“Say something! Do something!”: Bruce Springsteen’s tour is a call to action |
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“Say something! Do something!”: Bruce Springsteen’s tour is a call to action
The "Land of Hope and Dreams" tour is a rock 'n' roll narrative about collective action in dangerous times
Published May 28, 2026 12:00PM (EDT)
For the last two months, Bruce Springsteen has been staging a nightly protest rally in arenas across America. “The Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour” is part revival meeting, part homecoming and also simply a fine evening of music. But it is absolutely a protest rally, whether people know it going in or not.
“Now they say they’re here to uphold the law, but they trample on our rights.
If your skin is black or brown, my friend, you can be questioned or deported on sight.
In our chants of ‘ICE out now!’…”
Being surrounded by thousands of people yelling “ICE OUT NOW” has the opportunity to be transformative, or at least to make someone think. It is giving people a voice, and it is giving them a container in which to use that voice.
This is the last verse of “Streets of Minneapolis,” Springsteen’s protest song about the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. When Springsteen sang “ICE out now!” during a show in Pittsburgh (as he had in the previous 15 stops on the 20-date tour), the crowd echoed it back to him. This happened in Minneapolis on opening night, this happened in Los Angeles, in Portland, OR, in Atlanta, in New York City, in Chicago. This happened everywhere, and will keep happening in upcoming shows.
But he doesn’t continue with the next line and the final chorus. Instead, Springsteen pauses and sings the line again, this time stepping back from the mic and letting the audience supply, “ICE out now!” And then he comes back, gently: “In our chants of —” “ICE OUT NOW!” — one more time, this time louder and less tentatively from the crowd, before the E Street Band swings back into the song.
It isn’t just a piece of showmanship, either. Witnessing these moments in the audience, it felt as though Springsteen wanted to not just reinforce the message, but give everyone who didn’t know about it in advance an opportunity to consider the request and then give it a try, and once they said it out loud, give them a chance to say it with emphasis or enthusiasm or anger.
And even if there are people in the audience who don’t participate in the chant for whatever reason — they think that ICE just needs some regulation, they believe in the fantasy of “the Kavanaugh stop,” or some position outside of outright abolishing the organization — being surrounded by thousands of people yelling “ICE OUT NOW” has the opportunity to be transformative, or at least to make someone think. It is giving people a voice, and it is giving them a container in which to use that voice.
For a lot of people in that room, it may be their first exposure to participating in public protest. Because that is what this outing is, disguised as a Bruce Springsteen tour. It’s not about creating “a safe space,” it’s about taking an already familiar and comfortable space — a Bruce Springsteen concert! — where you can look around you and clearly see that that nice couple from Highland Park or Edina or Lake Oswego you were chatting with before the show are clearly not radical anarchists with Molotov cocktails in their pockets, but who yelled with gusto. Maybe more people are actually against this than you realized.
As Springsteen reminds the audience, “The E Street Band was built for hard times.”
“Streets of Minneapolis” was originally written and........