Springsteen and the Plagiarist
I went to see Bruce Springsteen last night at the Asbury Park Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The hall isn't really what its name sounds like; it's a big, brick, ramshackle building that looks like it hasn't met fire code in a while, and the part Bruce played in looked like a slightly bigger-than-usual high school gym. And as for Asbury Park—it's a dilapidated seaside town struggling to revive. Walking around the streets felt more dangerous than walking around the Harlem neighborhood where I live.
But against this gritty background, Springsteen was miraculous, heartwarming, authentic, inspiring—and generous. He's promoting a new record, called "We Shall Overcome—The Seeger Sessions," an album of American music popularized by the folk singer Pete Seeger. The concept is modest, an homage to an American legend and a musical tradition. But the show's spectacle was not; Springsteen was joined by no fewer than 19 other musicians on stage: a banjo player, an accordian player, four other guitarists (including his wife, Patti Scialfa, and a pedal steel player, such a gorgeous instrument), three backup singers, five horn players, a pianist, a drummer, a bass player and two violinists. All of them were fabulous musicians.
As the two-hour plus concert evolved, a couple of themes emerged: Springsteen's sense of family and community and his appreciation of history. When introducing one guitar player, a young man named (I think) Frank Bruno, Springsteen mentioned that Bruno's father, Springsteen's cousin, had taught him his first chords on the guitar, at age 13. "And then I went home and played, I don't know, Greensleeves—and right after that, Twist and Shout." That's an autobiography of an American great in a single sentence; I wish I could tell a story so well.
When beginning the song, "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight,"—
and we danced by the light of the moon—Springsteen mentioned that his grandmother used to sing it to him when he was going to sleep at night, and did a sweet, off-the-cuff imitation of her singing to him.
When he asked a stagehand for his "magic guitar," Springsteen joked, "When I play this one, look out," then explained that he'd had the battered old acoustic guitar "since Catholic school."
And when he asked his wife Patti and two of the female backup singers to solo—a request the singers clearly weren't expecting, as they quickly conferred on stage—he explained, "These three used to sing together on the streets of New York City 25 years ago."
All this against the backdrop of the tough town where Springsteen began his career back in the 1970s. (And at the end of the show, Springsteen read a list of local charities that the concert was benefitting.)
Family. Community. Humility. Respect. Few American artists could convey such values in the midst of a rock concert. Yet Springsteen did it not just with his words, or with the people he chose to play with, but with the music he chose to play. Only three of the songs, I think, were his own compositions. The rest were either Pete Seeger originals ("Turn, Turn, Turn") or folk songs played by Seeger, and time and again Springsteen introduced the songs by mentioning their original writer and their origin—"this one's from about a century and a half ago," or, "this is an old Irish anti-war song," or, "this is from one of the original minstrels."
In the process, he conveyed a profound sense of history and of tradition, sometimes quite literally, as when he sang "When the Saints Come Marching In," with its wonderful beginning, "We are traveling in the footsteps of those who've gone before."
Maybe it was at this point in the show when I suddenly realized why the Harvard plagiarist, Kaavya Viswanathan, disturbs me so much. There is in her act of literary theft none of those qualities that Springsteen brought to life last night and embodies in his career—none of that humility, respect, and reverence toward those who've gone before. None of that sense of tradition, of being a part of something larger, a product of the toil and the heartbreak and the joy of past generations. None of that sense of family, community, and love.
Plagiarism is the antithesis of all those things. It is a rejection of community, an insistence upon the primacy of the individual. It is disrespectful and immodest and selfish. It is greedy; it invokes contempt for those who work hard and don't cheat. It says that the labor of others does not matter except insofar as
I can use it to further my own ambitions—in this case, raking in a half-million-dollar book deal and becoming an investment banker. Is that why people go to Harvard these days? I hope not. But this is what plagiarism says; this is what it is.
And it may say something about what afflicts Harvard, and indeed our country, that there seems to be so much of it going around. I'm glad there are people like Springsteen left to remind us that we don't have to succumb to cynical opportunism, that we can strive to be better.
