Bruce Springsteen Forum

Die britische Zeitung "The Independent" hat eine super Rezension auf das neue Album veröffentlicht. Für alle "Englisch-Versteher:



Bruce Springsteen: Back at his barnstorming best


More than three decades since 'Born to Run' catapulted him to fame, Bruce Springsteen is back at his barnstorming best. His epic new album lays bare the fault lines running under contemporary America – and the tunes are great, too
By Andy Gill reports
Published: 27 September 2007

Next Monday sees the release of Bruce Springsteen's new album Magic, a long-awaited reunion with his old comrades The E Street Band. It follows a sustained period in which his musical interests have leant predominantly towards more low-key, folksy settings, with 2005's Devils and Dust, a sombre series of character studies in the bleak acoustic manner of Nebraska, succeeded last April by his hootenanny tribute to the godfather of politicised folk music, The Seeger Sessions.

Already acclaimed as a return to the ebullient style of those classic crowd-pleasers Born to Run and Born in the USA, and hailed ahead of its release as his most significant work in years, it's a great piece of work, its pumped-up wall of sound and lacquered surfaces disguising the kind of troubled ruminations on society and morality that have made Springsteen the pre-eminent political songwriter of his era. Not that everyone sees it that way, of course. His manager Jon Landau, for instance - the man who, as a Rolling Stone rock critic, came up with the now legendary claim: "I have seen rock'*'roll's future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen" – has described Magic as "a very bright record", the primary intention of which is not political. To which one can but respond in the time-honoured manner of aggrieved NME letter-writers: "Was he listening to the same record as me?" Songs such as "Gypsy Biker", " Last to Die", "Devil's Arcade" and "Your Own Worst Enemy" are not just clearly political, they represent the most complete and damning denunciation of Bush's foolhardy adventurism in Iraq yet thrown up by rock music.

But then Springsteen, like any articulate songwriter grappling with complex issues beyond the pop imperatives of dancing and romancing, has always been prey to misinterpretation – most spectacularly when Ronald Reagan's campaign chiefs managed to mis-read "Born in the USA" as a feelgood patriotic anthem, rather than an indictment of the country's social decay as seen through the eyes of a Vietnam veteran. Quite obviously, in that case at least, they absolutely weren't listening to the same record as the rest of us.

For me, the success of this latest batch of songs resides in the way Springsteen approaches his subject. Firstly, the big issue is never mentioned directly, looming intangibly instead, as he depicts the effects of combatants' death or disability on friends and relatives in the US – a distancing technique that has the paradoxical effect of bringing the war closer to home. Secondly, in order to convey the longer-term ramifications of the conflict, several songs feature projections into a scarred, uncertain future, rather than into the romantic past that once dominated his albums. And thirdly, there is – or there "appears" to be, I should perhaps phrase it in the circumstances – an underlying theme of illusion and deception running throughout the album that surely allegorises the ethical sleight-of-hand that has thrown his country's moral compass out of alignment. Betrayal is a constant companion in these songs, whether it's the craven media lambasted in "Radio Nowhere" as Bruce vainly spins his radio dial searching for "a world with some soul", the " speculators [who] made their money on the blood you shed" in " Gypsy Biker", or the "sinkin' sound of somethin' righteous goin' under" as the groundswell of post-9/11 patriotism is hijacked to perfidious ends in "Livin' in the Future". As Springsteen warns in the title-track, "Trust none of what you hear, and less of what you see. "

That advice, however, might well be heeded by those of us – myself included – who would try to confine Springsteen to their own preferred interpretation of him. Just as there are many fans – particularly non-American fans – who like to characterise Bruce as a man of virtue and probity, one of the last hold-outs for an increasingly tarnished set of American values, there are doubtless millions of others who'd prefer to draw a discreet veil over the conscience-tweaking concerns of The Ghost of Tom Joad, and simply exult in The Boss's capacity for good-time, boozy rock'*'roll fun. And who is to say they are wrong?

