#19 - Streets of Philadelphia / Bruce Springsteen

When Bruce Springsteen was asked why he was invited to write the theme song for 'Philadelphia', the first mainstream motion picture about the AIDS crisis, and one of the first films made in Hollywood featuring a gay protagonist, he responded that the film's director, Jonathan Demme, had 'wanted to take a subject that people didn’t feel safe with and were frightened by and put it together with people that they did feel safe with'. The song that Springsteen would create in response to this brief was 'Streets of Philadelphia', and it plays over the film's long opening credits sequence, Springsteen's murmured vocals echoing over shots of the city's inhabitants and some of its historical landmarks. Why would the presence of Springsteen have helped viewers feel less frightened by the subject of AIDS? And what does this particularly strategic soundtrack casting do to the meaning of the song?

All the songs discussed in this episode, including the original recording of 'Streets of Philadelphia' can be heard here. If you've enjoyed it, please leave a review on Apple podcasts; thank you.

With very special thanks to Paul Wierdak, the producer of this episode. 

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Secret Life of Songs, a podcast on pop songs and what they mean to us with me, Anthony, a musician who writes and performs under the name sky coloured. At a climactic moment in the penultimate act of Tony Kushner’s 1991 play, Angels in America, Belize, a nurse who administers end-of-life care to AIDS patients, and the play’s sole African American character, has just revealed to Louis, who in the first act has abandoned his HIV-positive boyfriend, that his new lover is an acolyte of the notorious gay-bashing lawyer Roy Cohn. Reprising his role as the figure who cuts through the other characters’ delusions and self-deceptions, Belize takes Louis to task:

Up in the air, just like that angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details. Louis and his Big Ideas. Big Ideas are all you love. “America” is what Louis loves … Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. … I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

This speech is taken from the second part of the play, ‘Perestroika’, which premiered in a Los Angeles theatre in November 1992. At the time, rumours had begun circulating of a major motion picture about AIDS, helmed by the Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme. Bruce Springsteen, who had moved to Los Angeles in 1991 from New Jersey, would eventually be asked to write its theme song. If Springsteen did see Angels in America, you can imagine his ears pricking up at Belize’s uncompromising critique of American mythologising, and of all the characters, identifying most strongly with Belize’s tough realism. When Springsteen sings, ‘Ain’t no angel gonna greet me, it’s just you and I my friend’ in the song he provided for Demme’s film, we might hear an echo with a moment earlier in the play, when Belize hears Louis’s abandoned partner Prior’s manic account of his night-time encounters with an angel, and reacts in a voice that Kushner stresses should be ‘tough, harsh and very clear’:

this is not real. This is just you, Prior, afraid of … Of what’s coming. … There’s no angel. You hear me? … I can handle anything but not this happening to you.

Philadelphia, released in December 1993, would go on to gain five Oscar nominations, winning two, including Best Original Song for Springsteen, a particularly impressive achievement for a song with a long, slow build, no tangible ‘hook’ and a fragmented, half-murmured vocal line. The film was a major box office success, making it not only the first mainstream movie to address the AIDS crisis but one of the first to feature a sympathetic gay protagonist: Andrew Beckett, played by Tom Hanks. That this milestone was achieved by a team of unambiguously, even pointedly, heterosexual men did not go unnoticed at the time. Besides Demme, Springsteen and Hanks, the film also featured Denzel Washington and Antonio Banderas in supporting roles and Neil Young as the performer of the film’s closing song. This may well strike us now as a dispiriting example of the culture industry’s recurrent historic co-option and sanitisation of marginalised narratives; Hanks himself has said that he would rightly not be cast in that role today. And yet, despite all this, Springsteen’s song, ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, still retains a startling emotional power: an unyielding bleakness reminiscent of his most sombre work, like his great 1982 album, Nebraska, and something more enigmatic than the ultimately optimistic, clean-cut film it accompanies. To approach the question of what is being expressed in this song, we’ll need to look at the moment of its release - the early 1990s - in both its songwriter’s career and the wider world it emerged into, to start to hear what may be reverberating in those long gaps between Springsteen’s fractured, murmured sentences.

* * *

At the height of Springsteen’s prominence in American popular culture, the period immediately before and after the release of his best-selling 1984 album, Born in the U.S.A., a conservative political commentator, George F Will, went to see one of his concerts, reviewing it positively for The Washington Post. After briefly mentioning Springsteen’s huge commercial appeal, Will starts his description of the show like this:

There is not a smidgen of androgyny in Springsteen, who, rocketing around the stage in a T-shirt and headband, resembles Robert DeNiro in the combat scenes of “The Deer Hunter.” This is rock for the United Steelworkers

Will, who had helped Ronald Reagan prepare for his TV debates during the 1980 general election campaign, and this article in particular, are credited with bringing Springsteen to the attention of the president. Although the story that ‘Born in the U.S.A.’, a damning protest song about the negligence shown to veterans of the Vietnam War, was played without permission at Reagan’s 1984 re-election rallies appears to be apocryphal, Reagan certainly did try to associate his campaign with Springsteen’s popular reputation as a tough, authentically working-class, self-made man pursuing the American dream. In a campaign stop at Hammonton, New Jersey, Reagan declared: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

