Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

the river: i'm partial to "the ties that bind," "stolen car," "ramroad," "the price you pay" (not sure why i like this one so much). "wreck on the highway" is a really amazingly clear expression of a very simple and powerful idea, though i'm starting to like it a bit less than before. "hungry heart" i like, but i think i need to listen to it harder. (??)

i love "bobbie jean."

a lot of the now-officially-released-formerly-unreleased stuff is unspeakably bad. maybe 15% of it is good.

that makes (at least) two springsteen songs inspired by badlands, btw.

bruce actually has written some amazing lyrics post-1987, but in general he can't seem to get the balance of abstraction and the particular as right as he once had.

and something has gone off about his music, too. critics tend to be glib about this, but i think it's fairly complicated. his gift for melody has withered a bit. i would say his gift for instrumental texture too, but even something like "lucky town" has a nice feel for the basic rock setup.

his "simplicity" definitely has the feel of an *earned* simplicity, a paring down... which is exactly what it is, since his first records had fairly sprawling melodies and arrangements.

Those are my 3 faves, although on a song-by-song basis both Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love beat Darkness, which (as has been noted) has its dodgy moments. But the stuff that's good on Darkness is good in some really interesting ways. I think he came into his own there, figured out more what worked for him and what didn't. He kept the big anthems, but he also finally figured out the quiet end -- it's the first album that anticipates Nebraska, especially the title track. And even the anthems got more pointed and pared down. Like, "poor man wanna be rich/ rich man wanna be king/ and a king ain't satisfied until he rules everything/ I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got" -- I mean, that's a great fucking lyric, especially joined to the jumping-out-of-his-skin throb of the song. It combines dawning political consciousness with adolescent will to power, and suggests without even meaning to the roots of fascism. And it locates all that in small-town Midwestern we-gotta-get-out-of-this-place cockiness, just barely covering up for a growing certainty that he ain't going nowhwere. (Which is kind of the theme of the whole album, I think, even more than "Born to Run" -- on Born to Run there still seemed to be some kind of idea that all that mythic shit would add up to something, but "Darkness" kind of put an end to that.)

Also, for all its cheesiness, I love "Candy's Room" just for the pure horny build and release of it. ("Prove It All Night," on the other hand, never really gets going -- he makes it sound way too much like work.)

Then The River...the blue-collar record. It's all working men and docks and factories and families. They date, they fall in love, they get married. They have fun on a Friday night (I admit to being a sucker for "Out in the Street," which is like the best beer-commercial song ever). But things go wrong, times get hard (on account o' the economy), men wander go out for a ride and they never come back. And even if nothing really bad happens, there's always some dead kid on a dark road to remind you where it's all headed. Favorites: "Hungry Heart," of course, because the narrator from the beginning seems aware of the weakness of his excuse (hey babe, I got a hungry heart, what can I say?), but also because there's something not bullshit about "everybody got a hungry heart" and "ain't nobody like to be alone." "Cadillac Ranch," which is basically a rewrite of "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" with James Dean and Junior Johnson in supporting roles -- the most rollicking Grim Reaper song ever (long and dark, shiny and black, pulled up to the house today, and it took my little girl away).
The title track, which is metaphorically overladen but to me makes up for it with the last verse (I just act like I don't remember/ Mary acts like she don't care/ but I rememember us riding in my brother's car, etc.), which just fucking hearts it's so good. Also, the fact that the song's preceded by a brace of exactly the kind of cocky teenage come-ons that got Mary pregnant in the first place ("Crush on You", "You Can Look (but You Better Not Touch)", "I Wanna Marry You") is some kind of brilliant sequencing.

And I love love love "Sherry Darling," which is maybe his funniest song, but still also a little desperate (he can't get this fucking noisy, nosy prospective mother-in-law out of his car or his life). And it has a hook like a shipyard crane.

Nebraska I wouldn't even know where to start talking and I've said enough, so I'll confine myself to "Reason to Believe," which -- like a lot of his stuff -- tends to get misread. The set-up is simple: every verse, something shitty happens, and at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe. There's nothing hopeful about it (especially not coming at the end of that album). The most he can bring himself to say is that it strikes him kind of funny. Take that as you will.

I meant hurts. I think. Whichever.

"Well now everything dies baby that's a fact/But maybe everything that dies someday comes back"

"I wanna spit in the face of these badlands"

"Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull"

"Sheriff when the man pulls that switch sir and snaps my poor head back / You make sure my pretty baby is sittin' right there on my lap"

"There's a girl across the bar / I get the message she's sendin' /Mmm she ain't lookin' too married /And me well honey I'm pretending"

"In the wee wee hours your mind gets hazy, radio relay towers lead me to my baby / Radio's jammed up with talk show stations / It's just talk, talk, talk, talk, till you lose your patience"

"The dogs on Main Street howl / 'cause they understand"

everytime he sings "sir" on nebraska

all of "if i should fall behind" (yes, in his abstract homily mode)

"into the fire" also wins an award for its admirable directness

- "southside johnny"

how so?

Meat Loaf is Springsteen as Broadway show tunes self-consciously instead of unintentionally

been out in that south american sunshine a bit too long today, ned?

But I'm no fan of America's heartland or its prophets in any way

i don't know what this means. it has little or nothing to do with springsteen's body of work.

ned:springsteen::me:smashing pumpkins

(except i'm right)

that hits on exactly what i don't like about springsteen in the '90s and beyond. yeah, that particular song was 1984, but he'd been planting the seeds of the problem for a while. the problem being his really awful use of overused, overworked, high-school literary cliches, which reached a sad peak on "human touch" and "lucky town." rain. birds. rivers. over and over and over. blah blah blah. he telegraphs his intended meaning in such a ham-handed way that if he were a basketball player, every pass he ever threw would be stolen.

hmm, can't say i've ever heard any humor in his delivery. but in either case, it's the later stuff that bugs me a lot more.

but what i liked about the good half, including the title song, was that it DIDN'T come off like he was trying to will it into being. it sounded like an immediate, gut response to a moment, for better or worse. as opposed to something like ghost of tom joad, which sounds like he spent weeks and months trying to will a classic folk record into being, and the results are nearly unlistenable.

"if i should fall behind" is a good example of a song that remains, for the most part, in the realm of metaphor, but works very well.

i mean that in the sense of tuneless, humorless and lifeless. it's been a long time since i tried listening to it, but when i did, my memory is that i couldn't -- didn't want to -- finish a single song.

On the other hand, the case against: Ian Duncan Smith voted "City of Ruins" his favourite song on Desert Island Discs.

Why do you prefer self-concious show tunes to unintenional ones?