The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #124

#124: "American Skin (41 Shots)" (2000) - Bruce Springsteen & the E. Street Band

While mother and the DSS contemplate their decision, we take our leave and head over to the the Bronx, where on February 4, 1999, we and the NYPD find Amadou Diallo, who looks an awful lot like a rapist, so we accost him, and he takes off running, and we shout for him to put his hands up, and he reaches into his jacket, and he pulls out his wallet.

Not before we shoot him, though.

Nineteen times.

Missed on twenty-two.

Bruce Springsteen--and the rest of New York City--hears about this, and the Boss writes a song about it, and he debuts the song live sixteen months later (to the day), and this record is the result of that performance, where Springsteen brings it all back home--the prejudice, the fear, the ghosts of the past and present, the sins of our fathers, the shame of our mothers, the rage against society's ill--when, 3/4 through the record, he repeats, acapella, "You can get killed just for living in," and no one responds. The band remains quiet. The audience remains quiet. The sound of one man and his cry, his gospel shout, his call to witness: and silence is his answer. We all sleep alone. We have to wake ourselves.

Springsteen wakes himself soon, on the record, but his passion, his rage against the dying of the light...it's all gone. He's resigned. "Your American skin." His wife comes in as Springsteen tails off: "forty-one shots" she reminds him. She reminds us. Clarence Clemons then offers a mournful liturgy as the chorus sings the refrain, and they grieve, and we grieve, and we despair and wonder if we're really any better off today, or if there's any hope, and we listen to what these artists have to play for us, and we know the answer, and they sing the song.