Opening his gig report with an observation of what is not there, Will’s relief that ‘there is not a smidgen of androgyny in Springsteen’ is telling: albums by acts such as Prince, Culture Club and Wham! had dominated the Billboard album charts in the early 1980s; we can witness the way Springsteen’s decisively masculine public image was welcomed by conservatives troubled by the space opened up in popular culture for non-traditional conceptions of gender. In American society more generally, though, Springsteen was going with the grain: in film, for instance, the 1980s saw a surge of hyper-masculinity, with the names Seagal, Stallone, Van Damme, Willis, and Schwarzenegger regularly splayed across movie posters, all in the shadow of an all-action male movie star of the previous generation - the president himself - whose public persona, needless to say, betrayed not a smidgen of androgyny, emphasising toughness, autonomy and indomitable physical vitality. The review sees Springsteen himself in this cinematic tradition, linking his headband and T-shirt to a modern icon of American frontier masculinity: Robert De Niro’s hunter-soldier protagonist in Michael Cimino’s 1978 Vietnam War epic, The Deer Hunter.

In a 1996 interview with The Advocate magazine, Springsteen was asked about the chain of events which led to him composing the theme song for Philadelphia:

[Jonathan Demme] told me that Philadelphia was a movie he was making “for the malls” … he wanted to take a subject that people didn’t feel safe with and were frightened by and put it together with people that they did feel safe with - like Tom Hanks or me or Neil Young. I always felt that was my job.

Pressed by the interviewer on this question of how he helped people ‘feel safe’ with a subject they ‘were frightened by’, Springsteen goes on:

When I first started in rock, I had a big guy’s audience for my early records. I had a very straight image, particularly through the mid ‘80s.

Fear across the apparent divide between straight and gay people comes up earlier in the same interview, although in that instance, the fear flows the other way:

The bonus I got out of writing ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ was that all of a sudden I could go out and meet some gay man somewhere and he wouldn’t be afraid to talk to me and say, ‘Hey, that song really meant something to me.’

Springsteen’s implication that a gay man might have felt afraid to talk to him prior to ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ gives us a brief insight into the connection - so well-established by that point it passes almost unnoticed - between overt male heterosexuality and potentially violent homophobia. It’s remarkable, and not a little galling, to reflect on the fact that, in an age of widespread vigilante violence against gay people, it was the fear the straight world felt about homosexuals that shaped the making of America’s first major motion picture about a gay man with AIDS. Springsteen’s presence on the film’s soundtrack was part of a calculation, openly stated by Demme in a 2006 interview, that they ‘weren’t interested in making a film for people with AIDS or for the gay audience’, rather the film was directed at ‘people who were homophobic, were prejudiced against people with AIDS.’

Such an approach was savaged by gay commentators at the time: Ronald Mark Kraft, reviewing it in The Advocate, suggested that ‘Gays and lesbians may very well feel cheated by Philadelphia - it’s AIDS 101 and Gay 101 all neatly tied up with a red ribbon’. Actor and comedian Scott Thompson argued: ‘The movie was too polite, too ginger. If Hollywood is using this movie to make America love us, they are making them love a false image. I don’t want that kind of acceptance’. Most famously, the playwright and prominent AIDS activist Larry Kramer, in an essay titled ‘Why I Hated Philadelphia’, wrote: ‘It’s dishonest, it’s often legally, medically and politically inaccurate, and it breaks my heart that I must say it’s simply not good enough and I’d rather people not see it at all.’ Its more recent reputation has not fared much better: Sarah Schulman, in her 2021 history of the AIDS action group ACT UP, cites Philadelphia as an example of mainstream culture’s ‘gross mis-representation and mis-historicisation’ of AIDS, pointing out that it features an ‘alone and abandoned gay [man] with AIDS, contrasted with a homophobic straight person who heroically overcomes their prejudices to support the poor gay man who has no community and no political movement to protect him’, when, in fact, ‘the opposite was true: gay men with AIDS were abandoned by most straight people, including their families, neighbors, and government. And they were defended by their community, who often shared their lack of rights and representation.’

Reflecting on why he was asked to write the film’s theme song, and in particular why he may have been so well-suited to the project’s stated goal of appealing to homophobes, Springsteen returns to the theme of the fear of homosexuality, saying:

I knew where the fear came from. I was brought up in a small town, and I basically received nothing but negative images about homosexuality … Anybody who was different in any fashion was castigated and ostracized, if not physically threatened. … the gay image back then was the ‘50s images, the town queen or something, and that was all anyone really knew about homosexuality. Everybody’s attitudes were quite brutal.

The brutality and apparent ubiquity of hatred towards the figure of the gay man in American society in the twentieth century is all the more striking when placed in the context of our evolving understanding of the history of sexual definitions, which, since Michel Foucault’s influential writing on the topic in the 1970s, has accepted that until the late nineteenth century, being ‘a homosexual’ barely existed as a meaningful concept. Sexuality was understood primarily as a set of activities not a state of being: something you did, not something you were. The very category of ‘the homosexual’, and then later, ‘the heterosexual’, was only brought into being in the 1880s and 90s, as an outcome of both modern science’s enthusiasm for classification, and urbanisation, which meant, as the historian of masculinity Anthony Rotundo has written, that ‘those interested in sexual relations with members of their own sex could meet and develop a sense of community’. Of course, prior to this, homophobia had existed and been no less dangerous but it tended to be directed towards acts which it was thought anyone might be tempted to indulge in; it was only during that - remarkably recent - era that sexual orientation came to be seen as a defining aspect of a person’s basic identity; in that moment, as Foucault put it, ‘the homosexual was now a species’.

