TS: Bruce Springsteen's "Racing in the Street" vs. Eminem's "Stan"

Cuz summer's gone and the time is right: which tragic tale of an obsessed dude with a depressed girlfriend is better?

can't stand the Dido chorus anymore.

Bruce

personally I prefer the Dido chorus to "with the eyes of one who hates for just being born." The awkwardness of that construction grates on me more and more as time goes on.

damn thought dave q was back

lol

Ok, so the thing that's always bothered me about "Racing in the Street" is that the narrator seems too self-aware for the kind of story Bruce is trying to tell. It seems like on the one hand Bruce wants to tell a story about a guy who's deluding himself into thinking that drag racing makes him cool and gives his life meaning, but on the other hand he wants to sing it like a dirge and really dwell on how miserable the guy's girlfriend is and how much of a toll his obsession is taking on her. And he's trying to do all that through a first-person song, so you end up with a narrator who's simultaneously clueless and self-aware. Does he really think that some guys just stop living, but not him, he goes racing in the street? Or is he hyper-aware that racing in the street is what's killing him?

Anyway, it occurred to me the other day that "Stan" tells roughly the same story - the guy who's compensating for the general hopelessness of his life by developing an increasingly unhealthy obsession, and the emotional toll it takes on his girlfriend, just updated for a time when people are more likely to get obsessed with celebrities than with drag racing. But where Bruce tries to tell it through a single voice, Eminem tells it through three voices, one of them a woman's, which I think is actually very effective.

Isn’t that Bruce narrative strategy kind of common though? In novels, maybe, when the protagonist is a child, like David Copperfield, say, but doesn’t have to be a child I guess, could just be a Good Soldier. Although maybe in that case it is more implicit, the child/narrator reports events but doesn’t quite understand the significance of them, although we can figure it because the author is signaling us. What’s the word they taught us in school, dramatic irony? Kind of hard to do in a three minute pop song, or is it?

lol

I probably didn't phrase it that well, but I'm not really talking about dramatic irony. I would say that Bruce successfully uses that a lot in songs like Badlands or The Promised Land, where you have this hopeful tone despite everything about the narrator's circumstance telling you that the hope is pretty futile.

Racing in the Street doesn't quite work that way to me because it sounds so miserable. That's what I mean about the guy simultaneously seeming self-aware and not. He's not accidentally telling you a depressing story through details he doesn't understand. The song sounds like he knows his situation is miserable. Half the lyrics tell you he knows his situation is miserable. The other half tell you he's clueless. To me, that comes across as an inconsistent POV rather than dramatic irony.

I didn't phrase mine well either, and by the time I was finished typing I kind of realized what you were getting at, thanks for clarifying.

“Racing in the Street” shoulda been done in a Beach Boys style, super upbeat with a lot of “oo-WOO-ee-ooooh” and “bom-bom-bom” background vox.