Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

The Progues lololol

90 minute version of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, with swirling twin-guitar solo in the middle

production/mastering on "death to my hometown" is a mess. cluttered and tinny. can't make out what the jaunty choir is singing on the chorus, if anything.

i love bruce and if i'm not mistaken somewhere in this long thread is an epic conversation b/t me, ally, ned, and other folks in which ally and i defend him to the bitter end. but i really don't appreciate his work of the past decade. it's not as much the persona, the lyrics -- it's the music. so little of it is given any room to breathe. little of it seems to modulate or build in any but the most obvious ways. oh well.

production/mastering on "death to my hometown" is a mess. cluttered and tinny. can't make out what the jaunty choir is singing on the chorus, if anything.

They're singing "Please don't brickwall/this song we worked so hard on"

You're right, sounds completely awful. And Bruce's singing is making me angry.

i kind of don't, since i listened to the last one and immediately regretted it.

i've enjoyed most everything that springsteen's released over the past 10 years and i hated working on a dream. his laziest thing since human touch. but i've liked what i've heard from this one.

also devils and dust is his best album of original material in this whole period (we shall overcome being the best record period), not the rising.

i do feel like devils and dust is mad underrated

ha. I was in Dublin a few years ago and Springsteen was everywhere. On every stereo in every record store, in every bar. There was even a bar called the 'thunder road cafe'. Eventually I went up to a guy in some second hand shop that was playing some live bootleg whatever springsteen thing (that sucked) and asked him what the deal with Ireland and Springsteen was, expecting to say that he was of Irish descent as Josh said but the guy just looked at me, narrowed his eyes and went 'he's just good'.

xpost "Devils & Dust" is an album you return to after you hear a few songs live and think, hey, these are good! And then you listen to the album and think, hey, this is dull. (See also: "Ghost of Tom Joad"). There's some fundamental problem Bruce has been having in the studio, in that even the albums that should have room to breathe are just as oppressive. It's not a coincidence that "We Shall Overcome" is his best album of the past decade or so, not because he didn't write the songs, but because the production (which sounds pretty live in a room to me) captures the sound and energy of Bruce and the band. The new one has some good songs on it, but once again its qualities are suppressed. Which is why I imagine this stuff will be so good live, freed from their shackles, as it were.

"Long Time Coming" off D&D is one of his best songs of the decade imho.

Sure, why not? But that album, which I tried to listen to again two weeks ago, is sort of deadly. Not as snoozy as Tom Joad, but a real drag. Good stories, dull songs.

What's the song in which the guy fucks a girl in the ass and calls it art?

Thunder Road

From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free

the most obsessive bruce fan I ever met was irish

The new album is a positive surprise for me. I thought he was to old to rock like this, but working on the leftover material from "Darkness..." apparently has helped him regain his old torch.

It took him almost 30 years, but the proper followup to "Born In The USA" is finally here.

The challopy undercurrent of this post is very Geir, but the praise for an album so light on melody and so heavy on loops and stuff is very un-Geir. I'm torn.

i made a word cloud of lyrics for all of bruce springsteen's recorded history. I'm really surprised the biggest words aren't "burned", "abandoned", and "automobile."

http://i.imgur.com/ct2oN.jpg

Or "sir."

Now Ain't Got Know Night
Baby Back
Little Love
Well Just Come Now

^^Chinese bootleg Springsteen titles

damn, that wordcloud is very, uh, springsteen

It looks like words used in just about every song of the last 50 years.

lol @ "well"

It looks like words used in just about every song of the last 50 years.

"well" yeah, but the collective tilt is telling

It took him almost 30 years, but the proper followup to "Born In The USA" is finally here.

geir, you should write for rolling stone. you have a knack for meaningless "observations" that could be nicely integrated into a promotional campaign.

LOL @ "highway" in that word cloud

title track on this is awesome.

"Wrecking ball" title track is not awesome. More like formula

You guys get on the same page please so I know if I need to bother with this. All this "this is great", "this is awful", "this is awesome", "this is formula" is not helping AT ALL.

This is worth hearing. How's that?

Haha, I was likely going to check it out anyway, I was just entertained by all the back and forth on this. Think its probably a good sign that there is a little divisiveness around this instead of a universal shrug.