And in the American context, as Rotundo lays out, almost as soon as this new species of human - the homosexual man - had emerged, it was aligned with contemporaneous notions of the gender binary: in short, ‘male homosexuality [was] equated … with womanhood’. It helps us understand why Springsteen - whose image at the height of his fame was received by almost all as a powerful, uncomplicated reassertion of traditional American masculinity - would naturally seem the perfect singer to act as a foil to the ‘frightening’ figure of the gay man. ‘The creation of the homosexual image’, writes Rotundo, ‘produced a deadly new weapon for maintaining the boundaries of manhood. Effeminacy had always been a troublesome accusation; now its force was becoming ruinous.’

Here we can see the foundation laid for the universally ‘negative images’ of homosexuality that Springsteen describes encountering in his hometown as a boy. The implication that being gay rendered a man bereft of masculinity endowed homophobia with all the force of misogyny in a highly patriarchal society; in addition to the disgust and outrage inherited from older religious strictures against sodomy, to be a gay man now also meant the surrender of male prestige and indeed a betrayal of one’s responsibility as a man to maintain it. And there’s an additional - and more specific - factor that explains why Springsteen’s 1950s upbringing might have exposed him solely to brutal attitudes toward homosexuality; the historian William Chafe has written that during this decade, “The effort to reinforce traditional norms seemed almost frantic”. The campaigns - by Joseph McCarthy and others - to root out communist-sympathisers in government habitually targeted homosexuals. Senator Kenneth Wherry, who was convinced America’s enemies were blackmailing closeted gay men in positions of influence, stated baldly, ‘You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives … A man of low morality is a menace in the government, whatever he is, and they are all tied together.’

If it’s possible to see the 1950s as a high watermark of anti-gay feeling in American society which was to begin to dissipate in the subsequent decades - between 1960 and 1980 more than half of America’s states decriminalised homosexuality - the arrival of the AIDS crisis, coming as it did in the midst of a resurgence of American conservatism more generally, emphatically reversed this, revealing an unprecedented depth of feeling against gay people. In this period, the proportion of survey respondents who agreed with the statement ‘sexual relations between two adults of the same sex are always wrong’ increased, peaking in 1991 at 78%. In this, they were unquestionably encouraged by the public statements of certain prominent political and religious leaders; the televangelist Jerry Falwell declared that ‘AIDS is God’s judgment on a society that does not live by His rules’, the minister and one-time presidential candidate Pat Robertson said ‘AIDS is God’s way of weeding his garden’, and, perhaps most damagingly, Senator Jesse Helms, in his 1987 senate floor intervention to oppose funding for AIDS education, directed an astonishing tirade against gay men, laying blame for the crisis entirely on what he called ‘the homosexual lifestyle’. The speech reached a grim rhetorical crescendo in his notorious declaration: ‘We have got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a perverted human being.’

Susan Sontag, in her 1989 essay ‘AIDS and its Metaphors’, pointed out that, while modern medical science had in most cases eliminated the once-widely held view that disease was the result of divine moral judgement, an exception was being made in the case of AIDS: ‘AIDS is understood in a premodern way’, she wrote, ‘[i]n the twentieth century it has become almost impossible to moralize about epidemics - except those which are transmitted sexually’. The failure of the Reagan administration, and that of his successor George Bush, to adequately address the AIDS crisis was turned from a potential political weakness into a strength by their ability to link virulent twentieth-century homophobia with deep-lying latent superstitions about the nature of illness. That this rhetoric in some cases verged on the openly totalitarian or even genocidal - think of Robertson’s ‘weeding the garden’ metaphor - may go some way to explain the caution Demme applied to the development of his film, Philadelphia, as underwhelming as it may now seem to us either as a political statement or as a representation of the reality of AIDS and its victims. But if that context and that strategy explain why Springsteen was asked to record the film’s opening music, it doesn’t necessarily explain why Springsteen agreed to do it, beyond his stated aim of making clear his support for gay rights, as real as that may have been. Just as I believe Springsteen would have been at least as interested in the ‘America’ of Angels in America as he would have been about any of its angels, we need to consider the symbolic significance of the city of Philadelphia as Springsteen wrote this song, and to do that, we need to go back to an earlier point in his career, to virtually the first statement he ever made regarding something which might be considered ‘political’, on a raucous, sweaty evening on August 20th, 1981.

* * *

Hello. Listen, listen for a second. Tonight, we’re here for the men and the women that fought in the Vietnam War. Yesterday I was lucky enough and I met some of these guys and it was funny because I’m used to coming out in front of a lot of people and I realised that I was nervous and I was a little embarrassed about not knowing what to say to ‘em and it’s like when you feel like you’re walking down a dark street at night and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody getting hurt or … getting hit in a dark alley but you keep walking on because you think it don’t have nothing to do with you and you just wanna get home. Well Vietnam turned this whole country into that dark street and unless we’re able to walk down those dark alleys and look into the eyes of the men and the women that are down there and the things that happened we’re never gonna be able to get home and then it’s only a chance.

