At least two occurrences come to mind – the title “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and a line in another song (I don’t remember which) that says something like “I saw you on the edge of town.”
What is the significance of the “edge of town” to Springsteen? Having grown up in the suburbs of the Midwest, I don’t recall any specific association with a town’s edge. Nothing special or sinister went on there. Are certain kinds of things more likely to happen on the edge of town? Is that where teen-agers go to cause trouble (in my suburb, they were more likely to head to the center of town to get into trouble). It’s not a place that strikes me as being particularly sinister or mysterious. It’s just where the suburban plat gives way to the corn field or the cow pasture.
I saw you last night
Out on the edge of town
I wanna read your mind and know just what I got
In this new thing I’ve found.
from Springsteen’s “Brilliant Disguise”
To me, the “edge of town” has always signified the bars, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, check cashing stops, etc. that are pushed out of the nicer parts of the town. The center of town would have the churches, schools, and fine upstanding businesses - it would be the face that the town wants to present to outsiders. Still, every town has got those other places that they don’t always like to talk about. Whether it’s an actual location or just words that indicate marginalization is probably different for each town, but the connotations seem pretty clear to me.
For a real life view of what I think of as “the edge of town,” go visit the boomtown area that’s just outside the nearest military base.
This is fascinating, because I would have said just the opposite. To find bars, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, adn check cashing shops, we’d have to head for downtown. The nice businesses and churches are in the suburbs or the countryside.
I wonder if this is a significant difference between New Jersey/East Coast urban structures and Midwestern ones?
That’s probably the best expression of what Springsteen is going for with those lyrics (and others in different songs that are ‘in the same neighborhood’). Bruce almost never writes from the perspective of those on top of the world; he invariably voices the view of those who live further down the ladder, if not actually on the margins of society. It’s poetical language for those lower positions in society.
Of course, in the suburbs, exurbs and rural towns (at least those of yesteryear–Darkness On The Edge Of Town came out in 1978), the edge of town is literally where the darkness takes over, where the street lamps stop and it’s just blank night until the next town–the kind of place where bad stuff can go down. A pretty easy metaphor to grab onto.
I think, for a quick answer, and based on the sense of isolation in much of his music (certainly in the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” album), the Edge of Town is for the misfits, those lost and alone, and on the edge of society.
Maybe they’ve gone there because they want to escape, but haven’t managed to actually do so. The edge of town is for the outsiders.
I think you’re supposed to think of it more metaphorically (as stated above). But I think it goes further than the marginalized of society. I think it’s a state of mind. Going into the “darkness on the edge of town” is akin to the “dark night of the soul” on the path to spiritual or self-fulfillment (whichever way you chose to look at it). A low point in your life where you need to find out what you’re really made of. Certainly could happen after a break-up, and certainly fits with cutting loose a deep dark secret. Further to this, in some of the live bootlegs I have from the Tunnel of Love era, he changes the line “I lost my money and I lost my wife” to “I lost my faith when I lost my wife.”
So for me, the songs always been about going away from the knowns in life (town) and taking a step into the unknown (the darkness) as part of the journey to finding out who you really are and what’s really important to you. These are the things that can only be found when you step out of the day-to-day humdrum and into the darkness on the edge of town.
Then again, some people have accused me of reading far too much into Bruce’s songs.
I think that for most of the characters in Springsteen’s songs, that darkness isn’t on a path to anywhere. It’s a hole into which people fall and more often than not can’t escape.
Take “Racing in the Street,” for example (a tune off of the album Darkness on the Edge of Town). The main character and his girl find release and salvation from their lives by racing, but life is still miserable. If I remember the lyrics right:
she sits on the porch of her daddy’s house
and all her pretty dreams are torn,
she stares off alone into the night
with the eyes of one who hates for just being born
. . . I feel like the “narrator” in Born to Run rode his bike out of town, but instead of freedom and wind in his hair, and liberation, he found Darkness. There are songs of hope (Badlands), but they’re based on desires, not the realizations of desires.
It’s not until Tunnel of Love that Springsteen’s narrator really finds peace. From the song Cautious Man:
*One night Billy awoke from a terrible dream callin’ his wife’s name
She lay breathing beside him in a peaceful sleep, a thousand miles away
He got dressed in the moonlight and down to the highway he strode
When he got there he didn’t find nothing but road
Billy felt a coldness rise up inside him that he couldn’t name
Just as the words tattooed 'cross his knuckles he knew would always remain
At their bedside he brushed the hair from his wife’s face as the moon shone on her skin so white
Filling their room with the beauty of God’s fallen light*
Plus, remember the last lines of the song “Darkness On The Edge Of Town”:
That “wanting things that can only be found…” part pretty clearly indicates desire, specifically desire for something that you have to cross some shady lines to get. It’s not exactly a path to nirvana; more like somewhere where you go to get lost rather than found.
It probably has more to do with the size of the urban area. Large cities have their seedy parts downtown, but smaller towns near a highway have them near the highway.
Clearly it imparts desire, but that’s the reason for going into the darkness. You have to go through that darkness to get to those good things sometimes. Of course I include strip clubs and other seedy places as offering good things as well as the loftier things I talked about earlier.
And as for Eonwe’s well-written post, I think we only disagree slightly, indeed. Almost always it is the desire or the journey, and not the realization of the dream or “the better life.” I just think in this case, it’s about starting the journey and not oblivion per se. I think the songs about falling into the darkness and not getting out are more obvious, Stolen Car, for example.
I very much agree with you about the various narrators finding more peace after ToL. Of course there are notable exceptions, but I think that’s right on.
I think the darkness in “Darkness on the Edge of Town” is a real darkness, and really at the edge of town, where they race cars for money. That would be past the strip joints and minimalls out where there’s little traffic. It’s also metaphorical, of course, “Where no one asks any questions or looks too long in your face.”
