Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (103 of them)
three years pass...
nine years pass...
Finally got around to revisiting Born in the USA, and surprisingly I loved it without reservation.
I was going to listen to it in light of that Pitchfork article, but I got caught up in other records, and in the meantime famed Columbia exec Walter Yetnikoff died. Never heard of the guy so all the crazy stories about him were new to me. Anyway, I bring that up because as soon as I put it on, I remembered Yetnikoff's comments about hearing it for the first time, and I really thought about what that would be like: it's 1984, you're a label exec, and this record lands on your desk, completely new and ready for company review. No one outside of Bruce's camp has heard it. There's no baggage or anything. Somehow that helped me really zero in on the words, and I came away with a much greater appreciation for the album.
Springsteen has been down on it for being too grab bag rather than a cohesive statement, but I think that may help - sometimes a concept can burden an album, where everything's got to have its place in a pre-designed narrative. In this case we just run the full gamut of material, and naturally they all feel like they flow through the same characters and occupy the same community. To me, that's enough for cohesiveness. And the stories are brilliantly detailed. Just about everything that catches a character's eye is perfect. I know it was fashionable to knock it for being pop or sounding dated, but so what? That's kind of what I like about it - having ultra-catchy, slick pop songs like these carrying these lyrical details and these types of stories.
Another thing I realized is how much I don't like the videos. Springsteen got top talent to direct them, but they do seem reductive and corny in retrospect. That really sank in with "Dancing in the Dark" - again thinking like I've never heard this before, the words rise up to the surface and it kind of feels like it's a guy at home alone in the dark, twitching with energy and anxiety, dying to get out of his rut, out of his life, etc. I guess that video helped sell it, but it seems miles in the opposite direction of what it really evokes.
― birdistheword, Saturday, 21 August 2021 05:01 (two years ago) link