Stevie Van Zandt's Activist Turn Began With a Cab Ride in South Africa
The Guardian introduces Stevie Van Zandt as a man unique in one respect — consigliere to both Bruce Springsteen and Tony Soprano — and reports that his political awakening came four decades ago in white-minority-rule South Africa.
The scene he recalls from that trip is a cab ride in which a Black man stepped off the kerb and the driver swerved to try to hit him. “At that point I became an activist,” he says, adding that there was no fixing it and no reform that was going to fix it.
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The category change is what stays with me: the same injustice could have been one more subject for the next album, and he says it stopped being an intellectual exercise instead. That is a higher bar than a good protest song, and it is why “I became an activist” lands harder than any lyric would.
The absolutism is the part I would argue with. “No reform is going to fix this” is the most flattering sentence available to an activist, because it turns a verdict into a substitute for the dull work. All the same, for a man the Guardian presents as a consigliere twice over, taking the hardest line for once is a real departure.