“Dancing In The Dark” is a four minute circus sung by the saddest clown in the show. If you listen to the song sans vocals, perhaps on some dollar-store karaoke CD, you have a classic 80’s synth-pop carnival of keyboard sounds and drum tracks. It’s inherently danceable, and if you’re not one for tripping the light fantastic you at least have to bop your head a little. It’s something you might hear while looking for your seat at the latest incarnation of P.T. Barnum’s traveling collection of acrobats, elephants, and clowns. But every circus has its sad clown.
I get up in the evening, and I ain’t got nothing to say. I come home in the morning, and go to bed feeling the same way…
Send in the clown. The narrator in “Dancing In The Dark” finds himself in a rut the size of a Providence pot hole. There is monotony in his life that he just can’t escape. When you are an entertainer, be it a rock star or a circus clown, you keep strange hours. You get up in the evening and go to bed in the morning. And you do it all again the next day. The cycle gets more and more vicious with each show, each city, and each tour.
Hey there baby, I could use just a little help…
If nothing else, “Dancing In The Dark” is a plea for help. He’s tired. He’s tired and bored with himself. As the carnival music continues to provide the happy backdrop, the story is getting darker and the clown is getting sadder, desperate even.
I check my look in the mirror; wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face…
A common thread in a great Springsteen lyric is the listener’s ability to relate to it. Who hasn’t had moments like this? Every piece of clothing in my closet is shit. My hair is an unmanageable mess of grays and snarls and frizz that Jennifer Aniston’s stylist couldn’t even raise to respectability. My face? There is a zit on my lower left jawline that you could safely land Apollo 11 on. I want to change everything in my life. Yesterday. Just as we still somehow make it to work every day despite our self-loathing, our clown trudges on as well. As the music keeps reminding us, this is the greatest show on Earth. It waits for no one.
There’s something happening somewhere, baby I just know there is…
Be it “Rosalita,” “Thunder Road,” or “The Promised Land,” there is always something to keep fighting for in a Springsteen song. Bruce is not going to allow his characters to pack it in and quit because that would somehow convey to the audience that there’s nothing left to fight for. So we drive the same damn commute we’ve driven for the last 20 years. We sit through our fifth Little League game in three days. We fix the same fucking screen door that we fixed last month. Because we know that there must be something more out there; something wild and exiting and adventurous. The great payoff is waiting for us, I just know it is.
You can’t start a fire, you can’t start a fire without a spark…
So the sad clown puts on his giant red shoes and his giant red nose and his giant red wig. He paints a giant frown on his already sad face. And through it all he hopes. He hopes that tonight, the fortieth show in the last forty-five days, he’ll find the spark. The spark that will start a life-changing inferno that will leave behind a trail of bad clothes, bad hair, and mountainous jaw zits. So the next time you see a clown pull the trigger on one of those toy guns that shoots the “bang” sign, know that he just might be for hire, even if it seems like we’re all just dancing in the dark.
“Dancing In The Dark” appeared on Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album Born In The U.S.A.
Bruce Unstrung 