"Wrecking ball" title track is not awesome. More like formula

formula can be awesome. it is pretty awesome here.

Good piece here: http://www.avclub.com/articles/pays-to-be-the-boss-why-the-bruce-springsteen-busi,70462/

Stick with Springsteen's albums from the '70s and early 80s.

I don't think that anyone would argue that those albums are not better.

My fave Springsteen tour, btw, at least in my concert-going lifetime, was watching him behind "Devils & Dust," actually, when it was just him, a host of instruments and some 160 songs from his catalog, new, old, unreleased, rare, etc. He really made a case for the dustier corners of his career, and found neat ways to refresh the familiar. For instance, I like to post this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4WKYtS4JDk

Tom Joad tour was legendary, too, and that album was dull dull dull.

Stick with Springsteen's albums from the '70s and early late 80s.

Great Jody Rosen review

Springsteen has always been a social realist—often, a brilliant one, with songs that captured the fine-grain texture of everyday lives. Here, though, he sounds like a socialist realist. The songs veer into proletarian kitsch: “Freedom, son, is a dirty shirt/ The sun on my face and my shovel in the dirt.” On his best records, Springsteen was simply a storyteller: He wrote about the white working class because that’s what interested him, that’s the world he knew best. In recent years, self-consciousness has taken hold; he’s never sounded so dutiful about his role as bard of the masses. Listening to Wrecking Ball, I was reminded of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, in which the successful Hollywood comedy director decides to make O, Brother Where Art Thou, a film that will capture the plight of the Great Depression downtrodden. In “Jack of All Trades” Springsteen intones: “I’ll hammer the nails, and I’ll set the stone/ I’ll harvest your crops when they’re ripe and grown … The banker man grows fat, the working man grows thin/ It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again.” O, brother.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2012/03/bruce_springsteen_s_wrecking_ball_reviewed_.html

"We Take Care of Our Own" has a this kinda thing going on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boPhDRug_SQ
deny it if you can!

but the praise for an album so light on melody and so heavy on loops and stuff is very un-Geir

You mean "Born In The USA"? Becaus that album is also full of loops and ostinato based songs. It doesn't always work (the title track and "I'm On Fire" feel a bit too repetitive for me, although I loved the former at 14), but surprisingly often it does. Even a track as repetitive and mantra-like as "Darlington County" appeals to me in some mysterious way. And I think it is much about the ethusiasm and enerty. An enthusiasm and energy that has been largely absent from everything folloing, but which seems to be back on the current album.

Okay I actually really like this, at least compared to his last couple studio albums. Kinda surprised he left the studio version of "American Land" off the standard edition.

no Geir, he means he's surprised you like the new one

On his best records, Springsteen was simply a storyteller: He wrote about the white working class because that’s what interested him, that’s the world he knew best. In recent years, self-consciousness has taken hold; he’s never sounded so dutiful about his role as bard of the masses.

i call b.s. on this. sure, his lyrics on this new one may be a new shade of awful, but springsteen's persona as the bard of the working class was always constructed, always extremely self-consciously. in fact, you can hear him struggling toward it on his albums. his first two albums are something very different: self-consciously poetic, dylanesque, felliniesque, profligate with internal rhymes, metaphors, literary allusions... he begins to purge this w/ born to run. by the river bruce-as-we-know-him emerges. that's not to say he hasn't pursued variations on this ethos. arguably, with much of tunnel of love and the two 1992 albums, he sort of half casts-off some of it. but then it's back in full force w/ the ghost of tom joad.

all that to say that characterizing springsteen's arc from earnest, working-class balladeer to self-conscious Voice of the Volk is really wrong. he's just gotten cruder about it.

^^ booming

But a definition politicisation took place in the early 80s which wasn't present in the blue-collar narratives of the albums up to that point. Jody Rosen's saying that his sense of himself as spokesperson rather than observer has gotten too heavy. The Rising had that dutiful, rep-the-nation vibe - do you remember that NYT story about a passer-by shouting "We need you!" after 9/11? That feels like something that's happened in the last decade or so, with mixed results. The first two albums following his politicisation - Nebraska and Born in the USA - don't suffer from that tone because it still felt fresh to him then, like he was working stuff out and finding the right stories to tell. Every political message was channelled through characters and stories - less so now.

^^^

this, plus musically the songwriting feels more forced.