At this point in his opening remarks to a packed-out Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, Springsteen introduced Bob Mueller, the founding president of Vietnam Veterans of America. The VVA had been struggling financially and Springsteen offered to pass on the proceeds from the August 20th concert, initiating a long-running association between them, credited with keeping alive public support for the war veterans. Mueller would later say that if ‘it wasn’t for Bruce coming forward there would not have been a coherent, national movement on behalf of Vietnam vets.’ Of course, it was also a link that would inspire a number of Springsteen’s songs, including one of his most well-known.

In 2012, Springsteen was asked whether it bothered him that songs like this one, in combination with the prominent placement of the American flag in both the album art and his stage shows of that time, could be, and often were, mistaken for straightforward American nationalism. He replied, ‘You can’t be afraid of those images … I don’t want to cede those feelings to just the right side of the street. … That’s not something I’m prepared to give up for fear that somebody might simplify what I’m saying.’ Certainly, one read-through the lyric sheet for ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ cancels any notion that the conclusion Springsteen invites the listener to make is the one George Will ends his concert review on: “There still is nothing quite like being born in the U.S.A.”

In fact, it’s a song which recasts exactly this sort of sentimental American exceptionalism as a question: is it a blessing or a curse to be born in the U.S.A., when it involves, as often as not, being treated no better than ‘a dog that’s been beat too much’? But Springsteen clearly feels an attachment to ‘those images’ and ‘those feelings’, and is not afraid to call it patriotism. In the challenge he poses the listener in that proud but pained repeated lyric - ‘I was born in the U.S.A.’ - we see a theme which runs through his entire body of work: the effort to square a clear-eyed acknowledgement of America’s many iniquities with a passionate faith in the real, enduring possibility that it may still choose to live out its founding ideals.

In the 1981 speech to the Veterans, for instance, modern America is cast as a dark street he and the audience find themselves walking down, eager to get ‘home’. The darkness Springsteen summons - the period of American history which encompassed the Vietnam War - was, we're led to understand, an aberration: it is an America which has strayed from where it has been and where it should be. And ‘we’ - the audience - are faced with a choice: can we acknowledge the ‘men and the women’ who are suffering terribly down America’s darkest alleys? If not then, Springsteen tells us, ‘we’re never gonna be able to get home’. This particular notion of ‘home’ as a place Springsteen intimates that he and all Americans have come from was to exert, if anything, a greater hold on him in the decades following ‘Born in the U.S.A.’. He increasingly became, in his words, a ‘student’ of American history, immersing himself in books on American politics, literature and music, all, he has said, in the service of ‘seeking out [my] truest identity … of trying to find out who I was, where I came from’. One book in particular seems to have made an impression: America: the Story of a Free People by Allen Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, which Springsteen has called ‘a very powerful history of the USA … the first thing I read that made me feel part of a historic continuum’. It’s a remarkable citation. Commissioned by the U.S. State Department and the British government during the second World War, the book was specifically intended to inspire America and its wartime allies to rally around what it defined as the intrinsically American values of democracy and liberty. In its introduction, for instance, it proudly states, ‘To a generation engaged in a mighty struggle for liberty and democracy, there is something exhilarating in the story of the tenacious exaltation of liberty and the steady growth of democracy in the history of America’.

Springsteen cites the book as a powerful expression of what he calls America’s ‘core set of democratic values’, and uses its account of the country’s founding to provide a starting point for the long story - that ‘historic continuum’ - which ultimately leads to his life and the lives of his listeners. And although he’s careful to mention that those core values have as often been ignored as observed, it’s clear that he views those ideals of freedom and democracy, as set out by mid-century liberal American historians like Nevins and Commager, to be absolutely primary to any conception of the American nation he would recognise. It means that when he bears witness to the harms incurred by the American system on the lives of those he has always believed he speaks for - the types of people who raised him and who he grew up with - his typical rhetorical manoeuvre is to assert that a shameful departure from America’s ‘true’ self has occurred: commenting on the Vietnam War in 1984, for instance, he called it ‘a subversion of the true American ideals’, reflecting on the years of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, he said, ‘When people think of the American identity, they don’t think of torture, they don’t think of illegal wiretapping, they don’t think of voter suppression, they don’t think of no habeas corpus … Those are things that are anti-American’ and his judgment on the 2008 financial crisis was that ‘a basic theft had occurred that struck at the heart of what the entire American idea was about’. More recently, he called the government’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the Mexican border, ‘so shockingly and disgracefully inhumane and un-American that it is simply enraging.’ Directly after ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, the focus for what Springsteen has called his ‘critical, questioning, often angry sort of patriotism’ was on the rapid expansion in the homeless population through the 1980s and early 90s. The Ghost of Tom Joad, his 1995 album, built on a long tradition of critical patriotism by borrowing from figures such as John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie, to protest the callousness and greed he saw as both the specific proximate cause of the suffering he was witnessing and as part of a much older American hard-heartedness that had once surfaced in the Great Depression, and would be seen again in the period after 2008, leading Springsteen to write some of his most overt political anthems in his 2012 album, Wrecking Ball.

