Things you might have thought were crap but actually aren’t part one: Bruce Springsteen
- Born in the USA is actually an anti-war song. See if you can track down the acoustic version with all the Regan-era bombasticism taken out.
- Billy Bragg really rates him.
- Represents the working-class American man.
- C’mon, you’ve got to admit Thunder Road kicks ass.
I read an interesting article about Springsteen recently that made me wonder if I was wrong to write him off as over-earnest and bland (although, as a kid, I loved ‘The River’ and ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town’, chiefly because my parents always played those records).
So I downloaded ‘Nebraska’ and, sure enough, it’s actually very good. Was thinking about putting ‘Mansion on the hill’ on my next podcast, although it’s probably a bit downbeat. But yes, Springsteen is actually pretty good.
Took you long enough Pete. The Born In The USA thing put a lot of people off, me included, though now I quite like his stuff in moderation. Best tracks off the top of my head: Philadelphia, Brilliant Disguise, Atlantic City, Secret Garden, and I’m On Fire, the only 2 minute single about paedophilia ;)
Yeah, have to admit that I’m still getting over Born in the USA. Keep reading great things about him and keep meaning to try him out but… well… you know… it’s Bruce Springsteen ;-)
It was a documentary on Radio 2 about two years ago that did it, but even so, yeah, it took long enough.
One of my top five albums of all time is The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. It is so often maligned as a Van Morrison derivative, yet it’s far better than that. It certainly shares a white boy soulfulness with Van Morrison, making it much less heavy-handed than some of his rockier albums. For me, never has the testosterone-fueled craziness of a young man’s life been drawn so vividly, eloquently and exhuberantly, the recklessness for which the characters in his later albums end up paying.
Worth checking out.
What did it for me was reading BillyBs comments that if Bruce Springsteen had been born in Essex and not New Jersey then A13 would have been the mega hit that Born In the Usa was. Springsteen is a pretty neat social commentator in his own way.
Never saw the attraction but thought I should give him a go but after hearing a gushy radio 2 documentary on him the other week feel less inclined to do so than ever.
Musical taste is a weird thing. Theres lots of things that are very popular and make the sort of sound I usually like but which I find hard to e.g. springsteen, r.e.m. , U2 (although I do like the odd song of those bands). Really disliked Oasis from the off but their latest one is pretty good in a La’s sort of way.
Sorry my “less inclined to do so than ever” comment sounds way more grumpy and dismissive than it should have done. Maybe I will give him another go? I’ll get some out of the library here and see if I like it.
I never rated stadium gigs, but I saw Springsteen in NJ and he made Giants Stadium feel like a tiny bar. By contrast, REM in Hyde Park felt like watching telly. I’ve got some great bootlegs of his going back – remind me and I’ll burn you one of them.
The cover of “Born in the USA” has him pissing on the american flag no?
He’s got to be one of the most misunderstand musicians of all time, at least in the UK. In America I think he’s pretty well understood, even Amiri Baraka called him a brilliant bluesman or something to that effect.
I’d never noticed that before. Either that or he’s got a nasty itch.
I think itching your groin at the flag is even more UNAMERICAN than pissing on it, especially in Wales where having a leak on the flag is a popular idea.
hm…
no
there was this thing on newsnight review or something that made these points a while back in review of his latest album release – so I think you’ve picked up some cultural osmosis there pete…
on the whole he is not challenging musically nor politically
“you can’t shift a product without a face”
I still think his music is crap. Just because someone decided to ‘reinvent’ him and make him into a misunderstood icon of american counter-culture cool won’t blind me to the overall crapness of his music.
Nice try Pete :) But then you probably don’t agree with me that Tatu were a cultural phenomenon!
Sprinsteen’s about fluking an entry point.
I don’t like all his music – songs that are rated, like Brilliant Disguise, are OK but I certainly don’t love them: I have to pick and choose what I listen to, even off an individual album.
His early stuff especially is what you might call street, (though I’m a little vague about that stuff – I grew up on a road). It’s absolutely blue collar, working class. Lou Reed used him as an authentic American voice back in the early 70′s.
It’s Hard To Be A Saint in the City was nearly included by David Bowie on Ziggy Stardust, (which sounds pretty hard to get your head around right now).
Springsteen has always stuck up for the working person, stated their case when things went against them, and at the same time made something beautiful out of it. When his long-time collaborator Little Steven, (he of The Sopranos fame) put together ‘I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City’, Springsteen was the highest profile face on the record, and was one of the reasons it got such a high profile, (the other being it was a great record). At the height of the AIDS epidemic, he wrote the beautiful, compassionate Philadelphia.
Joe Strummer constantly name-checked him, for his music and for his politics, which is a particularly notable recommendation.
None of this is going to convince a non-believer of the value of his music, but it hopefully suggests that for a mega-rich rock star, he walks a remarkably honourable line.
Dave – you’d be surprised. I’ve been coming round to Tatu quite a bit recently.
“he wrote the beautiful, compassionate Philadelphia”
The last time I heard this song I could have sworn the drummer was WAY off beat, I need to hear it again to check cos it seems unlikely. Maybe I was sipping sirrup or something.
Springsteen is awesome. “The River” never fails to make me shudder.
Neat blog btw (got receommended to me by a friend of a friend of yours…)
Speak of the dibble, I just got to a whole chapter on Springsteen in Craig Werner’s mostly excellent book A Change Is Gonna Come. Springsteen manages to get more coverage from Werner than anything else in the 80s despite the book being on “Music, race and the Soul of America”.
It’s a good book, especially on the earlier years of black music, he gets a bit dissolusioned in the 70s and his Hiphop taste is a bit derivative-white-student. Recomended though, yup.