This Land Ain’t Flowers’ Land

Man, the Mormons in Las Vegas must have it bad.

On their latest album, “Sam’s Town,” lead singer Brandon Flowers and his Merry Bunch of Killers have turned musically and thematically towards New Jersey legend Bruce Springsteen, using his brand of proletarian songwriting to illuminate the plight of their blue-collar peers on the mean streets of Vegas.

Actually, it seems that everyone’s favorite neo-glam-gone-heartland-band The Killers may have picked Springsteen as role model just because they think he’s patriotic, as opposed to those “anti-American” no-goodniks in Green Day, who Flowers recently denounced for having the gall not only to insult the president and his policies, but to go on tour in Europe spreading the same sentiments!

The result is just hypocritical enough to turn the stomachs of fans of the Boss. The album, which takes its name from a hotel-casino in Vegas, offers about as much authentic Americana as neighboring Paris Las Vegas Hotel offers of “la vie Parisienne.” Catchy as the title track may be, Flowers may need a reminder that it takes more than singing “my brother he was born on the fourth of July” to live up to the Boss’s legacy.

In a recent press conference—cited by everyone from MTV to The Boston Globe—Flowers said he liked how Springsteen’s music went into the towns of the working class “and into their houses and…humanized them.” Maybe it’s because Springsteen was actually friends with “them,” and didn’t need a reminder that “they” were just as human as record execs and alt-rockers.

Evidence of a profound social commitment on “Sam’s Town” is scant, but who needs musical populism a la Guthrie when your latest disc is, in Flowers’ words to MTV, “one of the best albums in 20 years.” In declaring his deep debt to Bruce, and in writing an overwrought album of trendy arena indie titled after a Vegas casino, Flowers wins a place in a long line of observers to misunderstand the goals of “Heartland Rock.”

The unfortunately and inaccurately-named genre—calling New Jersey part of the “heartland” raises both geographic and normative issues—popular in the early to mid-1980s, is usually defined by down-home folks like Springsteen, Tom Petty, and John Cougar Mellencamp: artists who wrote tender blue-collar tales of broken American dreams and perseverance over folksy rock backings, not maudlin anecdotes over bubbling synth lines.

Hell, even Billy Joel got in on the act with his trumped-out prole anthems “Allentown” and “The Downeaster Alexa,” conjuring up infinitely absurd images of Joel working in a steel mill, or relying on “the rod and the reel” to feed his family. Predating the Killers’ similar appropriation by several decades, Joel’s irony may have been unintended, but the best of the genre, and its musical ancestors, relied on a self-conscious tension between catchiness and acerbity.

Most of the best stereotypically “American” rock songs were written at least partly as bitter parodies; witness Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” penned as an Okie anthem in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless America.” Not everyone heard Guthrie’s original lyrics protesting the plight of people who “stood there hungry” in line at the relief office; George H.W. Bush, an unrepentant booster of privatization and welfare reduction, somehow managed to use “This Land” during his presidential campaigns.

Springsteen himself is known for covering “This Land” on tour, prefacing his performances with the song’s full backstory, making it clear that his own anthem “Born in the U.S.A.” falls in the same camp as Guthrie’s protest song. The Boss wasn’t wrapping himself in the flag in this song, but calling out a nation for their callous treatment of Vietnam vets. Like Guthrie’s work, the song was misunderstood and appropriated by politicians, this time within a matter of months.

The song was the titular track on Springsteen’s 1984 album “Born in the U.S.A.,” released to mass commercial and critical appeal in the midst of the 1984 Mondale-Reagan presidential campaign. In the wake of this success, conservative columnist George Will wrote a column entitled “Yankee Doodle Springsteen,” praising the positive attitude of a song where “problems always [seem] punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” Apparently the Reagan-era deficits extended to the realm of irony.

It gets even stranger. Given Will’s connections to President Reagan’s re-election campaign, staffers there made inquiries to Springsteen’s management about a possible endorsement. They politely declined the invitation, but the story doesn’t stop there; at a campaign stop in Hammonton, N.J., Reagan spoke about “America’s future,” a future that “rests in the message of hop in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.” The Gipper shouting out to the Boss?!

Recently, right-wing candidates seem to have learned their lessons, borrowing songs with more thoroughbred jingoist credentials for their theme music. Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” playing sporadically during the 1984 Republican National Convention, and interminably after Sept. 11, is a prime example.

The song is about as sugary-sweet as they come, but in the wake of Congress’ recent decision on legalizing torture and Bush’s signing of a bill making martial law easier to impose, cynical listeners may get a chuckle out of Greenwood’s “the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.” Luckily for rock fans, this song is as bland and forgettable as “Sam’s Town.”

Despite Flowers’ showboating, I think it’s safe to say that people will be humming “This Land is Your Land” and “Born in the U.S.A.” long after Killers songs like “Bling (Confessions of a King)” are reduced to iTunes Music Store bargain bins. Whether they understand the intent behind the music is another story.

—Staff writer Will B. Payne can be reached at payne@fas.harvard.edu