Bruce Springsteen - Classic or Dud ?

"candy's room" is the grebtest song ever written about being in love w. a prostitute when you sound a bit like david bowie

Is this a new genre? Cos that'd be fucking incredible.

I still love Bruce Springsteen. Put on Rosalita and you will see me go insane.

Yeah, new album is weak. Basically just an excuse for the live shows, though, which according to what I've heard remain wonderful.

Found this at the near start of the thread, dunno if Ned can be bothered to talk about it now:

La Bruce just collectively calls to my mind a stunted bastard vision of music that presumes he was the sole carrier of the 'spirit of rock and roll truth' that the Beatles and Stones 'started' in the sixties.

Odd, because Springsteen's own views are the exact opposite- he was always far less interested in The Beatles and The Rolling Stones than he was in Phil Spector and James Brown.

Though he always does look really tense and "real rock" when he performs.

It used to be such that every time I got drunk, the evening would end with me and a gentleman companion in the group deciding to put on Dancing in the Dark and imitating the Boss & Courteney Cox dance. This has thankfully not occured in a long time now.

Ah, to explain my sense further -- there I wasn't referring to exact sound (I hope) so much as the role he seems to be in. I don't like universal idolatry, but personal, and so much around Bruce is "my god, the genius is among us all again! DO YOU SEE!" insistence that just makes me hate him even more. Like I said above in that quote, I don't get the sense that he believes that garbage (if he takes Dave Marsh at all seriously, though, that's a pisser).

And as for the music itself, a lot of people love Phil Spector and James Brown. In my mind, that doesn't give them a free pass for their own efforts. ;-)

My only realization about Bruce recently has been when I finally heard Bat Out of Hell and realized I loved that a hell of a lot more than any Springsteen I've heard.

Yeah, Nebraska is a pretty OK album, but I recall at the time that it was more noteworthy as an advertisement for Tascam's portastudio than as any kind of artistic breakthrough.

Even so, I'll give him a "Get Out Of Dud Free" card for this, which I think is pretty goddamn cool.

He could have quite after Born to Run and still be classic classic classic. That album is one of the great moments in pop music history, and a cultural icon (in the States at least).

Even if you don't like his music, he's still classic.

And it is about time people start liking "Born In The USA" again. Just because the album sold zillions doesn't make it a bad album.

Of course the adulation is typically overboard. But what do you expect for someone who has had, at least at moments, near-Madonna-level pop smarts and still gets content, even poetry, into his lyrics?

One of the differences between him and "heartland rock" - r&b. A greater proportion of it, at least. Who else (besides the aforementioned Californians) has had such a sound during the same period at remotely similar levels of popularity?

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.

If he's writing that in 2005, about the stuff Springsteen was coming out with in 2005, then I think there's a part of it that I agree with, but that "if he every had them" definitely doesn't sound like someone who knows Springsteen's work at all.

Like, I do think that Springsteen in his early work is driven not just by connection to his blue-collar roots but by a sense of having just barely escaped a particular kind of working-class life that seemed to be marked out for him. And as he gets older and farther away from that life, and more comfortable with his status as a rich man, he loses that driving sense of "this could be me" that I think animates a lot of his portraits of people broken down or frustrated or limited by working-class life.

It makes me think of Dickens and the blacking factory, and one of the fundamental differences between Dickens and Springsteen (other than all the obvious ones) is that Dickens actually did work in the blacking factory, and so that experience is a foundational trauma that never quite goes away. Whereas for Springsteen it's a source of survivor guilt but not something that actually happened to him, and so its influence weakens over time.

And I think Springsteen is at his strongest when he is animated by that sense of identification with his characters, and that he finds that sense of identification, very often, through his own anxieties and obsessions. There's a feeling of "what if...?" behind a lot of Springsteen's songs, imo. Who or what would I be if I had never found music? If I had been sent to war? If I let myself drift too far away from people and couldn't find my way back?

By the time you get to Western Stars, the central "what if" has to do with marriage, and connections with people, and age, and the fear of impulsively throwing it all away and ending up alone at the end of your life. But there's a period in between Ghost of Tom Joad and Western Stars where Springsteen is still trying to be the writer of the working class, and imo you can tell that his heart isn't really in it, that the working-class experiences he's writing about are no longer the things that keep him up in the middle of the night. So on that level I don't exactly disagree with that criticism, but it sounds like it's coming from someone who wasn't going to like Springsteen no matter what.

