The Boss Takes on 'The King' with a little help from Bob Dylan
Bruce Springsteen's new anti-Trump protest song resonates with the sound of Minnesota's most famous native son
What follows is a short essay of mine about Bruce Springsteen’s new political protest song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” and its connections to Bob Dylan, published today in The Forward.
IF YOU THINK YOU’VE HEARD rock icon Bruce Springsteen’s brand-new protest song before, you may not be far off base. The melody of the Boss’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” written, recorded, and released just days after masked federal militiamen murdered Alex Pretti, bears a strong resemblance to that of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” from the Nobel Prize laureate’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited.
Whether Springsteen consciously or unconsciously patterned his song after Dylan’s doesn’t really matter. If anything, it is only appropriate that the Boss evoked it as a kind of tribute to one of his foremost musical inspirations (Springsteen inducted Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988) – one who just happens to be a native son of Minnesota, who once roamed the very streets of the song’s title while attending university.
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In solidarity,
“Well, I don’t want to go on the roof.” -- George Harrison
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Good work, Seth. I obviously listened to the song faster than Springsteen wrote it. So thank you for filling in the things that I missed.
Right on, Brother!!