In the early-'60s tradition of Del Shannon (a closer analogy than Roy Orbison even if he isn't named on Born to Run), Springsteen is a rather operatic rock star. Years of touring have formalized his histrionic tendencies, and now he risks getting tripped up in his own self-consciousness. Further, as Langdon Winner puts it, "Bruce has a real problem with rhythm"; when John Rockwell extols Springsteen's phrasing, I recall uncomfortably that Rockwell's roots are with Caruso rather than Ray Charles. For unlike the R&B-and-blues-influenced titans who are invoked as his predecessors--Presley, Dylan, Van Morrison--Springsteen shows no aptitude for the relaxed scat; he is obviously attracted to rhythm-and-blues as teen rather than black music. But this in itself is far from fatal. It simply means that in these respects the great rocker he resembles is John Lennon...It was an assumption of most early rock critics, who tended to be young litterateurs on a paying gig, that rock and roll was in hibernation in the years preceding Beatlemania. This was flat-out wrong. The early '60s were a rich if somewhat silly period that nurtured both the soul style (irrelevant here) and a wealth of not-so-ephemeral pop rock and roll, consummated in the enlightened hedonism of the Beach Boys and the great production machines of Motown and Phil Spector. This is Springsteen's era--he may talk Berry and Presley, but his encore is Gary U.S. Bonds....
Like the early '60s, the mid-'70s are a myopic time, but they lack hope and innocence; our rock hero is Elton John, who makes up for his visionlessness with overwhelming studio perspicacity. I'm sure it will seem willful to Jon Landau, who can't stand Old Four Eyes, but on mornings when I feel like playing Born to Run real loud I often opt for Elton's Rock of the Westies as well. Both answer my need for monolithic, full-sounding, produced rock and roll--a need I indulge freely because I know I have other very different ones.... For like so many of the best American popular romantic/primitive formalists, Spector was a unique but very narrow artist. He had a vision, yes--but it was romantic to the edge of camp, barely adequate to his more innocent and hopeful time.
It's fine for Springsteen to set himself up as the boy Darlene Love is gonna marry, or to vouchsafe the Beach Boys some East Coast hustle--but only if he can transform the high fantasy content of those images into something more than another of the doomed-loser myths that have littered America's artscape since the frontier closed. Early rock and roll was energized by the class mobility and material transport of a genuinely expanding economy, and the fact that those stimuli have dissipated doesn't mean people don't still hanker after them. Springsteen does, and so do his fans. His aesthetic strategy on Born to Run is to duplicate that energy and then add a patina of tragedy, just to remind us things aren't so expansive anymore. His rebel adolescent hero can be jubilant or mournful, defiant or driven to self-deceiving, but one thing is certain--he can always feel sorry for himself. This is a high grade of sentimental escapism, indulgence of a sort that is anything but wise. There is nothing tough or new in it. The future, rock and roll version included, is going to be tough, and it had better be new.
American popular romantic/primitive formalism challenges moribund notions of culture and limns a psychological dynamic that anyone who wants to affect this country (or this world) had better not only understand but harness. Nevertheless, it misses an awful lot. Most significant, its purview--just like our establishment, fancy that--is entirely male. I'm not being prissy here; I'm not suggesting that Springsteen write songs to Susan Saxe or give up male chauvinism for Lent. But he might try to defeat the stereotyping that afflicts even Terry in "Backstreets" and Crazy Janie, both presumably people he has known. The women of Dylan, or Ferry, or Fagen and Becker are hardly heroic sisters, but they are at least considerable rivals; their autonomy goes beyond that of Peggy Sue and the ladies of "East of Eden."
Admittedly, the politics of class and sex are a tick of mine, one that may well disfigure my analysis of an artist who has moved my colleagues so profoundly.... Springsteen... has always played a winningly articulate kind of loser, and now he is rich as well as smart. And so my colleagues both thrill to a fellow winner and identify with his loser rebel persona, forgetting in the rock and roll moment how much the winner in them shares with what the fighter was fighting against....
Welles theorizes that Springsteen's success reflects "the psychological needs of those who operate the media" more than it does "the desires and interests of those to whom the media is [sic] directed," but this is massculture theory cant, the kind that can be plugged in anywhere. Obviously, Springsteen does fulfill the fans' needs and desires--that's why they buy him and not Randy Newman. This does not mean, however, that their experience of the artist doesn't differ from the critics'. For the most part, Springsteen the winner can provide them strictly vicarious delight; what they need and desire--ominously, I think--is an artist who romanticizes and even celebrates a defeat that is a lot more likely for them than it is for any establishment, rock and roll version included.
― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 14:57 (three years ago) link