"if he ever had them," rather

Great post lily

otm I think Tom Joan is the last time he’s really persuasive in that mode, and even there it feels more like journalism than imagined memoir — like he’s done the research and is mustering substantial empathy as an artist, but he’s not drawing from any well of experience or first-hand observations.

lol Tom Joad autocorrect

Excellent post Lily. And tipsy makes an excellent point how Joad "feels more like journalism than imagined memoir" - I've grown to like that album, but it's probably no coincidence that the best songs (at least for me) were based on stories already written in detail elsewhere. I supposed "Nebraska" can be described as such but IIRC a lot of what's memorable and haunting in that song are Springsteen's own creation. A large part of the title track of Joad translates and even transcribes what Steinbeck wrote for his novel. Then there's "Galveston Bay" which is all drawn from a real-life story - I'm not sure if any particular lyric stands out for me, but it's a great story where all the details add up to something that's left a stronger impression than anything else on the album.

Yeah, the narratives on Nebraska feel deeply inhabited in a way they don't really on Tom Joad. Like whatever he'd tapped into on Nebraska wasn't quite there anymore, artistically, so he had to use other tools.

When more details about his depression came out in his memoir, it kind of suggested that Nebraska could only be a one-time achievement. IIRC, 1982 was about the time he really hit the breaking point with his depression, and a lot of that album really sits "comfortably" in the mindset of someone who's in a really dark place. If that's what it took to get him there, I don't hold it against him if he doesn't ever reach the same harrowing depths again.

I hear a lot of depression on Tom Joad, but I agree that Nebraska was the kind of risk that he could only take once and didn't dare try for again. It was written iirc before Springsteen had his big breakdown on his cross-country drive, and I get a sense from it of Springsteen sliding into depression almost deliberately, not trying to break his fall because to him, at that moment, depression feels like creativity. There's a kind of dark energy to Nebraska, a black light of empathy that feels very seductive. You listen to a song like "Reason to Believe," which is imo the darkest song on the whole album, and it's so charged with that feeling that can accompany the beginning of depression, that the world has been revealed to you as it really is, and that there is something special, something meaningful, about this revelation. Once Springsteen has his big breakdown, I think he stops leaning into the depression in the same way, but I do think it's very much there on Tom Joad - it just has a duller, more exhausted, more lived-in quality by then.

My favorite songs on Joad are the ones that feel as if they were written out of a depression that's if anything more entrenched than that of Nebraska. "Highway 29," "Straight Time," "Dry Lightning," even "My Best Was Never Good Enough" - there's a kind of dull, nihilistic noir voice to all of them that feels like it's probably picking up something very real about Springsteen's state of mind. I agree about the working-class Social Problem songs on Tom Joad - they feel like journalism to me rather than something felt from the inside. But then there's this other side to Joad which is Springsteen writing noir, with that classic noir theme of being so isolated from normal society that all your moral/ethical landmarks disappear and you become monstrous because there is nothing around you to keep you human.

Which can also happen in the deeper journalism, like In Cold Blood. Steinbeck doesn't go deep/isolated in the same way, but he tracks bunches of Grapescharacters, and not just the Joads, through hellacious migration---all those camps, communities of night and day, strange weather, that the reader becomes familiar with, never accustomed to (interesting to compare Woody G.'s "Tom Joad" with Bruce's: Woody had more experience along the Joads' lines, although, like Bruce, he wisely got his ass to NYC and least the fringes of show biz, through he spurned some opportunities there).
I wanted Bruce to drop the Popular Front approach and write about his and my father;s generation, The Greatest Generation as for instance Reagan Democrats, who had benefited at least in part from New Deal, Gi Bill, Eisenhower's construction of the Interstates, Military-industrial Complex boosting of economy------all that, and and then they turned against Big Government, in further contradiction, very selective "conservatism."
He eventually addressed some of that in the monologues-with-piano of his Broadway stint, I think, but maybe not in songs? I haven't kept up, sorry.

I meant, *proceeded* in further contradiction, very selective "conservatism," *through the rest of their lives and in the legacy/encouragement of some descendants.*

But there's a period in between Ghost of Tom Joad and Western Stars where Springsteen is still trying to be the writer of the working class, and imo you can tell that his heart isn't really in it

this may be true but it also gives me an excuse to bring up my favorite(????) springsteen song, “long time comin” from devils & dust. i mean he was doing a lot of character work at the time, it doesn’t all work or feel grounded in its setting but that one reaches in pretty deep imo

sorry that is a totally distracting sidepoint from lily's (as usual) excellent springsteen scholarship

No, it's not! and thank you!

Springsteen just cancelled some European gigs due to voice issues after having done UK gigs. Some tweets are saying he has Covid again (but that could be just twitter x)