Bruce Springsteen – Magic
I know I am so late reviewing this that this whole post is thus rendered largely pointless, but I thought I might write it anyway. Partly, I think, I want to write it because it’s actually a decent album and not only is that about the last thing I expected, but I also feel really quite guilty about my pessimism.
Springsteen, in my and a great many other books, is a legend. Asbury Park, E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, Nebraska – all iconic albums that stand about above the millions. His live performances, the early ones in particular, are almost beyond comparison. The Hammersmith gig and his 5CD box set are absolute must-haves for anyone even vaguely keen on his music.
Of course, he’s not infallible. Bar a couple of stellar tracks The River is really poor, as are Lucky Town, most of Human Touch and large parts of Tom Joad. Most crucially, The Rising and an admittedly cursory skim through Devils & Dust revealed an artist who, to me, was musically static. He seemed to be playing an MOR version of himself – the beats stodgy and both the rhythm and the arrangement absolutely predictable. I think I reviewed the last Rolling Stones album in a similar way – it was like listening to The Stone cover The Stones.
Now artists can’t retain their spark for ever and no-one should expect them to, so I was quite prepared to forgive and move on and not worry too much about future releases, and very nearly didn’t buy this album at all. So it is with guilt and relief that I am writing something of a mea culpa and announcing that actually, it’s really a bloody good record. He certainly seems to have gone back to a genuine E-Street Band format, which I believe was the stated intention, with a little fiddle left over from his brilliant Seeger Sessions album, and the results are excellent.
Now I am not saying that this reaches his previous peaks, and it’s never going to be a legendary album, but there’s a bit of funk, some tenderness and plenty of the old rock ‘n’ roll spirit to be found here. There are still a few uninspiring numbers, but about two thirds of this album are as good as he’s been for nigh on twenty years.
Bruce Springsteen – I’ll Work For Your Love
Bruce Springsteen – Girls in Their Summer Clothes (Does anyone else hear just a little bit of The Magnetic Fields in this one?)
While I cede most of your points, I have to argue in favor of The River. Then again, I was 15 when it came out and it was refreshing and explosive and fun. 28 years hence, it is rather dated. All that aside, The Rising was a tour de Force, an album about 9/11 that could only have been written by a son of New Jersey. Because many of those that died that day were from Jersey it was really up to Bruce to bring some perspective. I can safely say that I couldn’t cry about 9/11, living in Los Angeles when it happened but being a New Jersey/New Yorker until The Rising. The floodgates opened one aftenoon as I gave it a listen. I will never forget that moment and never forget the album that was the gateway to my own sadness and release.
That said, I wrote my own review of Magic (Worst title of a Springsteen album ever!) at http://shuffleboil.com/2007/10/12/review-bruce-springsteen-magic/
Come on by and take a look. Maybe you can even add an old reader’s efforts to your blogroll.
Keep it up, mate!
on the stephin merritt/mf sound – i was just thinking the same thing. pretty fab track.
i like the header picture today. 
Hello Allen old chap. Delighted to see you back again.
As to the whole 9/11 connection with The Rising, although I found 9/11 quite shocking it has never seemed especially real to me. Partly, I am sure, because I never even knew those buildings were there before they were knocked down.
The other thing is that we see aeroplanes crashing into various things and exploding all the time on TV screens. Someone telling you that this time it’s real just didn’t bridge the gap for me, especially from the other side of the world. I still find it surreal, so that emotional connection was never there.
Given the impact it had in the States though I did make a special effort to get into The Rising, but it just never happened. At the risk of setting off the internet crazies, I perhaps get the impression that the strength of that album was in the emotion and, particularly, the articulation. Without that emotional connection I just heard a record that, in a musical sense, didn’t do it for me at all.
I’ll definitely link to your blog though. We’ve got C&B going now as well, so I am turning into the Sith Lord of the internets – sending bad people out there to subvert the great people’s information revolution!
Without, one hopes, opening a whole new can of – albeit slightly askew – airport-related hoo-ha, but as for 9/11, regardless of distance, it did chill me somewhat (then &, to a lesser extent, now).
I will say, though, with regards to The Rising & the perceived US reaction to the 9/ll phenom., I do believe the genuine reaction/grief was one of disbelief that this had happened on their soil, as opposed to “dear Lord, thousands of people [regardless of CofO] have died needlessly — how terribly downbeat.