Certainly not Springsteen himself, who remains a firm believer in the notion of individuals having "multiple selves". During his VH1 Storytellers show in 2005, he recounted an amusing tale of how a couple had spied him leaving a New Jersey strip-joint and upbraided him in the parking lot, telling him he shouldn't be there. "I'm not," he responded mischievously. "I am simply an errant figment of one of Bruce's many selves. I drift in the ether over the highways and byways of the Garden State, often touching down in image-incongruous but fun places. Bruce does not even know I am missing. He is at home right now, doing good deeds!" Which is a lot more fun – and considerably more polite – than just telling them to mind their own damn business, the inalienable right of any public figure pestered during their private time.

For a long time, however, Bruce Springsteen would not have turned any heads as he exited a strip club. An ineffectual high-school student sustained by dreams of rock'*'roll stardom, he spent his teenage years performing in local New Jersey bands like The Castiles, Steel Mill, Sundance Blues Band and Dr Zoom & The Sonic Boom, groups whose names indicate the diverse range of musics with which he developed a familiarity: R&B, rock'*'roll, heavy metal, blues, soul, and whatever psychedelic delights were indulged by Dr Zoom. By the time he was 23, he had assembled around him the musicians who would form the core of The E Street Band, and had developed the facility at writing verbose, Dylanesque songs that originally attracted the attention of John Hammond, the legendary talent scout who had discovered Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Leonard Cohen.

As with Dylan before him, it initially seemed as if Springsteen would be another "Hammond's Folly", as his early albums Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle struggled to find an audience, and the "new Dylan" millstone seemed like it might become the headstone on his faltering career. By the time he came to make his third album, he knew it was his last throw of the dice, and so pulled out all the stops, his band spending months painstakingly layering the instrumental parts that might help realise his vision of a combination of Dylan's wordiness, Roy Orbison's operatic delivery, and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. Finally, after Clarence Clemons had spent 16 hours piecing together, fragment by fragment, the sax solo on " Jungleland", Springsteen declared the album finished, even though by that time he had grown thoroughly sick of the way it "ate up everyone's life" . Born to Run was released on 25 August 1975. Two months later, Bruce Springsteen achieved the unprecedented feat of appearing on the covers of both Time and Newsweek simultaneously.

Born to Run almost instantly became one of rock's landmark works, while the years of playing small clubs now paid off handsomely, as Bruce's band became famous as the most thrilling and cathartic live act on the circuit. But the vertiginous turnaround in his fortunes also had a seismic effect on Springsteen's life. As he explained in an insightful interview by Phil Sutcliffe in Mojo: "Fame... is interesting because it makes you very present and you have a lot of impact, but it also separates you and makes you very singular. You're now having an experience that not many other people you know are having. Its irony is that it carries its own type of loneliness."

His response to that loneliness was evident on the 1978 follow-up album Darkness on the Edge of Town. Where Born to Run had been brash and ebullient, an optimistic celebration of rock'*'roll's liberating spirit and a romanticised indulgence of its street mythology, new songs like the title-track and "Racing in the Street" were sombre pieces, haunted by failure, regret and spurned hope, while the protagonists of "Factory" and "The Promised Land" were frustrated working men with " death in their eyes" and violence on their mind. In the three years since he had been catapulted to stardom, Springsteen had developed the social conscience that increasingly came to dominate his work, from sources as diverse as John Ford's film of The Grapes of Wrath and the writings of historian Henry Steele Commager, which he claimed was: "The first thing I read that made me feel part of a historic continuum," and which cemented his ideas about civic duty and collective responsibility. His 1980 work The River offered a rapprochement of sorts between the popular party anthems of Born to Run and the blue-collar anxieties of Darkness on the Edge of Town, but 1982's stark, solo acoustic offering Nebraska blindsided fans with its bleak, brutal depictions of cops, killers, lifers and losers, desperate men pushed to their limits and beyond. It didn't sell too well.

