The music changes, message doesn’t

Sitting here listening to “The Essential Bruce Springsteen” – and, fittingly enough, “Born in the U.S.A” is playing – and I started reading the libretto. It’s always nice when bands who have a sense of the poetic actually tell us what they’re attempting to warble.

And once again I smile at the attempt by conservative politicians to kidnap the song as an ode to patriotism. When, of course, it’s a dark look at what war does to the poor. Our implied narrator goes to Vietnam to avoid jail, comes home but can’t get a job and gets no support from his local V.A. office. His brother, who fought at Khe Sahn , presumably was killed by the Viet Cong (“They’re still there, he’s all gone”).

And the song ends with the hopelessness of the forgotten vet:
“Down in the shadows of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m 10 years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t go nowhere to go.”

Prepare yourself, folks. If the documentary film “Gunner Palace” – which comes out for home consumption on June 28 – doesn’t give you a clue, then a story in the June 13 should. Headlined “Soldier Rap, the Pulse of War,” the story talks about how rap is the music of choice for veterans of the Iraq War to express themselves. Only thing is, their message is hardly as eulogistic as Springsteen’s.

Click here for a taste.