Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

but he loses that card for this, the final page of the aforementioned document, in which mr. springsteen proves he can't spell "asbury park."

i otherwise kinda like springsteen, so perhaps i'm not the best to answer this, but i'd say his career mathematically boils down to this:

1. great singer
2. damn good songwriter (despite a huge drop-off in the '90s)
3. fair-to-average, overrated bar-band backing (playing mostly hackneyed arrangements)
4. poor production (i like "born to run" just fine, but after that it's just so completely lacking in punch and warmth i can't believe he's ever been lauded for it)

"nebraska" discards with (3) and (4), leaving him playing entirely to his strengths. and as it happens his songwriting hit a peak at the same time. i'd say it's far and away his best.

i'd have to guess anyone owns the record knew, what with him screaming those lyrics out for the entire length of the song, not to mention the fact that he included a lyric sheet. that'd be 15 or 20 million people right there.

Wonderful and glorious. No, no need to thank me.

the 2nd verse of "41 shots" is heartbreaking, astonishing. the rest of the song doesn't quite live up to it.

also the man can sing. i don't like the way he pronounces "somewhere" (mumbled: "some-wahr") BUT: "lit-tle-world-fal-lin-apart"!!!

My mom loved his music, and I think it has something of a sentimental value for me for that reason. But I think it's deserved. Perhaps this is a cheap shot (bcuz I know there are poor ppl who don't like him) but I think most people who have ever been on the underside of reaganomix will agree that he spoke for people who needed someone like him. I don't care how un-hip it is to say that I like his music because it speaks to me from a place that few kinds of music do - certainly moreso than Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

Favorite work of his: side two of Tunnel of Love. A perfect piece.

That embarrasment aside, I do still like Bruce, though. For one thing, I like that (apart from Nebraska), his most depressing songs are also his most clappy-singalong songs. "Hungry Heart," "Born in the USA," "Cadillac Ranch", etc.

The "heartleand" thing" is more complicated than people who live there are willing to admit -- that's the problem. They ought to be populist (if not leftist), but they're not. They have a habit of ignoring their own reality in favor of something that someone told them was "simple." They buy "simple" like it was bread, and swallow it whole, and don't even realize they're choking on it.

But anyway... you're right, Springsteen does not fit into that mold, not by a mile.

"Ought to be?" Nothing more amusing than someone who isn't part of a group dictating to them what their preferences and priorities should be, as if they're too stupid to figure it out for themselves.

Anyway, "Downbound Train" > "Dancing In The Dark" > "Born in the USA", as far as that album goes.

Yeah, I like that one.

i agree. love for this song suddenly sprung upon me within the last four or five years. i was pretty indifferent to it, and then one day i was driving (naturally) and it came on the radio (of course) and that was it. i saw bruce last summer at meadowlands, and i cried twice (you want to hear atlantic city in a stadium in the dark with tens of thousands of people around you absolutely silent).

i sort of imagine springsteen has a randy old man album in him, but he'll have to get all the faith/hope/redemption metaphors out of his system first.

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.