Roll of the Dice: Queen of the Supermarket

Spin described it as “a widescreen melodrama about a cashier crush that for sheer overkill rivals Adam Sandler’s Broooce parody ‘Lunchlady Land.'”

The Seattle Times bemoaned the “disco strings, mounting backing vocals and pounding drums [that] turn it into a Broadway number.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer said it “just might be the worst song Springsteen has ever released on a studio album.”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Bruce Springsteen’s “Queen of the Supermarket.”

I love it. I always have, since I first heard it.

“Queen of the Supermarket”–like the album it hails from–is frequently misunderstood and definitely underappreciated. If you’re searching its lyrics for unplumbed depths, you’re missing the point: this is a song about the beauty that can be found in mundanity, set against a backdrop of wondrousness that we take for granted.

Let me show you what I mean:

There’s a wonderful world where all you desire
And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips
Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips
Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you
And the cool promise of ecstasy fills the air
At the end of each working day she’s waiting there

Scoff all you want about Bruce the millionaire writing about the common man–but if you can walk into a Whole Foods or a Wegmans and not be at least momentarily overwhelmed by the luxuries and indulgences amassed before you, you’ve lost way more perspective than Bruce has.

I still love going to my local supermarket, where I can sample my way through more kinds of cheese than I ever knew existed, find fish I never thought i’d see outside of a high-end seafood restaurant or fishing charter, try fruits and vegetables I’d never heard of, and an array of spirits more impressive than any bar I’d ever frequented as a young man.

My wife and I used to go to the supermarket on dates early on in our marriage, and I vividly remember the thrill of discovery and the sense of security found there. No one dies in a supermarket–everything you need, everything you want, and everything you never knew you wanted is there.

For Bruce to set a love song against that backdrop? That’s inspired.

For the object of the singer’s affection to be overshadowed by her surroundings? That’s brilliant.

Heck, even the instrumental track is brilliant. Watch the “making of” video below and listen to that introduction again.

Notice how Bruce has Roy syncopate mid-bar? That’s Bruce creating a background of delayed gratification to offset the foreground of instant gratification. Genius, I tell you.

I won’t even bother writing about Bruce’s warm, soaring vocal. It speaks for itself.

I’m in love with the queen of the supermarket
As the evening sky turns blue
A dream awaits in aisle number two

With that line, Bruce starts knitting, entwining love-struck metaphor with stark, everyday reality, and we’re never quite sure whether to laugh or swoon. Which is exactly what Bruce is going for.

Look how effortlessly he does it:

With my shopping cart I move through the heart
Of a sea of fools so blissfully unaware
That they’re in the presence of something wonderful and rare

That line–“with my shopping cart I move through the heart”–is exactly what I referred to above: the juxtaposition of something tangible against something figurative, the ordinary against the sublime.

The way she moves behind the counter
Beneath her white apron her secrets remain hers
As she bags the groceries, her eyes so bored
And sure she’s unobserved

Oh my. Her “secrets” beneath her “white apron?” That’s one of the most artfully subtle sexual references Bruce has ever written. And the fact that this beauty is bored and detached–numbed by overexposure to the wonders that surround her–creates the central dilemma of the song that’s so powerful that we instinctively understand it without Bruce ever stating it:

If this woman isn’t moved by the richness, the beauty, the diversity and divinity that surrounds her, how in the world can our hero ever hope to attract her attention, let alone hold it?

The strings swell, the backing vocals soar as our hero professes his love into the ether:

I’m in love with the queen of the supermarket
There’s nothing I can say
Each night I take my groceries and I drift away
And I drift away

With guidance from the gods above
At night I pray for the strength to tell the one I love
I love I love I love her so
I take my place in the checkout line
For one moment her eyes meet mine
And I’m lifted up, lifted up, lifted up, lifted up

And there we have it: our moment of connection, and it’s so powerful that even in that sacred setting, the singer is carried away by this one-of-a-kind in an emporium of excess.

I’m in love with the queen of the supermarket
Though a company cap covers her hair
Nothing can hide the beauty waiting there
The beauty waiting there

Another clever literary device, this is. Supermarkets are notorious laboratories of product placement and packaging, with every product’s exterior engineered to attract and hold attention. And here we have a checkout clerk who is attired to do anything but that–and yet.

As I lift my groceries into my car
I turn back for a moment and catch a smile
That blows this whole fucking place apart

Perhaps no verse that Bruce has ever written is ridiculed as much as that one. This is a writer who does not employ f-bombs indiscriminately, so why do so here?

Because the intensifier is necessary!

He’s singing about a woman who radiates so much beauty that she overshadows the amazing array of riches strewn about the aisles of the supermarket.

So when she steps out of the supermarket… just imagine how powerful she must be set against the backdrop of a parking lot. That smile–it must have been like looking straight into the sun. No wonder it blew the whole fucking place apart.

And let’s talk about that ending, because it’s one last stoke of inspired genius, an ethereal coda where the dominant instrument is the checkout scanner. Bruce turns the the monotonal scanner into a musical instrument, illustrating the transcendent beauty in the ordinary while simultaneously (and paradoxically) bringing us back to reality–and yet still managing to keep the protagonist afloat through swooning sighs.

Just. Fucking. Brilliant.

Bruce doesn’t attempt “Queen of the Supermarket” on stage very often. In fact, he’s only played it three times, and always by request (probably because he’s thrilled anytime he meets someone who likes the song).

But it tends not to work in concert. For one thing, it’s too delicate to translate well to a large arena or stadium; for another, the song is so carefully constructed and instrumented from start to finish that it’s just plain difficult to recapture that lightning in a bottle.

To the degree that it works at all, it works best as a quiet acoustic number. Here’s such a performance from the Wrecking Ball Tour in 2013:

So there. Mock it if you must, but you’ll not convince me that “Queen of the Supermarket” doesn’t rank among the best songs of Bruce’s 21st century catalog.

I’m in love with “Queen of the Supermarket.”

Queen of the Supermarket
Recorded: 2007-2008
Released: Working on a Dream (2009)
First performed: May 6, 2009 (Stockholm, Sweden)
Last performed: May 7, 2013 (Turku, Finland)

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