page_title: The Rising (Bruce Springsteen song)
section_title: Campaign and political use
hierarchical_section_title: The Rising (Bruce Springsteen song) / Campaign and political use
caption_attribution_description: English: Bruce Springsteen performing late in his appearance at the Change Rocks voter registration rally for Barack Obama, in Philadelphia on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
context_page_description: "The Rising" is the title track on Bruce Springsteen's 12th studio album The Rising, and was released as a single in 2002. Springsteen wrote the song in reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City. It gained critical praise and earned Grammy Awards for Best Rock Song and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance, as well as a nomination for Song of the Year. Rolling Stone named it the 35th best song of the decade, and VH1 placed it 81st on its list of the "100 Greatest Songs of the '00s".
context_section_description: 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. [It also draws on] 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[ed] 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."
  Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign created a video for "The Rising", called "Rise Up" at the Democratic Convention. It features video segments of people in the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as people united in the fight against COVID-19. Springsteen and his wife, Patti Scialfa, appear in the montage of people.
caption: "The Rising" was performed during this October 4, 2008, Change Rocks voter registration rally on behalf of Barack Obama, on Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
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