The Meaning of Darkness

When I transferred schools in 1993 and moved a few states north, my lack of knowledge and understanding of the world bordered on embarrassing. If you asked me about the Bay of Pigs, I probably would've directed you to a distant corner of the Bronx Zoo. A few months later the Civil Rights Movement would jar my life perspective, but had you inquired about the NAACP in early 1993 I probably would've referred to the National Association for the Advancement of Chicken Parm. I often wonder how I even got into college. Outside of college basketball and the Yanks, my brain was basically wide open.

After a crappy first semester, I enrolled in a class called "Inequality in America." It was around this time that I graduated beyond the basics of rock n' roll and discovered Uncle Tupelo, The Bottle Rockets, dug deep into Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town and began to recognize common themes running through the songs. The guys in Uncle Tupelo were looking for a way out, Brian Henneman and the Rockets were singing about welfare music, and Darkness had it all: dreams, factories, cars, the promised land, hope and something out there in the night. These were songs painted all over the shore towns of New Jersey. But they were songs culled from within all of us.

"Old man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, and the king ain't satisfied 'til he rules everything," Springsteen yelled on "Badlands." When I submitted my first paper for this class, I included that line. Little did I realize that I was finally relating to something outside of a basketball gym. "Adam Raised a Cain" dipped into some tempered fury inside of me. "Racing in the Street" taught me to dream. "The Promised Land" taught me to believe. When I really listened to "Factory," I thought of my stepfather, a lifelong police officer. And then there was that "Darkness on the Edge of Town" where we could finally move beyond our past.

On a later record, Bruce famously said that he "learned more from a three-minute record than he'd ever learned in school." At least for me, the next few years of schooling likely proved that wrong, but without Darkness I may have never been open to it all. In a sense, everything I've learned and everything I believe in can be found in those ten songs.