Bruce Springsteen opened his Land of Hope and Dreams Tour at Target Center in Minneapolis by calling the Trump administration "corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous", then asked the audience to join him and the E Street Band in condemning it from the stage.
The 76-year-old rocker, a longtime Democrat who opened Joe Biden's inauguration special, has spent recent weeks embedding himself in Minnesota's protest scene. He led the lineup at the Minneapolis-St. Paul branch of the No Kings rallies, performed at a benefit concert called Defend Minnesota! at the storied First Avenue venue, and released a song called "Streets of Minneapolis" in January that he described as a response to federal law enforcement operations in the city.
None of that is new territory for Springsteen. What is new is the scale of the contradiction between his populist posture and the price of admission.
From the Target Center stage, Springsteen delivered what amounted to a political address dressed up as a rock show. The Daily Mail reported that he framed the evening as a choice between competing values:
"Choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division and peace over..."
The ellipsis is in the original report. Whatever came after "peace over" was apparently left hanging, or perhaps the crowd filled in the blank. Either way, the setup was clear: Springsteen cast the current administration as the villain in a morality play, with himself and his audience as the righteous opposition.
He then turned to Minneapolis specifically, referencing federal law enforcement activity in the city:
"Well, this past winter, federal troops brought death and terror to the streets of Minneapolis. They picked the wrong city."
Springsteen named two individuals, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, as people killed in encounters with federal law enforcement. He dedicated "Streets of Minneapolis" to them and to what he called "our innocent immigrant neighbors." The Daily Mail noted it had reached out to the White House for comment.
The Minneapolis concert did not arrive in a vacuum. Days earlier, Springsteen headlined the local No Kings rally at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, where he performed "Streets of Minneapolis" for a protest crowd. NBC News reported he had previously debuted the song live at the Defend Minnesota! benefit at First Avenue.
In January, when he released the track, Springsteen posted on Instagram that he wrote it on a Saturday, recorded it the next day, and put it out the day after that. He called it a reaction to "the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis."
He also described a conversation with Tom Morello, the Rage Against the Machine guitarist who has played occasionally with the E Street Band since 2008. Springsteen told the audience he'd asked Morello whether the song was too heavy-handed:
"Now I know Tom is an excitable man. I say, 'Tom, what do you think? It's kind of soapboxy.' He says, 'Bruce, nuance is wonderful, but sometimes you have to kick them in the teeth.'"
The crowd, by all accounts, ate it up. Springsteen followed the speech by performing a cover of "War," a song he has used to protest Republican administrations going back to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He then jumped into "Born in the USA", a track whose anti-war lyrics have been a source of political confusion for decades. A UK radio station, Absolute Radio, recently announced it would censor a lyric from the song, according to The Sun.
Here is where the story gets interesting for anyone who cares about consistency. Springsteen built a five-decade career as the voice of blue-collar America, the guy who sang about factory towns, dead-end jobs, and the dignity of ordinary people. The Land of Hope and Dreams Tour is a 20-date run with the E Street Band, wrapped in anti-Trump and No Kings messaging. It is also being sold through Ticketmaster's Platinum dynamic pricing system.
Some seats have reportedly reached as high as $3,000. Newsmax reported that fans pushed back hard on social media, calling the pricing contradictory to the tour's stated political message.
One fan commented on Springsteen's Instagram post:
"If this concert is meant to be a political statement, dynamic pricing makes no sense... It feels contradictory to defend democracy while playing by pure free-market rules where money decides everything."
Another put it more bluntly: "If it were truly No Kings, you would need to be a king to afford tickets to attend a show."
That is not a right-wing talking point. Those are Springsteen's own fans, on his own social media page, pointing out the gap between his rhetoric and his business model.
Springsteen's political activism is not a surprise. He has been an outspoken liberal for years, campaigning for Democratic candidates and using his platform to oppose Republican administrations. He opened Biden's inauguration special. He has performed at protest rallies. He released a protest song within 48 hours of the events that inspired it. The man is committed.
But commitment and credibility are different things. When a multimillionaire rock star charges thousands of dollars for tickets to a show built around solidarity with working people and immigrants, the message gets muddled. When he calls the administration "treasonous" from a stage that costs a week's wages to stand near, the audience he claims to speak for is not in the room.
The working-class voters Springsteen once sang about, the ones in Freehold and Asbury Park and the Rust Belt towns that populate his catalog, voted for Trump. Twice. They did not need a $3,000 concert ticket to make their voices heard. They used a ballot.
Springsteen told the Minneapolis crowd that "the power and the solidarity of the people of Minneapolis and of Minnesota was an inspiration to the entire country." He said their "strength and commitment told us that this is still America."
Fair enough. America is also a place where people notice when the guy lecturing them about corruption and greed is doing it from behind a Ticketmaster paywall.
Several questions hang over the Minneapolis events. The White House has not publicly responded to Springsteen's remarks, at least not in any reporting available so far. The specific circumstances surrounding the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, whom Springsteen named and memorialized onstage, remain unclear in the public record. Springsteen described their deaths as the result of encounters with federal law enforcement, but the details have not been fully laid out.
That matters. If Springsteen is going to use a concert stage to accuse the federal government of "state terror" and dedicate songs to specific individuals he says were killed by that government, the facts behind those claims deserve scrutiny, not just applause.
The same standard applies to his broader characterization of the administration as "treasonous." That is not a casual word. It has a legal meaning. Using it from a concert stage, surrounded by fans who paid handsomely for the privilege of hearing it, does not make it true.
Springsteen closed his Minneapolis remarks by dedicating the evening to "the people of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the people of our good country, the United States of America." He signed off his Instagram post with "Stay free, Bruce Springsteen."
Freedom is a fine theme for a rock tour. But freedom includes the freedom of ordinary Americans to look at a celebrity protest tour with dynamic-priced tickets and ask who it is really for. The answer, increasingly, is not the people Springsteen sings about. It is the people who can afford to watch him sing.
When the working class becomes a brand instead of an audience, the protest is just a show, and a pricey one at that.
