Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

"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?

1.I think Springsteen's best LPs are his first three, all released before he started to shave.
2. Interestingly, by comparison, Bob Seger (often unfairly-but-not-without-some-justification compared to Bruce) QUIT shaving around the same time, and yet his music likewise declined!
3. The near-simultaneous release of the Dictators' "Cars And Girls" might've rendered "Born To Run" unnecessary, but for the fact that "Born To Run" is not only a good song but an amazing production, possibly the man's finest. My favourite, anyways.
4. And speaking of producers, I'll never understand what the hell's so great about Phil Spector anyways, my Ronettes and Crystals fandom notwithstanding.
5. Aside from the title cut, the Born In The USA single I recall most fondly is "Cover Me", because it's the most inconsequential.
6.Live on TV in '92, Springsteen totally surprised me by spicing up the otherwise useless "57 Channels" with some amazingly skronky guitar soloing, beating Sonic Youth at their own game. (And I was still a SY fan back then.)
7.As for the importance of cars/driving in Bruce's work and the appreciation thereof, don't ask me. I never much liked driving, haven't had a valid license in 5 years and haven't driven at all in 10 years. (Last time was June '94, 3 days before OJ Simpson's Bronco chase, incidentally! I remember these things.)

hmmm. i've always thought that was the exact moment where he jumped the shark.

exemplary solo: "candy's room." a song that i wouldn't mind hearing stephin merritt cover.

though really what "spare parts" sounds most like is one of the rejected tracks that later turned up on tracks (hmmm, so does "downbound train"). so maybe it's not that bruce's writing really dropped off, but his ability to divide the dross from the good stuff did.

guitarist: what's strangest is that he often has BOTH nils lofgren and s. van zant on stage with him, and *still* takes most of the guitar solos, and generally tends to rock them.

I'd like to hear Stuart Murdoch do that one too...(I guess fantasy Bruce covers would be a separate thread)