Born in the USA, however, sold by the shedload. The 1984 release, a return to the bi-facial, party'*'ponder approach of The River, remains one of rock's most successful albums, shifting over 15 million copies in America alone. The E Street Band climbed back on the tour bus – now more likely to be a private jet – and hauled their way around the world's football stadia for a record-breaking concert schedule, during which Springsteen met model Julianne Phillips, who would become his first wife in May 1985. Sadly, it would prove a troubled union, the singer's unhappiness being reflected in the subsequent Tunnel of Love, an album replete with misgivings, reproach, and the kind of unfulfilled hopes that on previous releases would have been ascribed to downtrodden working men.

Ironically, it was during the subsequent Tunnel of Love Express Tour in 1988 that Springsteen's affair with backing singer Patti Scialfa would become public knowledge. He and Phillips divorced in 1990, and Springsteen married Scialfa the following year. With its low-key arrangements featuring drum machines and synthesiser, Tunnel of Love was unlike anything else he had recorded, and though it remains a critical and fan favourite, the circumstances surrounding it have made him reluctant to perform its songs live.

Happily, his marriage to Scialfa has proven much more durable, producing three children, now aged between 13 and 17. As so often when creative types' demons are subdued, however, Springsteen's work has since largely lacked the bite and edge that once drove his muse. Subsequent releases such as Human Touch, Lucky Town and the mostly acoustic, overly finger-wagging The Ghost of Tom Joad were pale, anaemic affairs by his standards, and the post-9/11 offering The Rising, despite selling well in his homeland, seemed an ineffectual, confused response to the tragedy, short on insight and uncertain in its reaction to events. Once acutely aware of the tarnish on the great chrome bumper of the American Dream, in common with many of his countrymen he now seemed to exhibit a degree of difficulty in visualising his own country as it appeared from outside its borders.

Thankfully, Springsteen's political gyroscope has since re-levelled, and he played an important part in the Vote For Change campaign encouraging the young, poor and minorities to register to vote, and his song "No Surrender" was adopted as John Kerry's campaign anthem during his unsuccessful run for president. And in 2006, Springsteen became absorbed in the project honouring the activist folk-singer Pete Seeger, for so long America's conscience, recording a selection of politicised traditional songs associated with Seeger in rumbustious hootenanny manner. It seemed to some like an acknowledgement of his true heritage, an acceptance that ultimately, he would have to assume Seeger's mantle as People's Tribune, and that when that time came, he would do so willingly.

With Magic, he's getting his troops back in line behind him. It's Springsteen's most complex, textured work in years, as rich as any in his catalogue, with songs that both challenge, inform and entertain. He once observed, in his lyrics anthology Songs, that a song's emotional centre is dependent on the fellowship the writer feels with his subject, that when a lyric falls perfectly into place, "your voice disappears into the voices of those you've chosen to write about". On Magic this happens time and time again, as he proves himself a master of the empathy required to bring his characters to life in all their contradictory, multiple selves.

The photographs on these pages are taken from the exhibition Bruce Springsteen: the Boss Revealed, which runs from 26 October to 2 December at Proud Central, 5 Buckingham Street, London, WC2, and includes pictures from Terry O'Neill, Lynn Goldsmith, Barry Plummer, Adrian Boot, René van Diemen, Debra L Rothenberg and Jim Marchese.For more information about this and other Proud Galleries exhibitions, visit www.proud.co.uk

http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/fea ... 005008.ece
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Eine weitere sehr ausführliche und gelungene Besprechung ist im Online-Magazin "Counterpunch" zu finden. Ein Kritiker, der sich Mühe gibt, hinter die Texte des Albums zu schauen...


http://www.counterpunch.org/browne09252007.html

September 25, 2007

Sinister Magic
Bruce Springsteen Comes Home ... to Hell

By HARRY BROWNE

There are a few ways you can be both a political artist and a rock-star,
and Bruce Springsteen has been trying them out for almost four
decades now. You can write songs that adopt and/or explore the
perspectives of people without power. You can offer moral and financial
support to progressive causes, mostly low-key and local. You can go on
the stump nationally for a presidential candidate. You can trawl the folk
tradition and try to revive interest in some of its more radical
manifestations--and while you're at it you can take an archival curiosity
like 'How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?' and reshape it
into a great and bitter song about New Orleans and Katrina.

