[This past June, Bruce Springsteen released Tracks 2, a stunning collection featuring 7 previously unreleased full albums (totaling 9 LPs) from the early 80s through the late 2010s. It’s full of great music, but our favorite was Inyo, an album that connects to so many American histories. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy four songs & the album overall!]
On two ways the stunning title track added to my sense of LA histories.
Way back in February 2012, I dedicated a blog post to one of my favorite films, Chinatown (1974), and how it can help us analyze the history and identity of Los Angeles. In lieu of a full first paragraph here I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back for a couple thoughts on how “Inyo” reflects and extends some significant shifts in my thinking since then.
Obviously I’m aware—as anyone who’s seen Chinatown has to be—that the white men who built modern Los Angeles in the early 20th century were not always beacons of goodness (to put it very mildly). But in that post, I still referred to William Mulholland as simply a “particularly visionary city planner,” and at least implied that his aqueduct project was a straightforward public good. So I really appreciate that Springsteen’s song “Inyo,” the speaker of which first works on the aqueduct and then helps bomb it as part of the 1910s-20s “California water wars,” highlights how that aqueduct and its vital resources were consistently shaped by wealth and power. Moreover, that speaker includes not just class but race and ethnicity in his story, narrating, “My uncle pushed the Paiute from their valley/Cut out his homestead in blood.” Chinatown includes one young Native American kid (probably—it’s hard to say for sure) in its vision of LA, but this moment in Springsteen’s song really adds to those histories.
All of those histories have very much continued into our 21st century moment, and as my wife and I listened along to “Inyo” I was delighted to find that Springsteen’s speaker brings us up to the present in the song’s stunning final verse: “Tonight the Santa Ana’s drawing west across the Mojave/Blowing fire and dust onto L.A. County windowsills/Bill Mulholland and Fred Eaton are dead in their graves/The Queen of Angels, she remains thirsty still.” Back in this October 2021 post I connected California wildfires to Chinatown through the lens of David Wyatt’s excellent book Five Fires, and of course that unfolding contemporary history has only become more potent and destructive in the four years since. And I really love how Springsteen’s song connects our current crises back to the histories of and battles over water in Los Angeles, one more layer to how fully and beautifully this opening title song sets the stage for the whole of Inyo.
Next InyoStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Favorites from Tracks 2 you’d share?
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