Therefore, as a direct result, I kind of get a little weary with public chest-beating & finger wagging regarding the subject, regardless as to who is doing the wagging or being wagged at, simply because it’s generally borne out of a territorial pissing contest cloaked in (dare I say it, Diana-style) mass grief.
As for the album itself, I’m afraid I found it a little too, um, ingrained in the wrong side of trying too hard to stomach. Not that that’s ’steen’s fault; there have been too many earnest/wide of the mark attempts at confronting 9/11 via the medium of song. Every one of them falling down at the lyric stage, what is obviously the single most important part in any attempt at trying not to sound forced, reactive & overtly worthy in the face of anything that pounds ‘emotive value’ in your face at that high a level.
Well I think the toughest thing for an artist about 9/11 was that there was, and to an extent still is, a single acceptable way to react to it within the United States. Anything other than the right way was attacked with some venom.
Consequently, how do you write something sincere if you only have one very simplistic reaction that you are allowed to have? I think Springsteen might have been the first to write something even vaguely nuanced, or at least I get that impression. Not being an American of course, I can’t really tell.
I haven’t listened to The Rising, but anyone who wants to come to grips with 9/11 should hear William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops.”
I work just outside Washington, DC (in the tallest building in Northern Virginia as it turns out), and the plane that went into the Pentagon flew past my office window, straight down Columbia Pike. I didn’t see it go in, but many of my friends and office mates did. I watched the smoke and flames afterwards, and we all fucking fled. We knew what was happening because the Twin Towers was all over the internet, although they hadn’t fallen yet.
DC, it’s true that the reaction in the US had much to do with astonishment that this had happened in America, in buildings that many of us had visited, and which contained people many of us knew and loved. The reaction was fear. Nausea. 9/11 aroused such a response here because it scared us, and exposed a vulnerability most of us didn’t know existed, and killed people we knew. Because a similar attack elsewhere would not have exposed that vulnerability or taken our friends/parents/children/lovers from us, you’re probably right that it wouldn’t have engendered the same type of reaction. But how could it have been otherwise? Your Diana comparison just holds no water with me whatsoever.
I absolutely reject the judgment that Americans are peculiarly solipsistic in their grief, or that we are indifferent to the sufferings of anyone but ourselves. That’s not who I am. And that’s not anyone I know.
Well I think that was the thing for Americans. It was the first time they’d had to handle this kind of thing, as a nation. Most of the overseas genocide is seen on TV and is therefore surprisingly difficult to genuinely engage with. I’ve had just this problem with 9/11 itself.
But what about people in Buttfuck, Illinois? Or Arizona? It had no real direct impact on them personally. Where do they stir that emotional response from? That side at least bears at least some relationship to the Diana stuff, from my point of view, although this is the first I’ve thought about it.
Bear in mind too, C&B, that we over here don’t see individual normal Americans. We see a lot of television and movies and what we read in the newspapers. From looking at those it comes across quite strongly that 9/11 is the only disaster to happen in the world, ever. Oddly enough, even compared to Katrina, which I suppose says a lot about a/ the sense of shock, and b/ I don’t know, America’s attitude to failure perhaps? Not sure, but it must say something – you’d be far better placed than me to say what exactly.
Buttfuck is actually in Indiana, not Illinois.
Americans from everywhere were directly affected by 9/11. The hundreds of plane passengers who died on 9/11 were not from NYC by and large, they were from all over the country. NYC and DC are populated by people from every State, and the WTC and Pentagon were occupied by people from nearly every State, as well as several dozen countries abroad. Also, for all our regional provinciality, most Americans still view NYC and DC with awe and grudging admiration; they’re places that many Americans have visited and that truly stir the imagination, even for Buttfuckians.
The Diana analogy is just goofy. She was one woman (and a fine woman I have no doubt) who died in a fucking car crash. 9/11 was the intentional murder of nearly 3,000 innocent people, live on TV, and it was motivated by a truly scary apocalyptic theology. Likewise, the failure to reinforce the levees in New Orleans, etc., engenders real anger over here, but Katrina was a hurricane, a morally-neutral natural phenomenon, and people generally don’t equate deaths that arose from governmental negligence with those that arose from deliberate mass murder.
I recognize that people abroad don’t see ordinary Americans, just as we generally don’t see ordinary Europeans or Iranians or North Koreans. But the point is that you KNOW you don’t see ordinary Americans on the news. Just as it’s intolerable for Americans to make ignorant generalizations about Europe or the Middle East, so too is it wrong for Europeans or people from the Middle East to parrot media depictions of Americans that they know (or should know) to be misleading, and often outright fabricated as a means to move units.
