This is a phenomenal song, from a lyrical perspective. Springsteen's wistful, florid portrayal of the decaying lower-middle-class Northeast is easy to mock for two reasons: 1) It's a well he goes back to a lot and 2) he's very earnest about it. It's easier to define yourself as being against something than for something and shroud your true feelings in irony, because saying "I like this" or "I feel this" in positive terms only opens you up to ridicule. This song is completely guileless, which comes from a place of security you can only feel when you're as cool as Bruce Springsteen. (For clarity: No matter how uncool Springsteen's fans are perceived as being at times, I don't think anyone thinks the man himself is anything but a rad-ass motherfucker.)
"Jungleland" opens with a bit of scene-setting that's as poetic as it is efficient, and ends with a despairing, heart-rending fifth-act-of-Hamlet denouement. I'm going to hand-wave over the middle, which rocks and drives and the sax solo is cool, but I don't have anything interesting to say about it.
The violin-and-piano intro into the first verse almost feels like a pan down to an establishing shot, and Springsteen dances around nailing down specifics about his subjects while using only one or two words to describe a character and allowing the listener's own memory and imagination to fill the rest. We don't know who The Rat is, or who the Rangers are, or why they're having a homecoming in Harlem, but it's the seed of a scene, and while evoking a very specific image--a blue-collar tough hanging out in the street, meeting a girl, then running from the cops--while your imagination fills in the details.
The scene expands with each new musical entrance--flute at the start of the second verse, organ at "From the churches to the jails..."--until we get the drums and guitars and the rest of the E Street Band about two minutes in, at the climactic fight, at which point you wonder why The Outsiders or West Side Story needed the extra hour and a half, and Springsteen delivers my favorite line in his entire catalog: "They'll meet 'neath that giant Exxon sign / That brings this fair city light."
This is a near-perfect line, because "that giant Exxon sign" is a hilarious thing to say. It's not really a description of an Exxon sign exactly, though we get the sense of its size, because we all know what Exxon signs look like. "Giant" is the perfect adjective because it's got an absurd bluntness to it. Nobody would think of an Exxon sign as even being conspicuous, but here it's illuminating the entire "fair city," which is the kind of thing you'd usually call Camelot or something. Instead, "our fair city" is some anonymous, dirty, forgotten corner of Manhattan. And instead of a cathedral or a flag or a Bat Signal, they've got an Exxon sign. That brings with it not only a physical description, but at the same time makes this gang fight seem vitally important but grounds it in its own smallness. It's a piece of writing that staggers me every time I think about it.
And then they fight and there's a sax solo and blah blah blah until, about seven minutes in, it all gets quiet again and The Rat, who's lived and died and fallen in love and run for his life in the time it takes to take a dump and brush your teeth in the morning, is shot and killed in a soft, soulful coda. You didn't know this guy existed eight minutes ago and you've gotten to know him and now he's dead and nobody cares.
The descent to The Rat's death, and its insignificance, is contrasted against a dramatic, crushing final verse that drives home the truth that we're all kind of aware of but try not to think too hard about--that individual tragedies--even matters of love or of life and death--can be at the same time monumentally important to someone and completely insignificant to everyone else. That significance depends on how close you zoom in, and for a nine-minute song that's built mostly around a saxophone solo, we see this story from multiple levels, with rich detail and powerful emotional consequence. It's hopeful and heartbreaking and, more than everything else, a lyrical masterpiece.
