4: Failure

Hey, it's Jesse. Just a quick night before we start. This episode contains discussions of racist verbal abuse and police brutality. Take care listening. I wouldn't call Bruce a queer hero. For me, it's important to be a fan, but not to mythologize him and not to cast him in that queer hero light. We're currently sitting at the end of a long concrete jetty in Dover on a kind of four way.

Bench under a shelter. And why are we here, honey, Well, this is what I love.

I'm going to refer to as my depression bench.

Welcome.

I have cried here, I've quit my job here, I've grieved here.

I come here.

Whenever I'm free a certain way about something, because, honestly, what is better than speaking your feelings into the sea. Yes, this is episode four of Because the Boss Belongs to Us, a podcast where two queer nerds sit looking at the sea endeavored talking about their feelings.

I'm Holly, Yeah, I'm Jesse, and we feel like failures.

Off the back of our conversations last episode, we're really starting to doubt our mission. Sure, a lot of Bruce Brinky's lyrics make us feel seen, but can we actually relate to him? He's a multi millionaire and a lot of his fans can sometimes make us feel unsafe, and.

When it comes to Bruce himself, there is actually just no way we can know how he really feels about things. Like any celebrity, he has a whole team of people creating his public image.

We have no idea what he's actually thinking.

So now we're like, do we even want to make a whole podcast series idolizing a rich, white, straight cisman whose politics we aren't actually sure of?

So that's why I got the train from London this morning to come and see you.

Since last episode. I went to see Bruce Springsteen playing Cardiff Wales and it was amazing. I did my usual thing of queuing up for hours to try and get as close to the front as possible, which meant I was surrounded by Springsteen fans for ages and yet as always, some of those chats were really nice and the group of people What's passed with a sign saying Bruce Springsteen Fans for a Free Palestine, which I was just so

Didn't share my politics.

To my knowledge, Bruce Springsteen has never played in Israel. But we're recording this on the nineteenth of June twenty twenty four. And while we've seen some celebrities using their platforms to take a stand on Palestinian liberation since the most recent militarized escalation last October, Bruce is not one of.

That small number.

He's often spoken about as this really political musician. He's written songs critiquing the military industrial complex, the.

Two thousand and eight financial crash, border violence, police violence, exploitive labor practices, gentrification, all things we also care about.

But I just don't feel aligned with him right now. Me and you already spent a good deal of our personal lives engaging in activism, and this has only ramped up since last October. We're going to protests, We're working with local campaign groups fighting for Palestinian liberation and for an end to British complicity in this ongoing genocide.

We've also been mobilizing against some really scary political developments that are curtailing trans access to healthcare in the UK, especially for trans youth and that's just a name two of the terrible things happening in the world right now.

Every time we've met up to do an interview, we've had a check in before it started, talking about how we're feeling about the world falling apart. Then we've had to kind of like turn on our fun queer podcast brains and think about Bruce Springsteen in this really separate way. It's a pretty hard cognitive dissonance, which is.

So hard as well, because Bruce's music genuinely helps me with this stuff. When I was at that Bruce Kage in Cardiff, he played bad Lands and you.

Know the mid late bit, Yeah, for the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive.

I love that line. It feels like he's singing my shame away. Oh yes.

And then it just builds and builds into this beautiful crescendo, and it just feels to me like a call to action. I want to find one face that ain't looking through me. I want to find one place I want to spit in the face of these bad lands. I found myself crying and screaming along to these lyrics. This song, to me is about queer anger. It's about queer rage, and it allowed me to feel some of the emotions I've been feeling about the state of the world.

Oh yeah, literally, I have chills hearing you say that, because I felt the exact same way. Weirdly, often my anger comes out and out in the streets. Literally, just the chorus. When I'm out in the street, I walk the way I want to walk. My brain stops caring about the context of the rest of the song, and that bit for me is like the musical embodiment of the chant whose streets are streets. It converts my anger

Yeah, and that's why we've come to my depression bench. We're pressing pause on the mission to take stock of how we feel about all this.

Last episode, lets introduced us to the legend of Bruce Springsteen's relationship with Clarence Clements.

Their relationship is such a big part of Springsteen fan culture. They had this beautiful platonic intimacy. They often used to kiss on the lips on stage, and after Clarence died in twenty eleven, Bruce Springsteen said he was elemental in my life and losing him was like losing the rain, which is just so fucking beautiful. And this is exactly the kind of thing that my tarror reading queer friends say all the time.