In each instance of Springsteen’s many confrontations with America’s failings, while his anger and disappointment are clear, there is nevertheless still a defiant faith that America’s founding ideals endure. What results from this perpetual twinning of, on the one hand, a belief in the original goodness of the American idea, and, on the other hand, his compulsion to bear witness honestly to its terrible human consequences, is Springsteen’s fundamental ethical and political principle: the conviction that in life we all grapple with a clear and binding binary choice. Transplanted from the original Catholic context Springsteen was raised in, the choice between good and evil becomes, in his reading of American history, a choice between the country’s original ‘core set of democratic values’ and the ‘inhumaneness’ which runs throughout its history and which has so often seemed ascendent during the many phases of his long career. It’s there in the choice he presented to the audience in his 1981 Veterans speech - whether they were willing to look into ‘the eyes of the men and the women that are down’ in ‘the dark alleys’ - and it’s there in his explanation of the lead single from Wrecking Ball, ‘We Take Care of Our Own’: ‘That song’, he explained, ‘asks the question that the rest of the record tries to answer. Which is … Do we? Do we take care of our own?’

And, of course, it was there in his response to the AIDS crisis. In that same 1996 Advocate interview where Springsteen talks about how he came to write ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, he’s reminded by the interviewer of the atmosphere of the Reagan years, and he replies: ‘Yes, at that one point the country moved to the right, and there was a lot of nastiness, intolerance, and attitudes that gave rise to more intolerance.’ AIDS, in this sense, was an episode in American history similar to the Vietnam War: a national derailment: a crisis which challenged Springsteen’s bedrock assumption that at root America is a place of freedom and democracy. The imagery Springsteen reached for to express this - plainly a twist on Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan - was also similar: in his speech for the Veterans’ concert, Springsteen pictures Americans walking down a street late at night, confronted by the question of whether to help someone hurt in a dark alley; in ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, he poses the same challenge, only this time in the first person, from within the dark alley itself:

Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away … Will we leave each other alone like this on the streets of Philadelphia?

And it’s in this that we find the first answer to the question of what is being expressed in the many gaps in the melody of ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, and especially in its long introduction. If we look at the musical structure of the first section of the song, we can see we have, initially, a naked drum beat, played on a programmed drum machine, and then the song’s opening harmonic pattern, which consists of a four-bar phrase divided symmetrically: two bars of F major, two bars of A minor. This type of sequence - moving between the ‘home’ or ‘tonic’ major chord and the minor chord formed on the third degree of the major scale - is considered in classical music theory to be ‘weak’, as it does not have either dominant or sub-dominant harmonic implications and so does not consolidate a sense of key. In fact, it isn’t clear what key the song is in at first: treated differently, it could have turned out to be in A minor. There are songs which start with a similar harmonic pattern as ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ that do end up grounded in the minor tonality of the second chord rather than the major tonality of the first. It’s only when we get the first appearance of a harmony which is neither of the opening chords - the Bb major heard the first time Springsteen sings the word ‘Philadelphia’ - that the key of F major is confirmed. Springsteen’s treatment of the two chords seems particularly designed to present them as genuinely plausible harmonic alternatives: there are no passing notes between them, no fills or internal melodies to weight the music towards one or the other tonality. They are simply presented, block-like, with absolute rhythmic evenness: 2 bars of F major, 2 bars of A minor.

We are, I think, being presented with the musical equivalent of a choice: between the light and the dark, between the major or the minor. Which is to be our ‘home’, this suggestively long, wordless oscillation asks. And while Springsteen is careful to present these ‘options’ equally, it’s no coincidence that it’s at the first invocation of ‘Philadelphia’ that the music shifts and we’re given the first firm indication of our home key. Philadelphia, as all American schoolchildren learn, was the site of the 1776 signing of the Declaration of Independence, and has long been identified with exactly those values Springsteen looks to and which had been so thoroughly brought into question by the country’s response to the AIDS crisis. This symbolism - and the strategy of invoking that symbolism to prick the audience’s conscience - was not lost on the filmmakers of Philadelphia: Tom Hanks ended his Oscar acceptance speech for his performance in the film with a glowing allusion to ‘the simple, self-evident, common sense truth that … was written down on paper by wise men, tolerant men, in the city of Philadelphia two hundred years ago’. In the film’s opening credits sequence, which Springsteen’s song plays over, we see sweeping views of the city, its inhabitants and, for the sake of those slow to catch the significance of the film’s title, a direct shot of the city’s most famous monument: the Liberty Bell.

