Halloween Music Special: "State Trooper"
please don't stop me
I’ve been tinkering at what may be, in all humility and sober assessment, the best Halloween playlist of all time. That being said, I was reading the Defector article on Bruce' Springsteen’s Nebraska and realized I overlooked what I think might “scariest” song of all time, Springsteen’s “State Trooper”.
“State Trooper” is a narrative song, but not much narrative is given. The first person narrator is on the “New Jersey Turnpike riding on a wet night'/ Neath the refinery's glow out where the great black rivers flow”. He doesn’t have a driver’s license or registration, but he has at least a clear conscience. He pleads with the state trooper not to stop him. It’s not clear how far away the state trooper is. Is the narrator in the process of being pulled over, is a state trooper car tailing him, is a state trooper car just happening to share the road with him? The paranoia of driving without a license, knowing your life could be upend, the threat of state power being born down against you. Maybe there is no state trooper anywhere to be seen, but the specter of police presence has burrowed itself deep into the narrator’s psyche, however clean his conscience is.
Narratively, lyrically, that’s about as much as Springsteen gives you. In later verses we learn that the narrator is tired and losing his patience with talk show radio. We learn that the only thing that he has has “been bothering him his whole life”.
Aside from the standout image of the refinery glowing over the black river that opens the song, there is nothing concrete in the lyrics. The story, as such, is told almost entirely through elisions and insinuations. This is part of what makes it so unnerving the genuine suspense.
Of course, the sense of fear in the song also come is the musical qualities. The music is as sparse and insinuative as the lyrics. The song is just acoustic guitar and vocals recorded on a four track recorder.1 If I had to guess, the other two tracks where given over to reverb, which gives it a haunted, ghostly quality, as does the cassette hiss that snakes through the song. The guitar is a simple and persistent blues thrum, two notes and no chord changes. It stays the same throughout the whole song, never changing. Springsteen’s vocals are are barely above a mumble, an exhausted man on the edge, pleading. The affectless dead-eyed exhaustion is to me more menacing than more expressive, performative, vocals would be, the vamping and growling and all that. When people snap it is rarely theatrical; it is usually affectless, dead-eyed, and exhausted. Springsteen’s vocals are barely above a mumble until the scream. The scream, clearly cribbed from Alan Vega2, doesn’t come until the last seconds. It’s high pitched and piercing. It sounds like the scream of horror-movie scream queen as the killer descends upon them. Maybe something terrible has happened. Maybe the narrator is just letting out stress alone in his car at night.
Sometimes I read the song as a murder ballad. The narrator is the sort of killer who has had something “bothering him his whole life”, those bad thoughts that killers have. Still, he has a clear conscience about the things that he’s done. He’s done the deed, but he is too sociopathic to feel remorse. Too without emotion or affect. Sociopathic, or maybe just exhausted, that kind of exhaustion where things don’t seem quite real. He doesn’t have a wife but radio towers are going to lead him to his baby. It’s vague; those radio towers could be leading him not home but home, toward death, toward that scream. He has a prayer, and that prayer is that scream, and then it goes black.
The narrator’s relationship to the radio is menacing too. People do go crazy listening to that stuff. Listening to hours of talk radio is deeply unhealthy, and before the internet it was the main way of transmitting cultural schizophrenia. The chatter of voices, talk, talk, talk in the early morning hours when your mind gets hazy. He’s losing his patience. The question raised: what happens once he does. These days, people go on mass shootings after losing their patience with the radio (or Fox News or youtube or podcasts, but the point is the same). People didn’t really do that then, mass shooting but the threat of lost-patience induced violence linger.
The threat of violence lingers over the whole song. Maybe it is violence the narrator has or will commit, maybe a murder. But maybe it is only simple state violence inflicted on the narrator. Maybe the state trooper will pull the narrator over and give him a ticket for driving without license and registration. Maybe he will face jail time. Maybe he will only be fined. Maybe he will only be fined, but this is an exhausted man driving home late at night from the refinery. Maybe he works at the refinery. He’s overworked and underpaid. Maybe, Frankie Teardrop, he doesn’t have enough money. A large fine like that could ruin him. He won’t be able to pay rent. He’ll get evicted. He’ll lose his job.
The horror of the song is the indeterminacy. In the haze, a misdemeanor charge is as heavy as murder. It’s that sort of haze, where perspective is lost, where bad things. The narrators fear radiates outward. There’s nothing scary than a scared man.
(I didn’t put “State Trooper” on the playlist. It’s not a party song. That’s something you need to listen to alone, preferably driving at night.)
Addendum: Presence as Absence- There are plenty of songs that are just a man singing with his acoustic guitar. What makes this different? It barely feels like it fits into that tradition at all? A large part is the reverb. The reverb tracks are technically and literally additional layers. There is more going on in the song than just acoustic guitar and vocals. Paradoxically, though, these additional make the song sound sparser, emptier, because the reverb creates the impression of more empty space. Negation through addition.
Compare the song to two Suicide songs, “Ghost Rider” and “Frankie Teardrop”, the former of which “State Trooper” cribs its musical structure, the latter a narrative vibe.
“Ghost Rider” is too badass to be scary. The bass synth has got basically the exact same blue-pulse rhythm as “State Trooper” but where “State Trooper” drives paranoid on a wet highway, “Ghost Rider” cruises on a motorcycle. It struts. “Ghost Rider” is sparse, but Springsteen somehow out Suicides Suicide with an acoustic guitar. Besides, “Ghost Rider” is about a skeleton from hell who rides a motorcycle. That’s badass. That’s cool. Great song. Not scary.
“Frankie Teardrop” is a scary song. It tells a story. Frankie is twenty years old, he’s working at the factory, he’s not making enough money, he’s about to get evicted, he has a wife and kids. He shoots his wife and kid. He’s lying in hell. We’re all Frankies. We’re all lying in hell.
Musically, the song is sparse, just a quiet drone and distorted 16th note hi-hat hiss, until it devolves into straight noise halfway through.
But the narrative difference between the two tracks is something I want to file away for future craft notes. On the surface, “Frankie Teardrop” is the more horrific song. He explicitly murders his wife and baby. He descends to hell, and the sounds of hell can be found in Vega’s screams and harrowing soundscape of Martin Rev. The cover of the album is smeared in blood. But that’s just it. It’s explicit. The narrative is straightforward and clear. Things happen in the order they happen, and then they are done. I think that the narrator of “State Trooper”’s paranoia, his insistence on his clear conscience (protesting too much?), the thing that has been bothering him his whole life, the way he is about to lose his patience is scarier. Something uncertain about to happen is scarier than something that has happened, usually, I think.