Now I agree that American ignorance is particularly dangerous because we have big bombs and an unfortunate proclivity to use them on the wrong people. I’m not an apologist for the current
US foreign policy by any stretch, and in fact I think our democracy is badly broken in many ways. But I just don’t feel the need, just because I’m American, to be constantly apologizing for flaws in our national character that other countries exhibit to an equal or greater degree.
Did I ever mention that I find Americans to be a particularly angry people, by and large?
It’s interesting actually, C&B, because I have an American sister-in-law (my brother’s missus) and she comes over to France to spend time with our side of the family and has to listen to more anti-Americanism than I can imagine is pleasant. Not that we’re being spiteful, it’s just hard to put the brakes on sometimes.
When I was an Englishman abroad I was hugely critical of the UK because all I saw was the same as we all see of America now: the press, the political leadership (Thatcher), lobster-faced lager louts and so on. My relationship with the UK verged on disgust.
It was only when I moved to Scotland and was constantly attacked for being an ‘English bastard’, despite the fact that I didn’t for a second consider myself English, that I began to develop a sort of defensive patriotism.
Now I am surprisingly pro-English, for someone who has barely really lived there and someone who finds patriotic sentiment a bit suspicious in general.
Reminds me a bit of the reaction of a lot of fairly liberal Americans after the outbreak of public finger-wagging around the world post 9/11.
Not sure which point that particularly pertained to, but hopefully you get my vague drift.
How dare you accuse Americans of being angry people! English bastard.
Sheesh, it’s just like being at home.
C&B, firstly let me say, without a shred of irony or insincerity, I respect you, your views & your country (not necessarily your country’s views, but that’s another missive waiting to happen). I think, though, you’ve missed the point a little – I’m talking about what Toad’s picked up on; the wave of unconnected ‘grief’ generated by the initial response to the attacks which then, in areas not directly/personally touched by the attacks, were fanned by a whole host of ‘other’ deep-seated reasons (let’s just say certain parts of the US harbor certain types of mindset what kinda want to kill mostly everyrthing because they dang do deem them anti-American / Constitutional / Democracy / Freedom / God / KFC / whatever). Hence the Diana-style remark.
I made it because, over here, most of us sane thinking grumpy fuckers scratched our chins till they bled over the fact that, one day, we were all living in a perfectly sane world, then, the next day, most of the UK were wailing & beating their chests over the ‘loss’ of an ‘English Rose’ who, up until that point, was their only source of reading matter (a la the mornings via the tabloid press) & frankly they didn’t give a rat’s cocksnot about. The sudden & powerfully odd reaction by grown, sensible adults perplexes, not only I but many learned academics & proper thinkers, to this very day.
It perplexes me, as an international observer, in the same way as the rapid, immediate growth of fundemental, pure, manic hatred for an invisible / unknown ‘enemy’ (i.e. the speculative stuff thatb happened before anyone really had any type of evidence of who was to blame), as well as the loss of the bubble that has psychologically protecetd the USA since the after the Cuban Missile Crisis (even during the Reagan era you guys weren’t that concerned about USSR’s reactive/proactive strike capabilities, eh?).
I certainly don’t think the loss of one woman vs. 3000 people is even a conversation I ever want to get involved with because it’s fucking dumb & obvious, so please, I hope you don’t think I’m just being ‘over here’ & anti-American or ignorant to the grievving process involved in this section of history.
Also, let me make this clear before I get lynched again, I’m not saying there wasn’t an outpouring of genuine grief — people did lose loved ones, friends & such like, & it must have been an unbearably fraught surreality that I don’t think I could ever comprehend unless something similar happened on these shores (I could tell you some stories about aborted/defused attacks in the UK Mr Toad but I’d be breaking the official secrets act, so perhaos for when we’re around a cosy fire nursing a single malt or two…).
One of my very, very good business colleagues went through hell. His wife works in the Pentagon. Her office was smack in the middle of the impact. It was, needless to say, entirely decimated. She was down the hall when the ‘object’ (show me a movie of a plane, then I’ll say plane) hit the Pentagon. She, by miracle of positioning against a pilar more than anything else, lived to tell the tale. They have a chunk of masonry from the stricken wing on a plinth in their Washington DC home, complete with a plaque from the DG of the Pentagon, & a quote about mortality & what it is to suddenly wake up, snap out of terminal blinkers & finally realise that you are alive & what a glorious thing it is to have that chance to make that realisation (then something very American & overly patriotic – I forget what it was).