* * *

Although it’s now known that HIV had been circulating in the United States since at least 1970, the start of the AIDS crisis is generally held to be 1981, when, in June, the CDC (the Centers for Disease Control) declared an outbreak of Kaposi’s sarcoma among gay men in California and New York City, first reported in the national press the following month. Kaposi’s sarcoma - a form of cancer which causes purple or black skin lesions - may be the most commonly identified symptom of AIDS, although it only manifests in around a third of AIDS cases. The recognition by a colleague of a purple lesion on Beckett’s forehead in an early scene in Philadelphia is the crucial moment which precipitates the legal drama that follows: Beckett is abruptly fired by his firm, leading to the unfair dismissal lawsuit which constitutes the rest of the film. David Wojnarovicz, in his memoir of the early days of the crisis, Close to the Knives, describes seeing ‘people whose faces are entirely black with cancer eating health salads in the lonely seats of restaurants’. In the iconography of AIDS, the image of a male body pockmarked with what looks like painful bruises has long been central. It’s surely what Springsteen is thinking of in the first line of his song: ‘I was bruised and battered’ and, knowing how quickly Kaposi’s sarcoma could spread once contracted, it may also resonate in the subsequent lyric, ‘I didn’t know my own face’. It isn’t the only physical AIDS symptom which Springsteen picks up on in ‘Streets of Philadelphia’; perhaps second only to Kaposi’s sarcoma, the telltale visible mark of AIDS, as presented in standard representations of the illness, is a dramatic loss of weight. In My Own Country, an account of working as a young infectious diseases doctor during the onset of the AIDS crisis, Abraham Verghese describes a patient named Gordon asking ‘for a cushion: he had a big sore spot at the base of his spine. He had lost so much weight, the knobbly ends of the vertebra wanted to grind through the skin’; there’s something characteristically quotidian and tangible about the way Springsteen renders the image - over-familiar, even then - of AIDS-induced emaciation when he has his song’s character sing, simply, ‘my clothes don't fit me no more’, but his capacity to inhabit the experience of the person he is singing about, and convey it in telling, concise details, extends to its interior, psychological aspect, most fully revealed in moments like ‘I could hear the blood in my veins/Just as black and whispering as the rain’. Springsteen evokes the uncanny and terrifying experience of being conscious of a fatal illness within one’s own body. Elsewhere in his memoir, as he senses the virus encroaching on him, Wojnarowicz writes, in phrases which echo Springsteen’s lyric, ‘I felt my body thrumming with the sounds of vessels of blood and muscles contracting the sounds of aging and of disintegration’. 

Looking at the ways Springsteen seeks to reflect the experience of AIDS in his song may also explain perhaps its most curious feature: its title. If we assume that his brief was to write a song for a film named Philadelphia, it can only have been Springsteen’s initiative to add the phrase which recurs throughout the song as its refrain: ‘on the streets of Philadelphia’. Given that the film’s lead character, Beckett, is at no point homeless or threatened with homelessness, this may seem a strange decision on Springsteen’s part, until we consider the fact that, by the 1990s, it was increasingly clear that the crisis of AIDS was inextricable from the crisis of homelessness which, as we’ve heard, had worsened considerably in the same era and which was to dominate Springsteen’s thinking in the build-up to his 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad. In 1992, the National Commission on AIDS published a report which made clear the extent to which the two crises were bound up in each other. If you had AIDS you were at much greater risk of becoming homeless, due to obstacles to employment and the prohibitive cost of health care, and if you were homeless, you were much more likely to contract AIDS, with estimates of the HIV-positive rate among the homeless at this time ranging between 15 and 20%, compared with the less-than-1% rate among the population as a whole. In that sense, Beckett, a wealthy lawyer with an extensive support network, was a less typical AIDS victim than the character presented by Springsteen in the music video for the song, pacing endlessly amidst burning oil drums and abandoned tenement blocks, visibly ‘fading away on the streets of Philadelphia’. 

Thinking through the ways Springsteen sought to evoke the lived reality of AIDS gives us our second answer to the question of what may be happening in the gaps and breaks between the phrases and sections of his song. Dr. Verghese describes another man who had come into his care during the early phase of the crisis, ‘Puffing like an overheated steam engine … squeezing in forty-five breaths a minute … It had shocked [the nurse] to see a thirty-two-year-old man in such severe respiratory distress’, and Wojnarowicz, narrating in horrible detail the physical deterioration of his friend and one-time partner, Peter Hujar, observed ‘His breath … coming in rapid-fire bursts like a machine gun … He was limp and his eyes were closed and his mouth against my arm breathing wet sounds … I looked into his face: the irises expanding and filling the room, the curtains of eyelids shutting down over them’. Shortness of breath and acute fatigue, caused by Pneumocystis or other infections of the lungs, comes up again and again in descriptions of men with AIDS during the early phase of the crisis. We wait a long time for Springsteen to utter the first phrase of ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, particularly in the version of the song used in the film, and when he does, the sentences are broken up in the middle of grammatical phrases by audible breaths, in an exact inverse of how lyrics are typically ‘meant’ to be distributed across a melody: ‘I was bruised and battered I couldn’t’ - breath - ‘tell what I felt I was’ - breath - ‘unrecognisable to myself’ - breath - ‘saw my re-’ - breath - ‘flection in a window’ and so on. This is Verghese, again, asking his patient about his breathing. Each phrase he gets in response is broken up into a new sentence: ‘“How bad is it?” “What?” “The shortness of breath.” “Not too bad. Only if I try to walk or do something strenuous.” I waited. “-and I guess it has been getting worse. The last day or two. Sometimes … sometimes it’s all I can do. To get my breath. Even as I just lay here.” Springsteen’s broken phrasing becomes fractionally more joined-up during the bridge then lapses back into fragmented half-phrases in the last verse - ‘Night is fallen and I’m’ - breath - ‘lying awake I can’ - breath - ‘feel myself fading away’ - before stopping completely, giving way to a long instrumental outro, as if the effort of making his appeal to the listener has exhausted him, retreating back into silence, perhaps into unconsciousness, ‘curtains of eyelids shutting down over’ his ‘irises’.