Yes, but it's also something that gives us pause. As we said before, Bruce springsteen concerts are overwhelmingly white. Often the majority of black people at his shows are people who are working musicians on stage or staff working at the venue. Bruce is celebrated for this seemingly perfect interracial relationship, But to Bruce's mythology, is that a simplification of the story. This came up when Arakzech Jasmine went to visit Lex in New Jersey.

I'm thinking a lot about Clarence Clemmens, and I'm thinking a lot about how his relationship with Bruce does a lot of the humanizing of him. It brings him back down to reality.

For me, there's this episode of Bruce's podcast Renegade.

Where he talks about how Clarence is called the N word and Bruce, instead of like kicking off like you'd want too, like a superhero would, he becomes this just this guy right who doesn't know how. He feels awkward, he feels uncomfortable, he doesn't know how to navigate that, but he just stands there to be with his friend. I think it's those moments which humanize him. He isn't this superhuman, He is just a person.

This is a very generous reading from lex I think being able to see this moment as a testament to no one being perfect, to the idea that everyone makes mistakes, but we managed to show love and show up for friends in the ways that we can. But for me, I look at this moment and I worry, like, is this a representation of what it.

Was like for Clarence to tour with the East Street Band?

I don't know, but could this be indicative that, as the only black band member, he was not only the only one experiencing racism, but also the one who might have had to do some emotional labor holding the awkwardness and discomfort of his white bandmates.

Jasmine had some reservations about this too.

I'll be honestly, there is some part that makes me feel a little weird about Like, you know, Clarence and Bruce have this deep, deep friendship, but then at the same time, it's like, here is this black man that is being not the intention, I'm sure, but like is part of this device to make a white man more relatable.

That interaction for me actually is more that he messed up for someone that he really cared about.

Yeah, I think the thing where I'm kind of going with here is that like the larger idea of a queer icon, right, queer folks that then create queer icons. It's funny that a lot of queer icons are not queer. One of my queer icons is Lord Dern, not only queer icon style icon. For me, I look at Lord.

Dern as a way of how I move through the world as a transferm person.

But here I am a black woman who has no relatability to this very wealthy white woman. I feel kind of strange about that for me personally, you know the fact that like femininity is only granted towards white womanhood, and what does it mean for like a black person to base parts of their femininity on like a white woman. Like for me, there's that levels of distortion that I feel, and then also that feeling of like there are fucking black trans women that I can just like immediately, like

I think I think for me it's probably because he was just something that unfortunately it was there, right. Bruce was something that we'd listened to in the car, we listened to him in the house. He was just part of popular culture. So I think just in my mind I had to make him what I needed him to be to get through. I couldn't tell you why why do we do this, but maybe it's because if we have them, if we make them moll mold them into

Is it's hard.

I can patchwork together on identity and then you know, wear it like a little blanket when I don't feel quite as tough as I should. I think that's how I move with it.

I love this image of lex patchworking and identity for themselves things that are available to them. But there's another bit of me that's like, that's really tiring to have to constantly be contorting the scraps that we have and molding them into a ship where we can make sense out of them. It is an amazing queer skill, but also it comes from a place of scarcity.

Yeah, I think about there's a lot about the history of queer people needing to find role models.

It's easy to forget that within living memory.

For some of our elders, homosexuality was illegal in the UK. It only started being decriminalized in England and Wales in nineteen sixty seven, and then we lost an unimaginable amount.

Of queer people to the AIDS crisis.

One of the many awful impacts of those things is that now we have so few queer elders due to decisions to not be out publicly or to fear shame or death. Things are starting to change now there are many more out public celebrities. Whether one of the impacts of this was that queer people got used to having to find queerness in role models that don't share our marginalized identities. I use my own interpretations of Bruce's lyrics to find words to understand my gender before I had

Out trans friends.

It's kind of like Bruce was a placeholder for me until I found actual queer community.

And honestly, that's really similar for me. Bruce is still so important to me now, but I do think it's significant that the time I discovered him was when I was still closeted, needing to find meaning and what I had available to me. If we're thinking about queer icons, should we in fact be moving away from this practice, like Jasmine said, finding role models within our own communities, rather than finding yet another a rich, sis straight right celeb to imprint on.

That's next. We're back.

We're still sitting on my depression bench speaking of our feelings to the same the people were thinking about as queer icons are often not very queer at all. A lot of them are straight, A lot of them are these rich celebrities that just don't represent our politics, that just doesn't sit right.

