However, there is no direct line leading from American Skin to the enrolment in the Kerry campaign four years later. For in between lies the disastrous event of 9/11 and Springsteen's comprehensive artistic response to it. The Rising (2002) wasn't just a formidable rock album, which brought Springsteen's music back on the level of the eighties. Even more remarkable was the huge amount of political thinking and judgment condensed in the general direction of the lyrics. In this respect Springsteen seemed to have matured considerably. The Rising expresses a variety of perspectives and emotions connected to 9/11, and it touches repeatedly - and only loosely disguised under the gestures of love songs - upon the crucial question of an antagonism between the Western and the Muslim world. But it also expresses an effort to raise above the all too human short-seightedness and avoid getting overwhelmed by the immediate feelings of grief, despair, loneliness and hatred. The album insists on a higher perspective with room left for hope even in the darkest moments and on a religiously inspired message of love.
Off course, this appeal to charity couldn't avoid having a political significance in a time of warfare. And considering Springsteen's previous comments on war, notably the Vietnam War, this significance could all to well be expected to end up in some clean-cut pacifism. However, that's exactly what it does not. The Rising does urge to steadiness and a sense of proportion, but definitely not in abstraction from the political realities and the concrete feelings involved in the situation - among them anger and the need to fight back. Accordingly the album delivers a perfect artistic counterpart to the fact, that Springsteen publicly supported the way the Bush-administration handled the invasion in Afghanistan. It seems to balance very delicately between two poles: the insistence on a higher perspective and the implicit endorsement of a moderate military response. Both aspects are hinted at in a phrase, which might be taken as the key to the underlying political standpoint: "...a little revenge and this to shall pass".
As a contribution to the American healing process in the aftermath of 9/11 The Rising was remarkably well-turned. Seldom has a work of art been so seriously committed to the complexity and challenge of a difficult political situation. Springsteen had broken out of the image of the artist as a detached spectator, who stands on the sideline of the political process asking all the easy questions (e. g. "War, what is it good for?"). He had struggled to find the voice of ordinary people personally engaged in a deadly conflict, and with it's concreteness and political moderation The Rising seemed very suitable for uniting the nation.
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