Springsteen hasn't so far taken the Neil Young approach--release an
evidently heartfelt but often risible collection of agitprop songs in the
apparent hope they'll become the soundtrack for a (nonexistent) mass
movement. (That was Young last year; this year is sure to be different.)
And because Springsteen again avoids that tack on his new album,
Magic, there has been a murmur afoot, since the album leaked on the
internet in early September, that Bruce has (in the words of New York
magazine's Vulture blog) "gotten the politics out of his system."

Politics for Springsteen is not, however, some infection to be purged,
but apparently a part of his intrinsic make-up. Despite only a song or
two that can remotely be said to be 'about' particular issues, and
despite the absence of the lovingly detailed wretched-of-the-earth who
occupied The Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust, Magic is a
devastatingly political record, if not always in the predictable ways. It is,
for one thing, permeated with war, foreign and domestic, present and
past. If this artist has spent two decades wandering the highways and
byways of America in search of sounds and stories and themes, on
Magic Bruce Springsteen comes home, to New Jersey (no more drawl),
to rock & roll (the E Street Band denser than on any record since Born
to Run), to the Sixties (for what is more homely than our memories of
the period of our own youth?). And home--the home-front, if you like--
turns out to be apparently comforting but also fraught, a place of lying,
cheating, misunderstanding, and clinging on for dear life.

On Magic, the words 'Vietnam' and 'Iraq' are never sung, but the two
wars and the two eras shout out to each other across the musical din.

Partly this is about the sound: with the help of Brendan O'Brien's almost
monaural production, we hear bits of Sixties pop, including a big dose
of Beach Boys that should help us place the slightly bitter sweetness of
'Girls in Their Summer Clothes' firmly in the narrator's distant past: the
song's portrait of a buzzing small town makes it a companion piece to
'Long Walk Home', where we hear about the same place in countrified
21st-century alienation mode. (In 'Girls', a waitress brings coffee and
says "Penny for your thoughts"; in 'Long Walk Home', the diner is
"shuttered and boarded with a sign that just said 'gone'.")

But the album's sounds are also of the present day, including echoes of
the acts who in turn owe so much to Springsteen: Arcade Fire, the
Killers, Lucinda Williams. Even the resonant orchestral sound of Irish-
ironist band The Divine Comedy is audible on a couple of tracks. Those
who insist on caricaturing him as a musical conservative should at least
note how Springsteen's last project started with a tribute to Pete Seeger
and ended up sounding like the Pogues.

On first listen, especially to the lyrics of 'Long Walk Home', there is
more than a faint whiff of nostalgia here, political and otherwise:

My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town,
It's a beautiful place to be born.
It just wraps its arms around you,
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone

"The flag flyin' over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone.
Who we are and what we'll do and what we won't"

But sniff again. The nostalgia for the golden community of a past
generation that seems to permeate 'Long Walk Home' and that is
implied in much of 'Girls in Their Summer Clothes' is undercut sharply
by 'Gypsy Biker', which precedes 'Girls' on the album. 'Gypsy Biker' is a
lament for a friend killed in war, and there's no reason to say it isn't in
Iraq--the friend has been sent "over the hill" with the cry "victory for the
righteous", and the benefit going to "profiteers" and speculators"--but
the wailing rock guitars, and the emotion in Springsteen's wailing voice,
reach back 35 years or more. The biker culture that is invoked as the
dead man's friends "pulled your cycle up out of the garage and polished
up the chrome" (itself a line echoing from an Eighties Springsteen song
about a Vietnam vet, 'Shut Out the Light') then burn it in the desert is
emblematic of the Vietnam era, though that culture persists to this day.
The evocation of domestic turmoil about the war ("This whole town's
been rousted / Which side are you on?") is, unfortunately, more
redolent of 1970 than 2007.

Even the idea of Springsteen writing about a Gypsy Biker after decades
in which his white working-class characters have mostly been rather
blander, bleached into some version of universality, is something of a
throwback to the early Seventies.