This is something I discussed with Tom Rasmussen, who we heard from way back in episode one. We were talking about whether one of the unifying factors of queer icons is you dress up as them at a party, which it's got us talking about the singer, songwriter, visual artist and legend and one.

But then what's interesting is there's queer icons that you wouldn't dress up as like you would never but I consider her as a queer icon, but she's queer, So.

Then it's like, is that a different Hello Fish?

I don't know, that's really interesting. Can a queer person be a queer icon? Does a queer icon in the way we're talking about it do they have to be like parodiable because.

You would never parody only.

You couldn't, yeah, because she's she's mother. But like you could parody Mariah, or you could parody or not parody, but you could you want to sort of dress up as them. This is very hard, I'm sorry, not really being.

No, no, no, no, That's why we're that's why we're making the series.

But then I think also that there's an interesting question about gay icon queer icon, gay icon is particular.

Hmmm, yeah, interesting, have we actually been bad scientists? We're trying to test and Bruce's icon potential against a methodological framework that we based on a bunch of gay icons, But was that the wrong control group to be easy?

Yeah.

Also, a lot of these more obvious gay icons Brittany, Madonna, Whitney, et cetera, are often anointed by cis white gay.

Men, a part of the community that has historically had the loudest voice, the most sway in shaping queer culture. We're coming at this question of Bruce's icon credentials from a lens of like dyke and trans mass culture.

In our lives, we use gay to refer to people's sexualities, where thereas in queer is a term that speaks to a political identity too, as the old phrase goes, not gays and happy queer as in fuck you. So this gay icon versus queer icon distinction feels important.

Gay icon is like rhinestones on the bell. Gay icon does reinvent every single album that story of like of like real unbelievable wealth and success through adversity and getting there yourself and it's you, you, thank you and God, and that's it when you receive your like thirty second Grammy. What's really complicated then about that as idolizing these people who for whom that is the narrative is that's like a deeply deeply thatcher right, really right wing narrative as well.

In an American context, like totally typical American dream.

Pulled up by the bootstraps, Yeah, regionistic, which completely which is sort of really empathetical to like queer practices of community or whatever. And so I think that's why maybe it's hard to have an icon come out of the queer scene. Yeah, the older I've got, the more I've been turned off by that narrative, and the more I find it to be sort of quite like bleak.

Can queer icon means something different to gay icon, like in the way we're.

Using it, And who are we to decide who a queer icon is?

Are we falling into accidentally homogenizing the queer experience by speaking for all queer people?

Should we be moving away from these kinds of definitions entirely?

Wait, a queer icons just unsatisfactory substitutes for queer role models and community.

We need to get on this bench.

Too many questions, not enough answers. We're getting a little bit navel gaizy. We need tooth away from the sea.

I have an idea.

We get to have some we kind of walked down this round here.

We're gonna get.

Ahead of like bad things to see walking away from.

You come in, come in all right?

You get oh such one.

Okay, So for the benefit to take we are now back in Holly's house Stanley in their living.

Room with tea left wind.

And we have crafted an email to Jack how was the writer, academic, and author of.

The Queer Art of Failure, which we.

Feel is apt for what is happening right now.

So this is what we said in the email.

In episode four of our series, we've hit a rite block on our mission, and we're looking for a kind of queer agony uncle to talk our feelings of failure through with we would it, of course absolutely to be If this sounds intriguing, would you be up for a chat?

So I guess we'll see if he's up for.

A jat that's next, Jesse Holly, because the bus belongs to us, or does he?

We're not really sure anymore.

So, sir, it's a few days after that day we spent on a depression bench and we've.

Heard back from Jack, haven't we we have? Would you like to read his reply?

Yes, let me read the reply from esteemed at Jack Harveston beloved queer theories too all. He said, Hi, there, love the premise getting an unlikely figure recognized as a queer icon, but don't love the boss. So that's a past from.

Me, Thanks Jack. I mean, at least he said he loves the premise, and you know that means a lot.

So we've had to pivot, as queers often do, and I've come up with another solution. I feel pretty good about.

My Mum and dad went to a few of his concerts, like they went to quite a famous one that he did in mid eighties and he played in Newcastle and he gave quite a big amount of money to the local miners lodge who were on strike at the time. But my mom and dad was that tour.

This is a dear friend of mine and our substitute agony A. CJ. Ray's parents brought back a big Born in the USA poster from that concept, the one that's Bruce's butt, which they put up in the basement.

