the situation well. In the modern "me-sphere," we're at the center of information: peers, media, links, press, government, search, companies, work, and doubtlessly more. But, yes, we're surrounded. There's so much to take in. There's far too much to take in. So, we push back. We block friendships. We rag on the media. We gloss over links. We don't trust the government, and if we never did, now we don't trust companies either or establish lasting ties to our jobs. We have to become haters in a way, just to be able to focus on some things and find true happiness enough to get by.
In a world like this, how do we speak? How do we focus enough to get by and project ourselves on the world? After rejecting, we personalize. We look for which topics, arguments or infos fit our needs, aggregate this data, filter for the sources that work, and what's left in our sifter brings new curiosity and questions that toss us again into the world.
The most analogous shift I've found for this change has been the rise of Impressionism. Breaking from classical, "full" styles, Impressionism used tone and color to create portrayal. What was knowable became a question of perspective and perception, and the only direct knowledge was personal. [More from this blog on the stands of this connection.]
You could make a visual case for this shift with Springsteen, as album covers move from classic personal takes to tone-driven, perspective-driven, hyper-stylized, sometimes subtly hyper-stylized, approaches. But I'm no art critic. To connect Impressionism with how we tell stories now, you only have to look at our new story techniques, our personal publishing, our construction of 21st-century personal narratives. What we publish of ourselves are everyday scenes, our own angles or what we can see. They're incomplete, exposed, perception dependent, and flying through the world in so many directions toward audiences.
This presentation is in many ways more plea or request than theory, but maybe a plea can be a theory. One can look at how Springsteen's narratives have evolved and make any number of arguments about what in him has changed: aging, accumulating massive wealth, finding temporary or lasting relationships, growing into political or community aims, the list goes on. But as you consider Springsteen, consider the crowd and consider yourself. We're used to setting great artists apart, but struggling to take in this world and project ourselves back out, to what extent can we even set ourselves apart? Looking at one person isn't enough. The crowd changes us, and it changes our storytelling.
