"Plus, you know, when I was young, there was a lot of respect for clowning in rock music - look at Little Richard. It was a part of the whole thing, and I always also believed that it released the audience"
About this Quote
Springsteen is defending a lost art: the permission slip to be ridiculous on purpose. In rock’s current self-mythology, authenticity is treated like a sacrament - grit, sincerity, trauma, the whole confessional package. By invoking Little Richard, he reminds you that early rock wasn’t built only on seriousness; it was built on spectacle, camp, and a kind of holy misbehavior. The “clowning” isn’t a cheap gag, it’s a strategy: exaggeration as truth-telling.
The key move is his casual phrasing - “Plus, you know” - which downplays what’s actually a pointed critique. He’s arguing that rock once understood performance as an active relationship with the room, not just an artist broadcasting feelings. Clowning is a social technology: it punctures cool, breaks the audience’s self-consciousness, and turns a concert from observation into participation. “Released the audience” is doing a lot of work here. Release from what? From the pressure to perform taste, from the armor of irony, from the expectation that being moved must look restrained.
There’s also an implicit defense of his own stage persona: the mugging, the theatrics, the big gestures that some critics file under cornball. Springsteen frames those choices as lineage, not indulgence. Rock’s power, he suggests, isn’t only in making you feel seen; it’s in making you feel free - even if freedom starts with a well-timed, ecstatic bit of clowning.
The key move is his casual phrasing - “Plus, you know” - which downplays what’s actually a pointed critique. He’s arguing that rock once understood performance as an active relationship with the room, not just an artist broadcasting feelings. Clowning is a social technology: it punctures cool, breaks the audience’s self-consciousness, and turns a concert from observation into participation. “Released the audience” is doing a lot of work here. Release from what? From the pressure to perform taste, from the armor of irony, from the expectation that being moved must look restrained.
There’s also an implicit defense of his own stage persona: the mugging, the theatrics, the big gestures that some critics file under cornball. Springsteen frames those choices as lineage, not indulgence. Rock’s power, he suggests, isn’t only in making you feel seen; it’s in making you feel free - even if freedom starts with a well-timed, ecstatic bit of clowning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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