I remember going down the stairs and seeing it every time and just thinking like, hmm, that's pretty nice. I think I knew from an early age that I was attracted to both men and women, and I think for me, like the ultimate like early attraction was definitely Bruce.

I know from the queer punk scene. They are a true Bruce Springsteen mega fan who also shares our politics, so I thought they'd be good for some emotional processing.

I used to play in a queer punk band called Kinky, and we were playing a gig in London. Going upstairs was like a zine festival. Holly was there, and Holly had all these Bruce Springsteen zines and I saw them and it kind of blew my mind a bit, and I was like, oh my God, Like, I love scenes and I love Bruce Springsteen and I think he's a sexy man. I'm gonna make a zene about this, and they did.

I have it up in my bedroom wom It's called Butt Springsteen.

I draw pictures of an accentuated Bruce Springsteen butt at different parts of his career, talk about the different eras and the born to run, but the tunnel of love, but all the different butts, and then I give each one like a rating out of ten, but just as a spoiler, they're They're all ten.

So CJ now runs an art platform called Black Lodge Press. They design these beautiful posters with political statements fuck Matcher, bullshit, forever vote with a fucking brick. The past, we inherit, the future we build. They do a bun of research into each one, and they've made loads of zines as well, exploring queer radical histories of resistance.

When I go to the big Palestine demos that have been happening since October in London, you see black eards with Blacklodge Press art everywhere. We wanted to talk to CJ about what role art can play in the politics of resistance. CJ started thinking about this stuff as a kid when their big sister introduced them to bands like The Prodigy and Rage Against the Machine.

And we've Raged against the machine like the Zapatista kind of you know, liberation politics, movement and stuff discovering like punk through that as well, like hardcore punk, and really at the kind of heart of that is like the Diya ethos that's kind of embedded within like the anarchist politics of it all as well. So it maybe want to make zines, and it maye me want to make music and then make art and participate in direct action and stuff. For me, it's there is no radical culture

I love what you said about I hope. There's a in one of Mariam Karber's books. He's like a big abolistionist. She says like, hope is a discipline, which is something that me and my friends talk about quite a lot, as like it just being a really really important thing that you that you need in order to fight for the world that you believe in and that you need to make happen.

Yeah. I mean sometimes people say like, oh, it's the hope that kills you. I think it's a cynicism that kills you, like that just like eats away.

This is something that me and Olly have been really struggling with. We both come from quite similar backgrounds to you in terms of how we found our politics. And Bruce Springsteen, I think we can all agree it's not a DIY artist.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

And one of the things that we're kind of struggling with is that you know, you'll be a Bruce Springsteen live gig and there are people around you who definitely don't share your politics at all.

There's a song called forty one Shots, which he debuted in two thousand and the song forty one Shots is about the killing of an unarmed black man called Armadudialla. He was shot forty one times and by the MIYPD. And when that song was debuted in New York his live show, people were booing, People were leaving some of their backs on the stage as he played it as a form of protest, and the NYPD tried to organize a boycott of that gig, and then some of the

Right.

Sometimes as a Bruce fan, it can be really jarring to just feel that disconnect of thinking, oh, we're on the same page, me and Bruce, but then to realize, oh, am I just fitting in the blanks myself here.

Yeah.

I mean I get that kind of disconnect sometimes when I go to a punk show though, as well, and you're standing in the audience and there's like an abusive ex partner or somebody that you're friends with, or there's like somebody that's like cracking like homophobic jokes and all this kind of stuff. Oh went to private school, Yeah exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess like because we we kind of connected with him for the politics or for like our interpretation of

Aren't we welcome that too?

Yeah?

Exactly, Yeah, yeah, Yeah, there's a Bruce's butt for everyone everywhere.

Yeah. Yeah.

We're potentially getting to a point where we're like, there's a Bruce Springsteen who we have, as you said, Holleyfield in the blanks for and so we're like, there's like a Bruce that.

Exists in our brains.

Yeah, and then I guess what we're trying to work out at the moment is like, if you have got all that meaning and through that kind of created the Bruce Bristeen of your dreams, how much expectations should you have of the actual Bruce Bringsteen who's walking around in New Jersey like breathing air and talking to people.