* * *

Between the first reports of the epidemic in July 1981 and the release of Philadelphia at the end of 1993, more than 230,000 Americans would die from AIDS, a number that would continue to rise steeply in the years following, only slowing in its fatal efficacy with the distribution of protease inhibitor drugs in the late 1990s. Beyond this vast loss of life, as we’ve seen, AIDS had a huge impact on the public sphere, triggering a widespread homophobic hysteria, stoked by politicians who exploited the figure of the HIV-positive gay man as a modern scapegoat, the perfect antithesis to Reagan’s apparent invulnerability and rigid moral traditionalism. 

But this was not the only social impact of AIDS. In fact, it was exactly this exploitation of the virus in the era’s construction of reactionary politics which highlighted for many the political potency of sexual categories. AIDS created the conditions for a thoroughgoing critique of the deadly power of straightness. 1990 saw the publication of two foundational books in what was just starting to be called ‘queer studies’: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, both of which, Sedgwick’s in particular, are clearly contextualised within the AIDS crisis and the discourse around it. Butler, for instance, points out that the common identification of AIDS as the ‘gay disease’, seen, for instance, in Jesse Helms’ senate speech, in combination with the media’s frequent implication that AIDS victims were ‘polluting’, built on a pre-existing assumption of male homosexuality as ‘a site of danger and pollution’. And Sedgwick’s book, for its part, includes in its delineation of the factors which have led to the construction of the closet chilling observations of the genocidal impulses in mainstream homophobic AIDS discourse, connecting the ‘fragments … of a time after the homosexual’ seen in nightly news reports on the epidemic to the Biblical origins of the word ‘sodomy’: to Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities of sin God saw fit to destroy without trace. 

Springsteen himself, in that same period, appears to have gone through something of a critical reevaluation of his sexual and gender identity, coming to a much more questioning stance towards the sort of masculinity he had become associated with. 1988 had seen the end of his first marriage and a period, following the tour for the album Tunnel of Love, of something approaching a complete nervous breakdown. His response to this, ultimately, was to dedicate himself to psychotherapy with a devotion he compared to his youthful obsession with rock n roll: “I knew I’d had to spend eight hours a day with a guitar to learn how to play it … And now I had to put in that kind of time just to find my place again … I crashed into myself and saw a lot of myself as I really was … Am I just trying to be the most popular guy in town? I questioned everything I’d ever done’. This wholesale self-questioning would, one imagines, have taken in the image which was built around him during the Born in the U.S.A. era, which he would later express regret for, saying: ‘Who knows, I was probably working out my own insecurities, y’know? That particular image is probably the only time I look back over pictures of the band and it feels like a caricature to me. … that particular moment I always go, “Jeez,” y’know?’ This process of reflection at the end of the 1980s did not spare the E Street Band, that tight-knit group of musicians, all-male until Patti Scialfa joined in 1984, who had been Springsteen’s constant musical accomplices on his albums and tours since the early 1970s. After Tunnel of Love, Springsteen broke the band up, relying on different musicians or, as we hear on ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, synthesisers and drum machines to create his musical backing. He has said of that decision, which was deeply hurtful to a number of the longstanding members of his band, that ‘We were all in our mid-30s and I said, ‘It’s time to deal with these ideas. The band as a lost boys club is a great institution - the level of general misogyny and hostility and the concept of it as always being a place where you can hide from those things. But I wanted to change that, I didn’t want to do it.’ Springsteen’s rejection of the structure and the atmosphere - what Sedgwick would recognise as the homosociality - of the ‘great institution’ of the all-male rock band, and his distancing from his action-hero mid-80s image, meant that stage performances involved more diverse ensembles, and in his songs a more tender, empathetic form of masculinity has prevailed - no more addresses to ‘little girls’ - which may indeed have helped him write his first song from the perspective of a gay man, ‘Streets of Philadelphia’. 

This evolution of Springsteen’s conception of himself, however, has not done much to dent the popular perception of him, which typically remains fixed on the headband and biceps of his mid-80s concert appearances or, taking into account his advancing age, sees him in terms no less gendered: as the archetypal exponent of ‘dad rock’. There is one group of listeners, though, for whom, perhaps paradoxically, Springsteen’s assertively straight aspect - what the music writer Nadine Hubbs has called his ‘epic heterosexuality’ - has been particularly important. A remarkable number of queer writers have, over the years, responded passionately to Springsteen, with both hostility and enthusiasm. One of the earliest and most consistent, the gay Latino poet Rane Arroyo, wrote a series of ‘Springsteen poems’ contesting the particular ‘constructions of masculinity’ in Springteen’s lyrics and public image. Hubbs herself has argued that Springsteen’s music has ‘contributed to the forces of heteronormativity’ and has ‘stifled possibilities for other kinds of love’. Alongside this, though, there has been a tradition of queer listeners embracing Springsteen and his work, often playfully but nonetheless with sincere love and admiration. Queer zine writer Holly Casio has argued that ‘Bruce is the perfect queer hero if you have queer vision and a lot of time on your hands. … To an untrained straight eye he is Bruce Spingsteen: All American Man - the very embodiment of heterosexuality. To … deftly experienced queers he’s a queer in tight jeans and a muscle tee’. More recently the writer Natalie Adler has written about and built on the now well-established practice of queering Springsteen, claiming him as her ‘butch lesbian mom’. 