I call B.S. on this, too. The main issue is that the music is forced, yes. But this may be the first Springsteen album whose politics are explicit, not implicit. Bruce the passionate Persona may have imbued his music with a political edge, but I think even his most "political" material - "Nebraska," say, or certain tracks off BitUSA - aren't exactly strident and, despite the bombast of some of the music, are ctually kind of subtle and nuanced. Again, as I pointed out above, "Darkness on the Edge of Town," his first "political" album, and the first he made after Landau politicized him (ie made him read books), was largely written and constructed during the Ford administration and takes aim at no particular villains. The River, Nebraska, BitUSA ... it's a general malaise and disappointment he's tapping into. Ham-fisted or no, the new stuff is specific, and I have no problem with Springsteen going that route. He's working in a classic, direct folk tradition, and as much as the snob in me (the elite in me?) may not dig it, his heart is undeniably in the right place, and there's no one else doing what he's doing at the (literal) level he's doing it.

(And not to romantize it, anyone who has seen him live understands that we do need dudes like Bruce, to some extent. He may be the only performer I've ever seen able to totally unify tens of thousands of people, which is quite the trick and, as above, ever primed with an idealist potential.)

When has Springsteen not been political?

Never mind “Badlands” and “Born in the U.S.A” — what is “Thunder Road” if not the embrace of heterosexual manhood as defined by early sixties radio?

Obviously it depends on your definition of politics - all art is political from a certain angle - but he had no particular views on foreign policy and no real understanding of economics, ie the issues that he later embraced, when he made Born to Run - that came later. That's not a criticism - I think Thunder Road is perfectly fine without macroeconomic insight. But it does make sense to say that his worldview changed significantly in the late 70s/early 80s. I actually thought it was after Darkness but I might have misremembered that. The Dave Marsh book on Springsteen in the 80s goes into detail about exactly how this awakening happened, via various books that Landau gave him.

When has Springsteen not been political?

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn),

His before meeting Jon Landau and Dave Marsh stuff. But I am guessing you may wish to use a more expansive definition of "political" and even include those early releases with their Dylanesque wordplay.

Here's Nabisco turning the lyrics of the latest one into a speech:

http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/bruce-springsteens-stump-speech.html

We've gone over this. Just because Springsteen talks about the underclass or the economy does not make him political, necessarily. He's painting portraits of a certain segment of the country, true, but that's general reflection and observation, not a platform or angle; "Badlands" is every bit the "I'm going to get out of this town and make it" anthem that "Born to Run" is, but there is nothing beyond generalities in that song, as awesome as it is. It may make you want to conquer the world, or shake your fist at the government, or rue the death of the American dream, but that stuff is all projected. Even "BitUSA" toes a certain ironic line, but never comes right out and picks a side. That's one o his gifts, I'd say, that balance, and that's perhaps why the new one feels so ... unbalanced.

And yeah, Springsteen was definitely not consistently political on stage until at least "The River." And even then, it bears repeating that he did not explicitly endorse a candidate or get involved in a campaign until Kerry.

I haven't heard the new album, but in re that Rosen review, or at least the lines quoted in it, it sounds like it's less a problem of being "too political" than not being politically smart and engaged. All this stuff about who grows the grain versus who eats it, and shovels in the dirt and so forth, is some kind of Industrial Age view of capitalism that doesn't have a lot to do with American/Western working-class life now. For all its melodic limpness and Depression echoes, Tom Joad at least showed an attempt to grapple with realities of the '90s: immigration, methamphetamine, the explosion of the prison-industrial complex. If the new album is really just a lot of would-be Wobbly anthems, that strikes me as less a problem of politics than nostalgia.

That seems pretty accurate. It's a weird nostalgia for a more idealistic political time, without sounding necessarily of the '60s. Though as snapshot political outburst, I wish it was more like, maybe, Neil Young's "Living with War."

what is “Thunder Road” if not the embrace of heterosexual manhood as defined by early sixties radio?

Alfred, I actually remember reading an essay in a book edited by ... I forget which former/current Rolling Stone editor. Anyway, it was about sexual ambiguity in Springsteen songs, and actually their less than forthright heterosexuality. Worth a chuckle or two. Want to say it was predicated on the ambiguous nicknames of his characters?