Yeah, it's like the idea of Bruce and then the actual reality of him being a human being is like it's really like if I if somebody says to me Bruce Springsteen, I instantly in my head think of like nineteen seventy six Bruce, like hot hot. I often just forget that he's actually a real person. It's quite a

That's part of it, though, isn't it. I think that's how we compartmentalize and what we make meaning for because I don't like to think that the album Working on a Dream exists. I want to block that from my memory. Queen the Supermarket, What don't know?

I mean, there's there's stuff that he's done, you know, Like when I think was it North Carolina past the kind of bathroom law that transphobic? Was it North Carolina? I think it's somewhere where yeah, yeah, yeah, And he had a solidarity for like the kind of trans and LGBT community. He canceled that show because he wasn't going to play in a state which had that law. For me, that isn't like a kind of performative action at all. Like I think that's really coming from him and from

I'm so sorry, we're being real down, But.

I know, I think I think he does, like he does show solidarity to the different communities, you know, giving money or like or writing songs about like different experiences for different communities and different people. I think he does show that.

I feel I'm I know that we literally just had a conversation about how cynicism isn't always useful. But I do feel slightly more cynical about the canceled gig than you CJ. Like when I'm feeling down on Breece. Yeah, I have this feeling where I'm like, he wasn't the only artist who did that. It was there was like a cool to boycott or to cancel gigs in North Carolina because of this baffing bill that was anti trans So like a bunch.

Of artists did or were at least asked to.

And the cynical bit of my brain is like, well, you know, Bruce is fucking loaded, Like it was very easy for him to cancel one gig and it did make him look really good.

I believe it can be both things.

I believe that he can have those politics and that it can be good for his career, so that I'm like, yes, that is nice. Yes, it also makes you look good. Is this the bind of being a celebrity?

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, it's tricky in it.

Yeah.

I think like I wouldn't be shocked if like a proportion of Bruce Bingsteen fans have transphobic views. Like that wouldn't surprise me. I guess it did like provide like a positive piece of publicity for him by by counseling that gig, But I would be surprised as well if it maybe even turned a few fans off him as all. At the same time, poor guy, he's fucked either way.

It's tough, isn't It's a tough bind because I really relate to UCJ of being like sometimes I just ignore a day.

Because that is also part of life, isn't it.

The other relatable experience in my life is that I simply love to watch a shitty, shitty rum com, like a rum com that has the worst sexual politics in it, do you know what I mean? That's the most heteronormative that like portrays a version of life and love that I completely disagree with. But I find it very comforting,

Yeah?

I think so. Yeah. No, I guess it's like going to the football, Like I like despise like the kind of the entire like structure of modern football, like the wages, the sponsorship, you know, everything about it. I despise it, But I love football, and so like I'm still going to go and watch football. I'm still going to support my team. If we kind of break down, people like Bruce, not even people like Bruce, but like notions of Bruce

It's an often like misused quote, but that whole like there's no such thing as ethical consumption and the capitalism it's been stretched to all different versions but could also be applied here. I do wonder as well, like, as queer fans, is this a sign that we like really truly love something because we're tearing him to shreds right now. But I feel like you can only really do that with the things that you really love as well, what you can terrogate.

In that way, Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

I wonder just to kind of sum up all this up, is there any advice you can give to us about how we can be good fans? How how does fan how does that work for you? And like, can you give us any any tips?

I would say, like maybe approach it from a hopeful point of view rather than a cynical point of view, a hopeful view in which you can make a connection with people or gain pleasure or joy from something. I lost my dad like two years ago, and we we played a Bruce song at his funeral. If I should fall behind, I think it is always called oh yeah, we played that at his funeral, and I've seen him a few times, but I've never seen him play that before.

I've literally got a tear in my eye that is.

Go with open Hearts.

That's next episode.

Because the Buss Belongs to Us is a production of malten Hart and iHeart Podcasts were hosted by Jesse Lawson and Holly Gassio.

The series is executive produced by Jesse and Holly and created by Jesse Lawson.

This episode was produced and sound designed by Jesse Lawson, with production assistants from Thomas Griffin and Tess Hazel. Michelle Macklam is our mix engineer.

Our original music and theme is by Talk Bizarre at Talk b a zed Aar Underscore.

Our show art was designed and illustrated by Holly Cassio at Holly c Asio Clact.

Checking by Selina Solin. Legal services provided by Rowan, Moran and File.

Our executive producer from Moulton Hert is Jasmine dat Green. Our executive producer from iHeart Podcasts is Lindsay Hoffman, Hi good Lie.

Because the pus of