The Atlantic

Bruce Springsteen Explains It All

As his wildly successful one-man Broadway show comes to Netflix, one thing is clear: Under his tutelage, everything makes sense.
Source: Kevin Mazur / Netflix

Bruce Springsteen is a phony, and he wants you to know it. “I’ve never held an honest job in my entire life,” he shouts early in his one-man stage show, viewable on Netflix Sunday. “I’ve never seen the inside of a factory, and yet it’s all I’ve ever written about. Standing before you is a man who’s become wildly and absurdly successful writing about something [with] which he has had absolutely no personal experience.”

Springsteen’s deceptions, as revealed in the extraordinary , are

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic5 min readAmerican Government
What Nikki Haley Is Trying to Prove
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Nikki Haley faces terrible odds in her home state of
The Atlantic7 min readAmerican Government
The Americans Who Need Chaos
This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. Several years ago, the political scientist Michael Bang Petersen, who is based in Denmark, wanted to understand why peop
The Atlantic3 min read
They Rode the Rails, Made Friends, and Fell Out of Love With America
The open road is the great American literary device. Whether the example is Jack Kerouac or Tracy Chapman, the national canon is full of travel tales that observe America’s idiosyncrasies and inequalities, its dark corners and lost wanderers, but ult

Related Books & Audiobooks