Bruce Springsteen is featured on the new “Home of the Brave Backstage” video series.
A new video series about music and politics — put together by the Home of the Brave organization, and titled “Home of the Brave Backstage” — launches today with a 10-minute episode featuring Bruce Springsteen that can be seen below.
“To me, music and politics … on some level, has always been intertwined, because what is rock ‘n’ roll or hip-hop?” Springsteen asks, rhetorically, at the start of the episode, in a clip edited down from a longer interview segment. “It’s an expression of freedom. It’s like, hey, we do plenty of music that’s just fun. But we want to make you think about what it means to be an American, about what your responsibility to your community, to your country, is.”
Later, he says he has always seen himself as “a defender of democracy, of American values.”
The show is co-hosted by Dropkick Murphys frontman Ken Casey; former Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia officer Michael Fanone, who was seriously injured on Jan. 6, 2021; and Sarah Longwell, who serves on Home of the Brave’s advisory board. Future episodes will feature Joan Baez, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett, and others.
According to a press release, each episode “will focus on the necessity of artists using their platforms to speak out, how ordinary people can fight back, and the devastating consequences of staying silent in our moment of rising authoritarianism.”
Springsteen concludes the segment by saying, “particularly as someone who grew up in the ’60s, it’s been shocking, the lack of national momentum to stop what’s been happening (politically). I’m not someone who necessarily believes every artist has to be political. … People use culture and are culturally powerful in many ways. You can make an argument that Elvis, a James Brown, or a Curtis Mayfield … you can make an argument that they changed the world as much as Woody Guthrie, just by what they exuded and what they performed. So I don’t think every artist needs to use his voice that way. But I think if you are inclined to, and if you are involved in the national life and community life of the place you come from … to know yourself, to know what it means to be an American, to live in America … I think your community involvement, your national involvement is of great benefit to your own search for identity.”
The episodes were filmed at The Power to the People Festival at The Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on Oct. 3.
Future episodes will be posted on Home of the Brave’s YouTube channel.
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