No Surrender: Bruce Springsteen, Neoliberalism and Rock and Roll’s Melancholic Fantasy of Sovereign Rebellion

This thesis builds from press accounts of Bruce Springsteen’s South by Southwest
keynote address, taken by many to be a renewed call to arms of the classic mantras of the
rock ethos in the age of a declining recording industry. In tracing the ways the speech
circulated I argue that its discourse was rearticulated toward quite different (and
concerning) ends. Throughout, I aim to show the apparatuses of power that sustains the
rock liberation fantasy. I read the coverage of Springsteen’s address as a therapeutic
discourse meant to soothe the anxiety over the closure of agency in the age of
neoliberalism. The general problematic for the thesis, then, addresses an anxiety over the
collapse of freedom and as such works to offer broad reflections on the nature of radical
agency in our increasingly neoliberal present.