In short, the beloved Gypsy Biker may have been killed in Vietnam, or
in Iraq. Being a fictional character, indeed, he may have died in both
wars. Either way, "To them that threw you away, you ain't nothing but
gone."

To Springsteen, product of the Sixties, the personal is political. The
album starts with a sort of animating first track, 'Radio Nowhere', a
largely successful attempt at a kick-ass declaration of life-in-the-old-
guy-yet, as the narrator, "trying to find my way home", rocks through a
familiar Springsteen lexicon of location and desperation in search of
human and musical connection. It's not hard to hear "Is there anybody
alive out there?" as a plaintive cry about Life During Bushtime. Then
the next three tracks are apparently 'relationship' songs that might not
be out of place on 1987's marriage-on-the-rocks album, Tunnel of Love.
Given that the present Mrs Springsteen, Patti Scialfa, has just released
Play It as It Lays, a fine album of often cuttingly intimate new songs that
must have Bruce blushing and squirming even more than other long-
lasting husbands who happen to hear it, it's tempting to listen to these
songs for his side of the story.

But unlike on Tunnel of Love, he keeps inserting lyrics that indicate
wider significance. 'You'll Be Comin' Down' and 'Your Own Worst
Enemy' are titles it's easy enough to politicize, and the words oblige.
The self-loathing you-cum-I of the latter song is uncertain of his social
identity, his place in the world. "The times they got too clear / So you
removed all the mirrors Your flag it flew so high / It drifted into the sky."
The protagonist of these songs could easily be the United States of
America--this sequence almost ends up sounding like a joke about the
intense identification between Springsteen and his country that has
trailed him since 'Born in the USA'.

He has most fun with this murky idea on 'Livin' in the Future'. (It's true,
Springsteen has rarely meet a letter-G he couldn't drop.) A pop-rocking
tune in 'Hungry Heart' mode, and again ostensibly about a troubled
relationship, its chorus is a paradox and an instant classic in the annals
of false comfort:

Don't worry, darlin'
No baby don't you fret
We're livin' in the future and
None of this has happened yet

If only. The second verse reminds us that Springsteen, as John Kerry's
musical mascot, had a peculiar stake in the last presidential poll. The
narrator wakes on election day, whistles the time away

Then just about sun down
You come walkin' through town
Your boot heels clickin' like
The barrel of a pistol spinnin' round

I wonder who that could be? Yet on an Internet message board for
Springsteen fans, a contributor get roasted for suggesting this song is
political. Sadly, or perhaps magically, once the E Street Band starts
touring next week, there will be arenas full of people bopping to this
song as though its chorus could somehow be literally true.

By its end 'Livin' in the Future' is at least in part a self-parodying
memoir of Springsteen's failed electoral venture:

I opened up my heart to you
It got all damaged and undone
My ship Liberty sailed away
On a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates
And let the wild dogs run

My faith's been torn asunder
Tell me is that rollin' thunder
Or just the sinkin' sound
Of somethin' righteous goin' under

'Righteous' is a word that crops up more than once on Magic--though
not as often as the keynote, 'home'--and while the charge of
righteousness sometimes seems to refer to the American political
posture, one senses that Springsteen is also pointing the finger at
himself.

The John Kerry relationship re-appears, as does the Vietnam
connection, in more obvious form in 'Last to Die', the album's clearest
polemical song 'about' Iraq and the first in a three-song suite that
closes the album with deadly serious State-of-the-Union intent, albeit
with continuing vibrations of personal politics. 'Last to Die' is a sketch,
drawn from inside the traditional Springsteenian bubble of a car driving
away from something (and toward "Truth or Consequences") on some
American road--a sketch of the home-front's alienation from the terrible
reality of war and of the rending of the social fabric. ("Things fall apart,"
he sings, inviting us to fill in the rest of Yeats' 'The Second Coming',
which funnily enough was also a feature of the final episodes of The
Sopranos. It's a Jersey thing.) From the car radio comes a voice, "some
other voice from long ago," and the chorus that follows is lifted, loosely,
from John Kerry's brilliant 1971 testimony to the Senate foreign-
relations committee:

Who'll be the last to die for a mistake
The last to die for a mistake
Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break
Who'll be the last to die for a mistake

(At least the narrator is not listening to Radio Nowhere; more like
WBAI.)

