Forget Bruce Springsteen, we're all enemies of the state

June 12th – Why does the establishment walk in such fear of the rock music genre and its proponents? I mean, it’s only rock ‘n’ roll…isn't it?
Not this shite we see each and every day (or is just that it seems that way) this shite we see each and every day on the talent (loose term) shows that are the staple of telly-on-the-cheap these days, where some twelve year old kid is singing a cover version of a song about the hardships of life (?) and kidding us that he/she has wanted to be singer all their life…yeah, all twelve long, hard years of it; yeah, right…right…OK, sorry, off on one; start again. Try and make it sensible; sorry about that last bit…

An unarmed Amadou Bailo Diallo was standing outside his flat early one morning when he was approached by four plain-clothes cops who thought he was another, completely different person who, they had been told from the covert surveillance bods, was highly dangerous. In the mother-of-all cases of mistaken ID they challenged him, he ran to his front door (they were plain-clothes remember) he ran to his front door, pulled out his wallet from his jacket and the cops shot him to death on the front porch. 19 bullets hit him. In total 41 were fired by four cops who, it can only be said, made several catastrophic decisions in the brief time of the event. You can read the rest, if you’re interested that is, in the reports of the day (February 4th 1999) ‘cos, although I've given the gist I expect you to be curious enough to read ‘em and weep; that’s not what I wanted to write about, although I expect you to follow it through to the conclusion of the trial of the four cops on the 25th February 2000. Guess what?

No, what I wanted to put down was how Bruce Springsteen was treated by the audience when he debuted his new song American Skin (41 shots) at a concert at Madison Square Garden on this day in 2000. 
The A. B. Diallo shooting was an incident that sparked off all sorts of discussions about police brutality, about poor police training, about racial profiling, about the treatment of suspects, about the dissemination of police surveillance information, about the accuracy of intelligence gathering…ringing any bells with recent news events anybody? 

Then a rock singer gets up to put his own take on it and he, Mr. Springsteen, was roundly booed by a large segment of the audience. Now, one assumes they were fans of his (that’s why they bought the ticket; no?) and so of a similar mindset. I mean, why would you buy a ticket to show given by a band that you didn't like…and they aint cheap, so…?

So; picture it. Fans of Mr. Springsteen booing him for singing a song about something they knew he would have a concern about, I mean, that’s why they buy his stuff, isn't it, to hear like-minded statements? Summat’s not kosher here, is it? Do you think, heavens to Betsy, that they could have been a plant? To find that out, of course, you’d need to be able to tap into the electronics of the watchers and get a look at the round-robin E-mails, the txts and missives that were passed around leading up to that particular night’s gig, but we can’t do that, can we? That’d be  anti-social, illegal even…wouldn't it?