The Tris McCall Report

Lyrics Check: "No Surrender"

There were about seven thousand singles released form Born In The U.S.A. "No Surrender" was not one of them. At first glance, this seems a little arbitrary -- there's no real reason why "I'm Going Down" or "Cover Me" should have gotten the nod ahead of "No Surrender," a song with a bigger chorus and a more sweeping verse than either of those. But in 1984-85, after the runaway success of "Dancing In The Dark," anything released by Springsteen was chartable. Decisions about what would be pulled from the album and thrown onto mainstream radio started to feel a little more personal.

The Boss is a generous writer, and all of his songs are given to the world. But I think "No Surrender" may have been presented to us a little differently. Springsteen may have intended this particular argument for his core fans -- those who had been following the story from the outset, and were as interested in his views on his home state as they were on the Reagan Administration. Born In The U.S.A. was such a monster hit that pinpointing a target audience for a single release couldn't have been easy to do. Yet putting "No Surrender" in a prominent place on the album (it kicked off side two, at a time when such a move still meant something) while withholding it from commercial radio might have been a message from the Boss: to get this one, you can't just be zoning out on the beach. To get to this one, you've got to buy the album and pay attention to the whole thing.

Springsteen would later confirm the importance of "No Surrender" by foregrounding it on his live boxed set. As for me, "No Surrender" was an immediate favorite, and important enough to compel me to scrawl the lyrics on the brown paper cover of my primary-school reader. I was just a kid -- at the dawn of my purchasing power -- when Born In The U.S.A. came out. I remember riding my three-speed bicycle to the Millburn Music Staff, buying the cassette, opening it up, and memorizing the songs on my ride home; one eye on the road as I pedaled, another on the liner notes in my left hand. In a week's time, I'd have committed the entire album -- from "born down" to "your hometown," from the initial enormous kick drum to the final fading synthesizer pad -- to something much deeper than memory.

Even then, it struck me that "No Surrender" was a little different from the rest of the songs on Born In The U.S.A. It was a little more fist-pumping, a little more echoed, a little more ancient-sounding. If I'd been the older version of me, I might have identified the effect as "Spectorian"; if, at that point, I knew Greetings and The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle as well as I did The River and Nebraska, I might have considered the song a throwback. Certainly it's the most high-Romantic song on Born In The U.S.A., and a reminder that Springsteen could still turn on the Turnpike Byron schtick when he wanted to. Here's a break from the terse, unsettling, economical address that Springsteen had, by then, developed and used so well on songs like the title track, "Glory Days," and "My Hometown" -- proof positive that the wordy, imagistic Springsteen hadn't been completely subsumed.

Me, I found the song inspiring. I knew that Born In The U.S.A. was, among many other things, a major downer, and I saw "No Surrender" as a defiant break in the gloom. Well, defiant it is, but upbeat it almost certainly is not. And as I've traveled around our state, I've returned frequently to "No Surrender" -- since so many claims made, attitudes struck, public frustrations and positions seem to resonate with the song's lyric. I have come to believe that the key to understanding New Jersey is buried in the lyric of "No Surrender," and that to truly comprehend the song and its monumental second verse is to begin to know what it means to be a Jerseyan.

Let's take a closer look at Springsteen's words, and I'll try to show you what I mean.

We busted out of class/ Had to get away from those fools/ We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school/ Tonight I hear the neighborhood drummer sound/ I can feel my heart begin to pound/ You say you're tired and you just want to close your eyes and follow your dreams down

The first verse opens with a standard rock and roll cliché: school's out, and it's a damn good thing. Sure caught my attention when I was sitting in class -- nothing pleases the kids quite like populist railing against teacher. But even here, at the most mundane moment in what becomes a strange and hallucinatory song, Springsteen's word choice is telling. He begins with an escape, a refusal to engage with the school system. His students are looking for release; they're prisoners trying to get away. Compare to Paul Simon's comparable opening to "Kodachrome": "when I think back on all the crap I learned in high school," he complains, "it's a wonder that I can think at all." Simon, the Springsteen of New York, takes a typical New Yorker's line: his problem is with the subject matter, not the institution. Simon's narrator is implicitly suggesting that if the "crap" could be improved or upgraded, the school system might not be something that needed "busting out" of.

Springsteen's characters wouldn't agree. They're not looking for instruction from people who aren't part of their subculture. They want to learn, too, but they're not looking to any established authority to teach them. They believe that their own community -- in this case, the rock and roll community that makes three minute pop records -- is the one worth listening to. See, Simon's problem is with the curriculum. Springsteen's is with the official pedagogy -- he doesn't believe there should be any. We can teach ourselves, his characters say. We don't need wisdom imposed by authorities, we can find it within our own neighborhoods.

And so in case we need a reminder that this is the prevailing attitude, the "neighborhood drummer" begins to play. This is something more than an invitation to dance, or to party -- if you hear the neighborhood drummer, you're in tune with something fundamental and unerring about your community. The teachers and institutions can't get in step with it; it's a heartbeat reserved for those who belong to the clan. But the response to this call isn't what you might think it would be: instead of feeling energized, by belonging, the unnamed "you" of the song opts to shut his eyes and follow an inner vision. What sort of an existence is this: one turned so sharply inward, away from any named authorities, that it begins to feel circular, awash in fantasia?

The chorus:

We made a promise we swore we'd always remember/ No retreat, baby, no surrender/ Like soldiers in the winter night with a vow to defend/ No retreat, baby, no surrender

If the narrator won't acknowledge that the world outside his neighborhood has anything to teach or show him that's more compelling than his own dreams, he's certainly not pretending it isn't there. It's present, all right -- and it's hostile. The gang of friends who busted out of class with such urgency is here reimagined as a militia, strung out in hardship on a battlefield. If their camaraderie is a strength, it's also borne of necessity and a kind of desperation.

