Why is it OK to enjoy non-credible pop music as long as you’re not in its target market? A young man can wax lyrical about manufactured pop and know that there is no risk of ridicule. Irony and post-whatever has allowed it acceptable. However, if I admitted to liking the Stereophonics, a band aimed squarely at young men, I would be tarred and feathered by a mob of enraged hipsters. (Please, no Girls-Aloud-good-pop-versus-Toploader-shite protestations. Think about what I’m saying.) And the same goes for Bruce Springsteen.
I’d always assumed that Springsteen was awful, the kind of pop star your Dad would like. Somewhere near Dire Straits in credibility and not too far from Phil Collins in nauseating false sincerity. The jeans, the bellow, the dancing with Courtney Cox videos… but most of all the cover of Born in the USA and the song itself. But little by little I started hearing good things about him. So eventually I bought that album, played it a few times and forgot about it. After a while I went back to it. And back to it. And back to it. Then I got it.
A major problem comes with the production. If he’d been born ten years earlier, and had sounded more like the Band or the Stones, we’d be talking about him in hushed tones. The synthesisers and drum sounds on Born in the USA are resolutely ‘80s and take some getting used to. Most of his famous songs are from this behemoth, and so have coloured expectations of the rest of his work.
Here though is the main hurdle: Springsteen is not ironic. His sincerity and earnestness seem out of place in a world where everything else is lazily cloaked with irony. Such honesty can make one uncomfortable. Unlike most white rock stars, he tries to foster community, focusing on the us rather than the me. His passion brings people together, but we find this difficult to deal with, accustomed as we are to worshiping some remote and playful star on a distant stage. More “4 Real” that Richie Manic ever was. He is also defiantly American, and this is a concern for British indie kids. If he was bohemian and metropolitan than maybe we would let him off. But to be American *and* proudly working class? That takes a lot of forgiving.
One thing he is not is the “Bryan Adams it’s ok to like.” Instead he comes from the American populist tradition of Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie. Intensely political, his concerns are with the oppressed, the migrants and those suffering in the desolation of deindustrialised Reagan America: your tired; your poor; your huddled masses. Reagan hilariously misunderstood Born in the USA, and possibly should have checked the words before he claimed, “America’s future… rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.”
His lyrics are Carveresque - Nebraska is eleven short stories. He captures the petty frustrations of daily fights against The Man and the boredom of most people’s lives. I may not be American, and I sure can’t drive, but I know what it’s like growing up in a town full of losers, and I guess I pulled out to win.
So then... Bruce Springsteen: born out of both black and white music traditions; master of the gospel and blues impulses; gritty realist; intensely romantic; social commentator and creator of euphoric anthems which tap into universal experiences.
And he fucking rocks. And that’s the main thing. It’s OK, you can like him.
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