As for the LP, I have to say I cringe when I hear/see/experience anyone trying to ‘do’ a cause celebre – regardless of its importance. If the subject is too big for a normal, everyday person to articulate without descending into withering cliche/lazy chocloate box reasoning &/or chest thumping pride/jingosim, then I don’t want a ’singer/singwriter’ (of any degree or bent) to attempt to tackle it. That’s simply my opinion & litmus test. Please don;t judge yourselves on it
;o)
DC
Toad-o. You list a bunch of recent albums, but have you heard the rollicking good time on the Live in Dublin set? Wonderful, wonderful music that actually points out colors in his studio work that you don’t necessarily notice on first (or tenth) listen.
Actually, no I haven’t listened to it at all. Isn’t it a lot of the Seeger stuff? I get the impression that would be absolutely incredible live. I’ll take that as a recommendation then and get back to you all in a bit on that.
Great stuff. The comments thread I mean. I am just someone who never did and never will ‘get’ the Broooooooooooooooce phenomena.
Christ JC this is my second post ‘like this’ in a week. Fevered debate a-go-go. I can’t turn my back on this lot for a minute.
Well, DC, I don’t think I “lynched” you; I just thought some of your earlier comments could benefit from a different perspective. If your point was that some Americans are douchebags, then I’m with you, although I don’t think most Americans have succumbed (permanently at any rate) to the kind of hysteria you describe. There are still many of us who are determined not to allow fear and anger to make us into the monsters that Al Qaeda believes we are.
I also dislike contrived music of the sort you mention, but Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan seemed to pull it off. I haven’t listened to the Springsteen 9/11 record, and once again I’d recommend Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops.” Shattering. In a good way.
I agree, Dylan + Guthrie (even Ochs, Mr. T.) pull off the impossible BUT I think that has a LOT to do with the era from which each were spat (although, Dylan’s not that adverse to the odd bit of wince.)
C+B – one thing you must do, however, is ignore words like ‘lynch’ as these are gobbed up with tongue firmly in cheek.
I need to also point out though, after re-reading my original gabble I have noticed that I use the words perceived reaction (which was the point I was trying to make) BUT, crucially, I have (like the twat I am) used an entirely incorrect word — genuine when I actually meant disingenuous — to set up the point for my argument re: the Diana similarity.
Blame the fact that I was initially composing the comment bit by bit & in bewteen meetings at Proper Job & not proof reading before posting.
I can see now why a confusion has arisen.
Bad Boy; Naughty Boy; In Your Bed.
DC
Bad dog. No biscuit.
“Lynch” means nothing. OK. Got it. But . . .
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/10/tilghman.woods/?iref=mpstoryview
Sharpton is a muppet and I really don’t have a lot of time for the man. Not that it wasn’t a bloody clumsy remark.
Agreed. On both counts.
You know a really good song about 9/11. Mark Knopfler and Emmy-Lou Harris song called ‘If This is Goodbye’. They wrote it after reading the text messages and listening to the voicemails from the people on the planes. Properly moving if you ask me. And it’s a way of coming to grips with it and bypassing patriotism and country and returning the whole incident to being something that happened to some people as a opposed to a country.
Oh, and your sister-in-law doesn’t mind the American stuff. She just inserts the prefix ‘looney’ before half the things you say about Americans (and Christans) and it rolls right off. Carry on.
Christ. that’s a bit dodgy isn’t it?
btw my ‘that’s a bitr diodgy’ was in reference to the linked article, not Mr. T’s sister-in-law. I’m being uber careful now, in case I get some blog-based jihad on my ass based on misintepretation of my prattle.
Drunk Country
I think the ‘not in my son’s name’ gang gave them the transcripts to write the song as a reaction. But there is a distinct possibility that I just made that up. Either way, I can imagine it was requisitioned against anyones will. That would dodgy!
Er, oops. Just goodgled the damn thing and it’s actually based on and Ian McEwan piece. Turns out I’m an idiot.
Ben, Cheers. When I said ‘linked article’ I meant C&B’s lynching piece re: Tiger Woods. I’ve not heard the track yo refer to, but will seek it out for the sake of balance.
Cheers & *yawn* Goodnight.
Never could stand that dog…