Reno is remarkable for being the most sexually explicit song that Springsteen has ever written. In fact, not many other songwriters have ever been so outspoken either - we don't recall hearing anything like it since Frank Zappa's Bobby Brown! But off course, Springsteen isn't just describing sexual activities to provoke the public. Reno is a very quiet and gloomy song, and only prudes will be too offended to notice, that its message is extremely serious, probably even religious.
The setting is about a disillusioned guy enjoying the ambiguous pleasure of a prostitute. Since he is a Mexican emigrant, the song seems to belong in the thematic area of Springsteen's 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad. And the end of Reno fits neatly into the social realistic perspective underlying that album. The prostitute promises the narrator the best coitus he has ever had, and the song ends with the laconic statement: "It wasn't the best I ever had, not even close". This could work as a metaphor for the general disappointment that a Mexican emigrant may experience in the USA - just recall the advice given to Miguel by his father on Sinaloa Cowboys from The Ghost of Tom Joad: "for everything the North gives, it exacts a price in return".
The meticulously detailed description of the intercourse between the narrator and the prostitute endows the scene with an atmosphere of lostness: The narrator observes it all as a detached spectator, he even looks out the window and becomes wholly absorbed by distant memories. He is involved in a sexual act so purely physical, so bereft of all poetry, that it is hardly even sex anymore. This contrasts sharply against the memories haunting him at the very same time. He thinks back upon a girl, whom he describes in the warmest and most poetical phrases - e. g. she is always addressed as "you", while the prostitute is consequently designated as "she". The whole song is build around this contrast, which is sharply expressed in the opening sentences: The narrator notices that the prostitute's ankles are similar to his old girl friends, and for a moment he feels "filled with grace"; the next sentence quotes the prostitute telling him some ice-cold facts about the ways he can use her body. So much for the feeling of grace!
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