Minneapolis, I Hear Your Voice Singing Through the Bloody Mist

Bruce Springsteen adds to his history of social commentary launching a critical nuke at "King Trump's private army" while rallying a weary people in Minneapolis vs. his tyranny

by Cliff Schecter

White Working Class Hero

I’ll never forget when I saw The Rising tour in Cincinnati. The longing for those lost in heartbreaking dirges such as You’re Missing and Empty Sky and the struggle for hope in elegies like “My City of Ruins” and “Lonesome Day” touched me deeply.

I saw the second plane hit from less than a mile away in downtown Manhattan, you see, the fireball engulfing the sky for a split second and producing a deafening echo in The Canyon of Heroes. That was my home that had just been attacked, and Bruce echoed those sentiments.

I believe Bruce has now done it again, for the people of Minnesota, with Streets of Minneapolis.

But let’s take a step back for a second. Springsteen pre-2000s was a hero to the white working class. Those who toiled with their hands and saw their dreams exported aboard planes and ships to China along with any semblance of economic stability in their lives.

Bruce was the bard of the Badlands. With a desperation to escape Jungleland, perhaps by racing down Thunder Road to a better future. He gave us beautiful, primal screams about an economy of purposeful subterfuge, so bullion-based elites could take more—always more…as he fought constant despair to hold onto his hope that he and others like him wouldn’t have to accept just eking by. If at all.

This garnered him a huge fan base among guys (and some gals) who worked with their hands for a living. Many may not have known exactly what was happening, but sure as shit knew at the end of the month they were making less, paying more for health care, housing, recreation, and generally being written off as losers.

Yet, many of of these very same white working men who’d cheered when Bruce sang paens to their dusk-to-dawn work ethic didn’t feel the same way when others were the focus. Let’s call it the first wave of those body (and brain)-snatched by our discordant, distorting transmitters of disinformation. Fox, Limbaugh, et al began tearing America apart for those same people who always wanted more—first and foremost themselves.

Workers knew Springsteen as the voice of a generation who saw salaries stripped away, and with it a sense of pride, spirit, and belief in the promise of America. Bruce spoke to them about the con being played on them.

This, from Factory, was the kind of poetic nod to the life they sought to live they’d come to expect from Bruce:

Early in the morning, factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
It’s the work (the work), the working (the working ) just the working life (just the working life)

Later in the song, he spoke of the life they saw ahead of them, where an Armani Suit walked over to hand them a pink slip:

End of the day, factory whistle cries
Men walk through these gates with death in their eyes
And you just better believe, boy
Somebody's gonna get hurt tonight
The working (the working), the working (the working), just the working life (just the working life)

Yes, the former kid from Freehold with a Fender spit fire about this betrayal at the hands of the gentry. Chronicled the assembly-line dreams and shrinking factory towns with a voice that could make you grind your teeth and want to get up and dance all the same.

Unimpressed by an 80s “greed is good” ethos representing the new foie gras’d vulture capitalism, he kept finding ever new and creative ways to tell the same old story—except it was getting worse.

Bruce Rises To Singing About War & Race

The Boss maybe didn’t start down the road to his dalliance with destiny as a singer about racial injustice—though he did touch on these themes some of his early songs. But his arrival as an artist focussing on these issues was inevitable.

Back in Cincinnati, 14 months after 9/11, America had returned to our banality of evil. There was a boycott of downtown. A police officer had shot an unarmed man, which lit the fuse and riots ensued. Springsteen, whose show was planned long beforehand, decided to play. But as a nod toward the protestors, he began with American Skin (41 Shots), a song about the murder of an unarmed Black man in New York City.

I’ll never forget that concert.

And the anger from what can only be dubbed pre-MAGA. It was swift, and palpable.

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Springsteen had found his footing—long before the punditocracy tried to co-opt Born in the U.S.A. with plastic flags and patriotism as a buzzword—singing about Vietnam vets he saw returning home to nowhere, all-but forgotten, all around him. A searing indictment of how a country treated its so-called warriors.

That paradox, that tension between the glory and the grievance, was his first political act. And it already rubbed some former fans the wrong way (the ones who, unlike Reagan, understood Born in the U.S.A wasn’t bestowing glory on Old Glory).

As the decades unfolded, Springsteen’s music became more overtly about America at its breaking points. Race, but really the othering of any American. From the ghosts of young men sent to fight the wars of half-cocked crony capitalists who half-understood battles they’d never fight, to those who looked different or loved differently treated as mere apparitions to be ignored.

Springsteen had a different project: to tell the truth about all injustice.

From American Skin (41 Shots), confronting police violence, to the mournful strains of Streets of Philadelphia, Springsteen tilted at powerful forces that gnawed at a raw spot in his soul. And in America’s.

He wasn’t concerned with spreadsheets or mass-market consensus. The Boss’ audience may have started in blue-collar bars and arenas, but the heart of his music always beat to a rhythm of dissent, empathy, and the hard truth that this country’s myths often hid its cruelties. The plight of the worker was still part and parcel to his musical crusade, but now he told other stories too, to form a tapestry of resistance.

And, as is always the case, some didn’t like the new blanket.

The Boss Uses His Platform To Directly Take On Trump’s Fascism

The man matured with the musician, so it was inevitable he wouldn’t just respond to the current outrageous moment in our history, with democracy threatened, with silence. Springsteen has amassed immense social cache—power—through his artistic success and wealth, and to nobody’s surprise who’s followed him, he chose to use it.

So now, in the cold winter of 2026, outraged by the killing of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of racist, violent, authoritarian federal immigration agents in Minneapolis—as part of a sprawling, incompetent, and criminal Operation Metro Surge—Springsteen’s dropped perhaps the most direct protest anthem of his long career, and certainly his most pointed: “Streets of Minneapolis.”

Through the winter's ice and cold
Down Nicollet Avenue
A city aflame fought fire and ice
'Neath an occupier's boots
King Trump's private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes

Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn's early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringin' through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renée Good

Written and recorded in a matter of days, the song doesn’t tiptoe around metaphor. It names the villains. Calls ICE what Bruce rightfully senses it has become under Trump—a “private army” executing state terror on American streets.

The song chants right back at brutality without fear, channeling a chorus from across Minneapolis, crying in unison: “ICE out!” Its lyrics memorialize the victims and commit their names to song, a kind of musical witness that has no time for the breathless lies of political spinsters.

In releasing Streets of Minneapolis, Springsteen isn’t just giving a soundtrack to resistance, he’s drawing a straight line.

From the forgotten workers of The River, Johnny 99, and Working on the Highway. To the Vietnam vets of Born in the U.S.A., Shut Out The Light, and Brothers Under the Bridges.

To minority and immigrant communities in The Ghost of Tom Joad, Souls of the Departed and American Skin (41 Shots), to the timely and fierce incantation of unified strength we’re now witnessing with Streets of Minneapolis.

The Boss reminds us that it’s always been about those who need to amass more—always more. More wealth, more power, more fame. Those who rig our economy, war and peace, even race relations, because there’s profit in it. No matter the damage they do to the rest of us—the phantoms they will never see—as long as they get more.

He also reminds us protest against this condition isn’t a fad; it’s the lifeblood of a republic…our republic. And it is most needed when our leaders most lose their way.

If you still think protest music is quaint, or that old rockers should “stick to entertainment,” Bruce’s latest work is a middle finger and a wake-up call all in one. It’s a ritual of rage and remembrance, and an anthem for a generation that has had its humanity tested by unchecked power and abundant cruelty.

And is willing to fight, as Bruce has always been, to get to The Promised Land.

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