What do we know about the war they're fighting, this epic battle set to the tattoo of the neighborhood drummer? Most importantly, it's a defensive struggle. These soldiers are dug in against an outside force that is demanding surrender -- a combined host of teachers, authorities, and institutions arrayed against the integrity of the clan. The vow made by the characters is one of resistance: no, we won't listen to your recommendations or follow your lead, no, we won't adopt your values. We will cling with all our might to whatever self-determination we can squeeze out of the public sphere.

Tonight young faces grow tired and old and hearts of fire grow cold/ We swore blood brothers against the wind/ Now I'm ready to grow young again/ I can hear your sister's voice calling us home across the open yard/ Well, maybe we can cut someplace of our own with these drums and these guitars

It's an exhausting fight. Choosing not to capitulate to outside cultural forces requires constant vigilance, and an unwillingness to become interpolated into the mainstream by osmosis. And that's what happens to most everybody, right?, you start out determined to be true to yourself, your band of brother and gang of freaks, and then Citibank comes calling with an offer or two, and the next thing you know, you've capitulated. You leave Teaneck, buy a condominium in Chelsea, and become a member of Lincoln Center. But not these guys, not the heroes of "No Surrender." Swearing blood brothers against the wind means you stand with your community at all expense. It'll kill you young, and it'll wear you out, but refusing to become one of Them -- that's the whole ballgame.

But who They are is ill-defined; here, as elsewhere. You can do battle with the forces that erode your cultural identity, but you often look stupid in the process -- refusing to eat anyplace but the neighborhood diner will look to those who aren't insane with Jersey pride like tilting at windmills, or, at least extremely paranoid. The battle for self-determination forces the defender of his own integrity tighter and tighter into a corner of his own devising. It's confining. It makes even the most battle-tested warrior long for a spot where he can drop his guard and do his own thing without the pressure of outside influence.

Yet mainstream culture keeps calling. We hear the voice across the open yard; it hits the clan like a summons. They stop and wonder what they ought to do, and they express that desire that all Jerseyans, no matter how sophisticated and refined, have felt at one time or another: "maybe we can cut someplace of our own." Where that place might be isn't specified. Most likely it can't be specified. But the tug toward that imagined land -- that place of our own where we won't be bothered, where we won't have to give up the neighborhood lessons and traditions that we share, where our own constructed community can't be shattered -- draws us, pushes us, ties us into knots, sets us alight with desire, defiance and blood vows.

And that's it. That's the key to understanding what makes New Jersey the place it is. Why are there towns in Hudson County that consist of a few city blocks? Why are we unable to regionalize our thinking; why isn't there more cooperation between cities? Within the cities, why is it so difficult to find out what's going on; why doesn't news spread? Why are our social scenes so atomized, sealed off from each other? Why are there 566 municipal governments in a state almost as small as Delaware? It is because the principle desire articulated in "No Surrender" -- the call to cut someplace of our own -- motivates everything we do. Take any issue, any debate currently extant in New Jersey. Apply a little pressure to the parameters of that debate, and its character will be revealed: somebody is trying to cut someplace of his own. Somebody is breaking away, jealously guarding the integrity of his community, refusing to listen to outside sources, taking his ball and going home.

It makes us special, really it does; it makes us special even as it kills us. We're great nonconformists, libertarians -- we want you to do your own thing, as long as it happens over there, far away from our own thing. We're not going to tell you how to live your life. We're not going to tell you anything. We're finding our own way, making someplace of our own; sometimes with drums and guitars, sometimes with secession movements and school board hearings, and sometimes just by closing our eyes, and following our dreams down. And as we bat those lashes and drift off into an inner vision, the neighborhood itself fades to black, and doors slowly shut:

On the street tonight, the lights grow dim/ The walls of my room are closing in/ There's a war outside still raging/ You say it ain't ours anymore to win/ I want to sleep beneath peaceful skies in my lover's bed/ With the wide open country in my eyes and these romantic dreams in my head

As a pre-teen elementary school student, busy getting my education from three-minute records and the romantic dreams in my head, I wrote these lyrics on the brown-paper cover of my reader. This was the poetry that spoke to me: not the grand, nation-building doggerel of the flag salute or the adventures of Dick and Jane, not even the optimistic rhythms of Dr. Seuss and Edward Lear, but this story of escape, defeat, closure. I was young to be so fatalistic. But I was a Jersey kid born and bred, not wanting to listen to anybody, always looking to cut someplace of my own, skipping out of class to read books or to make up stories, searching for a way to elude the closing walls.

I think we're right to see it as a war: a constant fight to maintain self-determination, intellectual and otherwise, amidst a mass culture that seems determined to strip it away. That's the part of New Jersey that's great -- that defiance, that willfulness, the ferocious defense of turf. But like all wars, it's fought at a price. We're now so distrustful of overarching plans and unification projects of any sort that it's nearly impossible to kick-start communication between the thousands of little clans that make up Jersey society. We don't look for common ground, we look for our own ground. Resistance here is a tenacious act, but it's also a private act. Individually, our escapes may be more successful than those of the people who take to the streets in a chase for Utopias to construct and heathens to convert. Individually, we're unconquerable. Collectively, we're easy pickings. We're atomized, huddled in thousands of private subcultures, swearing allegiance against the wind -- bands of blood brothers getting old as the lights grow dim.