Except that he tells us Kerry's voice is from "long ago", 'Last to Die' is
another song that could be set a generation ago. As it is, however, the
chorus needs to be sung today precisely because Kerry and his ilk now
lack of the courage of their earlier convictions. "We don't measure the
blood we've drawn any more," Springsteen sings. "We just stack the
bodies outside the door." As the guitars drop away momentarily, from
the car there is a glimpse of reality, perhaps a news promo seen in the
window of a TV shop:

A downtown window flushed with light
"Faces of the dead at five"
A martyr's silent eyes
Petition the drivers as we pass by

The song concludes in full rock & roll roar with a vision of "tyrants and
kings strung up at your city gates," so maybe Bruce won't be going the
electoral route in 2008.

It isn't the only vision on this album, which has more elements of
prophecy than propaganda. Even the 'love song', 'I'll Work for Your
Love', is an ode to a bar-waitress written as a half-jokey exercise in
extended religious metaphor:

Pour me a drink, Teresa, in one of those glasses you dust off
And I'll watch the bones in your back like the Stations of the Cross

The last song, 'Devil's Arcade', is the among the album's most literal: a
lover recalls portentious, and passionate, youthful episodes with a man,
then tells the story of than man enlisting, being wounded, probably by
an IED ("Just metal and plastic where your body caved"), being
hospitalised and returning home to fragile life, "the beat of your heart"
repeatedly seven spine-tingling times over a slow rhythm. But there are
meanings that are harder, in every sense: the Devil's Arcade could be
the war, but Springsteen also uses the phrase as he describes the
characters' first sexual experiences. This is no simple and simplistic
exercise in painting devil's horns on George W. Bush.

Springsteen has rarely been so difficult. At its most challenging, Magic
is an attack on American cruelty and pretensions, on the indifference of
its political class; but it is also a continuation of the occasional auto-
critique that in the last two decades has seen him write scathingly about
"a rich man in a poor man's shirt" ('Better Days') or admit that "The
highway is alive tonight / But nobody's kidding nobody about where it
goes" ('The Ghost of Tom Joad'). The name of the album, Magic, draws
attention to his self-referential intent: no words in the Springsteen
Canon are more beloved than the audience sing-along line from
'Thunder Road': "Show a little faith, there's magic in the night ... " But
here, magic is something entirely more sinister.

The slow title track is sung from the perspective of a conjuror who runs
the listener through his ominous bag of tricks, including his capacity to
escape the "shackles on my wrists" that are probably the most potent
global symbol of today's USA. "Trust none of what you hear / And less
of what you see," he then sings, and the political meaning for media
consumers is clear enough. But with the song's passing references to a
river and a rising, you also sense something of a personal confession.
That Magic publicity shot of 58-year-old Springsteen with a biologically
unlikely full head of thick dark hair, wearing tough-guy chains and
clutching the old Telecaster, its famed wood veneer cracked with age--
is that just another untrustworthy image from the Magician's PR
department?

On an album of screaming guitars, crying sax and mourning organ, one
that often feels haunted by perdition, at best, and apocalypse, at worst,
the song 'Magic' takes the most directly prophetic form, every verse
ending with "This is what will be." And, as always, prophecy is not
about the future. Springsteen reads America's past, the 'strange fruit' of
racist lynchings echoed in the disaster of Katrina, the spectre of
domestic refugees in the shadow of the political uses of terror, and
emerges with a vision of hell:

Now there's a fire down below
But it's coming up here
So leave everything you know
Carry only what you fear
On the road the sun is sinkin' low
There's bodies hangin' in the trees
This is what will be
This is what will be

Magic by Bruce Springsteen is officially scheduled for release on vinyl
in the US on September 25th and on CD October 2nd. It is on sale in
Europe and elsewhere later this week.

Harry Browne lectures in Dublin Institute of Technology and writes for
Village magazine. Email harry.browne@...