What all of these queer receptions of Springsteen have in common is the recognition in his work and on-stage persona of a particularly vivid demonstration of the notion of gender performativity, a core concept of queer theory since Butler’s Gender Trouble. It’s the very overtness of heterosexual male identity presented in Springsteen’s classic songs and performances which make him such a fruitful figure to reinterpret along queer lines. And it’s in our embedded memory of that compelling performance of heterosexuality in Springsteen’s earlier career that we can start to see the basis of ‘Streets of Philadelphia’’s striking - and yet elusive - emotive force. The presence of Bruce Springsteen in the song and its placement at the start of Philadelphia is intended to make us feel that we are safely within the heteronormative familiar, but its strategic caution goes well beyond this. Questioned on why there are no scenes in the film that present sexual intimacy between Beckett and his partner - while Denzel Washington’s character is pictured in bed with his wife - Jonathan Demme responded: “I didn’t want to risk knocking our audience back [twenty] feet with images they’re not prepared to see.” In a similar fashion, Springsteen’s song carefully excises any hint of gay sexuality from either its lyrics or its musical setting. While many queer writers have written about Springsteen, no one has ever claimed that ‘Streets of Philadelphia’, his only song from a definitely gay perspective, itself contains any signifiers of queerness or campness. In fact, its overriding stylistic objective is precisely to deflect from anything sexual or AIDS-related. Springsteen’s honed instinct for inclusive, universalising forms of musical and lyrical expression meets the film’s overarching goal of addressing homophobia and the AIDS crisis with minimal reference to gay sex to produce a lyric sheet in which virtually every statement can be reasonably interpreted as either a description of a gay man with AIDS or simply a destitute person living on the streets asking for help. ‘I was bruised and battered’ may refer to Kaposi’s sarcoma but may, of course, be heard as someone who has been physically assaulted; ‘my clothes don’t fit me no more’ may allude to the rapid weight-loss caused by AIDS or may, just as viably, be understood as the result of simple malnourishment. The song’s sole reference to physical affection is found in its most complex, ambiguous line: ‘receive me brother with your faithless kiss’. Is the kiss of a faithless ‘brother’ a euphemistic reference to the abandonment of a sexual partner, like Louis and Prior in Angels in America, or is Springsteen alluding to the idea of ‘my brother’s keeper’, with the implication that American society is like Cain from the book of Genesis, murdering his brother, or possibly Judas Iscariot, enactor of the most famous ‘faithless kiss’ in history, betraying the nation’s ideals and a whole generation of AIDS victims?

The fact that many listeners of the song - particularly those who encounter it away from its original setting as the theme song in Philadelphia - miss that it is about a man with AIDS attests to how successfully the song masks its link with the epidemic and with homosexuality. But it is exactly its dexterous avoidance of any unambiguous connection with gay sexuality that ultimately, and perhaps inadvertently, makes the song such a moving expression of closeted existence. By adhering so closely to the film-maker’s directive to make something specifically designed not to provoke homophobic antagonism, Springsteen and this song perform a manoeuvre familiar to anyone who has lived the ‘shadowed life’ of the closet: he skilfully directs attention away from sexuality and only ever expresses his true self via plausibly-deniable allusion and ambiguity. The painful suggestion that results from this is that, even at the point of death, the singer of the song is still closeted, still encountering the world behind what Wojnarowicz described as ‘that breathing glass wall no one else saw’. We might think specifically of the many victims of AIDS who were unacknowledged by their families even in death or, more generally, of the awesome power of the closet to diminish a life right up until its last moments. Sedgwick writes that ‘“Closetedness” … is a performance initiated … by the speech act of a silence’ and this is, finally, what I think is resonating in the wordless interludes and suggestive gaps of ‘Streets of Philadelphia’: we are hearing the silences of the closet; we hear Springsteen’s voice as if it is emanating from inside the closet, only to withdraw, back into the shadows and silence, a dying voice still veiled in secrecy. 

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In the next episode of the Secret Life of Songs - the last of this series - I’ll be talking about Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case of You’. Written at the start of what the writer Tom Wolfe famously labelled the ‘Me-Decade’, Mitchell was part of a loose group of songwriters based in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles who were seen as enacting a ‘turn inward’ at the outset of the 1970s, abandoning the social conscience of the counterculture and coming to focus entirely on the individual's personal foibles and inner struggles. As we’ll see, Mitchell was capable of both channelling and criticising these deep historical impulses, a tension which was never so raw and transparent as on the album ‘A Case of You’ appeared on, the one she called her most ‘honest’ and ‘pure’: 1971’s Blue.

This episode was produced by Paul Wierdak. If you're enjoying the series please consider rating and reviewing it wherever you get your podcasts.