The Rising (Bruce Springsteen Song) - Campaign and Political Use

Campaign and Political Use

During the 2008 U.S. presidential election, "The Rising" was first used as a closing campaign rally song by the John Edwards campaign. Despite the song's grim setting, the "Rise up" refrain matched the closing exhortation of Edwards' speeches. The Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign then began to use the song as well, especially at the end of her rallies or victory celebrations. Following Springsteen's April 2008 endorsement of Barack Obama, the Obama campaign began replacing U2's "City of Blinding Lights" with "The Rising" as their commencement-of-rally song.

Springsteen himself would perform "The Rising" during his solo acoustic Change Rocks appearances during early October 2008 at Obama registration and vote rallies. The song was also played immediately following Obama's victorious presidential acceptance speech on the night of November 4, 2008 in Grant Park in Chicago. Rolling Stone later remarked of its use there, "when its metaphor of struggling through darkness was blasted at Obama's victory celebration, it became a national anthem for the 21st century."

Springsteen opened the January 18, 2009 We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial with the song. It was performed by Springsteen on acoustic guitar, backed by a 125-member female choir in red gowns; a writer for the American Folklife Center commented that, "Particularly in that arrangement, it draws on the gospel tradition. the tradition of spirituals, and there's a lot of lyrics that speak to spirituals." When Springsteen was one of the recipients of Kennedy Center Honors in December 2009, the musical tribute to him concluded with Sting leading a performance of "The Rising" together with a large gospel choir. The intense rendition got Barack and Michelle Obama and the rest of the formal-dress audience out of their seats and swaying to the song's thematic development; Rolling Stone commented that the song "end the evening in an uplifting, change-the-world mode, as only Bruce’s music can."

Springsteen himself remarked upon the distance the song had travelled, saying: “You write ‘The Rising’ for this, it gets picked up and used for that, so you end up here. If someone had told me in 2001 that ‘you’re going to sing this song at the inaugural concert for the first African-American president,’ I’d have said, ‘Huh?’ But eight years go by, and that’s where you find yourself. You’re in there, you’re swimming in the current of history and your music is doing the same thing.”