“No Surrender”/ “Bobby Jean”—Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, from Born In the U.S.A.
Christgau: A+, #1 Album of 1984
Eddy: one of the Top 15 Albums of 1984
Grammy: album nominated for Album of the Year 1984
RS: #6 Album of the ‘80s
How the hell can Bruce Springsteen be so easy to make fun of, but at the same time so undeniably appealing? Here’s a smattering of Bruce references I’ve collected over the years:
In elementary school, I went on a field trip to the high school library; I spent the time poring over a teenybopper book titled something like Today’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Stars, whose author struggled with the same question, calling Bruce’s singing “rough” and his guitar playing “simple,” finally chalking his appeal up to communication with “everyday people” (or something like that).
In Paul Zollo’s excellent Songwriters On Songwriting, Randy Newman explains why he satirized Springsteen in ‘83’s “My Life Is Good”:
I think his reputation artistically probably is inflated a bit. But everyone who sees him changes his mind. A lot of musicians don’t like his music. But when they see him, it’s like they become a pod person. [Laughs] It’s like [softly] “No, he’s great, man.” I say, “What do you mean he’s great? Yesterday you said it sounded like it all came out of a well.” And they say, “No, man, he’s great, he’s great.” I don’t know what it is. It’s like hypnotism.
During the five hour drive back to college, my road-trip buddy Mark rocks Garth Brooks, Elton John, the Bloodhound Gang, Top 40 radio, and Bruce’s “My Best Was Never Good Enough,” which includes the immortal line, “‘Now life’s a box of chocolates/ You never know what you’re going to get’/ ‘Stupid is as stupid does’/ and all the rest of that shit.” (The featured songs from Garth—“Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)”—and the Bloodhound Gang—“Hold Your Head Up High (And Blow Your Brains Out)”—are no days in the park either.)
In his excellent A Whore Like All the Rest, Richard Meltzer relates an amusing (and kind of jerky) anecdote wherein he jumps out of his seat and belts “Oklahoma” along to his girlfriend’s Springsteen record—the point being that Bruce isn’t singing rock ‘n’ roll, he’s singing showtunes.
Several months later, in a biting (and kind of stupid) Meltzer-inspired fog of thought, I agree with a coworker that Springsteen’s great “for the most part” but caveat that he’s “not cynical enough” (comparing him, no doubt, to the brilliant lifelike cynicism of—who the hell?—Dylan? Eminem? Probably Randy Newman).
In Accidental Evolution, Chuck Eddy posits his rock worldview with the following Springsteen observations:
“When Bruce Springsteen puts over a believable song, he does it the same way John Waite does—by accident.”
“Bruce Springsteen has his moments, but he usually doesn’t have a whole lot to do with rock ‘n’ roll. Like Rick Wakeman or Pete Townshend, he plays art-rock. By which I mean his muse can’t be separated from his ego; he’s too palpably concerned with how he’ll be documented in the history books.”
Springsteen’s an obvious example that everyone can relate to, but what makes him so obvious and so relatable?
He’s huge, of course—everybody knows at least one song (my mom likes “I’m On Fire,” though she used to worry about me listening to its dirty lyrics). Unlike other rich superstars, he somehow retains his image of a knowable person. His ‘80s peers Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince are all too intimidatingly mired in controversy or, at this point, their own grandeur to imagine hanging out with them. Don Henley, who’s probably just as rich and popular, works for everyman causes but seems to lack (at least persona-wise) Springsteen’s openness. Maybe this is because we don’t know how Springsteen votes. He’s almost certainly a democrat, but in the older, populist sense of the word; it’s hard to imagine another musician that Ronald Reagan and Ani DiFranco could appreciate equally.
It’s a shtick, of course. Whether or not private Springsteen is more agreeable or a better citizen than private Prince is hardly our concern. Prince has turned private fantasies (his and ours) about sex and decadence into enormously appealing music; Bruce has done the same for citizenship, or at least for private fantasies of citizenship, which for most of us are still rooted in the varied carols of Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” Who’s America? Mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, deck-hands, shoemakers, hatters, wood-cutters, ploughboys, mothers, wives-at-work, seamstresses, laundresses. (Note the absence here of bohemians and billionaire bigshots, or even white-collars.) On Born In the USA, America is a jobless Vietnam vet who can’t get work at the refinery, road workers, convicts, a car wash attendant, a rock musician, a barfly, and an aspiring author; only one of their varied carols (the road worker in “Darlington County”) is happy (and even then his buddy gets arrested), a couple are more bittersweet, but none of these blue-collars seem happy about their jobs. (Contrast them with Whitman’s singing Americans, who could themselves show up in a Broadway musical montage.)
In this sense, then, Springsteen is too cynical re people’s attitudes toward their jobs: you go to work, you come home, you pine about your friends and your love life, and what you do at work doesn’t really matter. In fact, it’s hard to think of a song anywhere that focuses on the productive/creative triumphs of the singer at work—“Day-O” and “Paperback Writer” and Weird Al’s “Dog Eat Dog” excepted—so this “cynicism” may reflect society at large (if not just an overused pop-music cliche). But if that’s the case, I don’t want the cynicism, because it’s not very interesting. Springsteen’s at his lyrical best when he gets little details exactly right—like “We learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school,” from “No Surrender”—and while he can do this with aspects of jobs (see “Downbound Train”), you don’t feel like the characters are invested in their work. But I want to talk to people and hear from people who are invested in their work; I want to know what they find stimulating about their careers. This doesn’t make Bruce bad (I did put six fucking songs off his record on here), but it shows that his primary strength is not “relating to the everyday joe” (i.e. the blue-collar worker as regards his work), except as a uselessly sympathetic drinking partner who nods at all your complaints.
Or maybe it just shows that my conception of the “everyday joe” is in error, and that Springsteen’s ability to relate to everyone implies that all of us, bohemian and blue-collar and bourgeois and billionaire bigshot alike, are ourselves “everyday joes.” To put it another way, when Prince makes millions of people love “When Doves Cry,” he implicates us all in his shtick—we might not have pseudo-Freudian psychosexual hang-ups, but we can realize how much we enjoy the kinky energy of the music and lyrics. Springsteen’s pleasure implicates us in his everyday American shtick, and so, while we might not all work down at the car wash dreaming of our love gone bad, while some of us may indeed like our jobs and find them fulfilling, we can recognize the self-pity of being someplace “where all it ever does is rain,” and realize that plenty of others do too. Pointing out this stuff, of course, is a big part of the job description for being a popular musician.
“Take Me With U”—Prince and the Revolution, from Purple Rain
Christgau: A-, #29 Album of 1984
Eddy: #73 Heavy Metal Album
Grammy: Best Rock Performance, Best Original Score Album 1984 (album); album nominated for Album of the Year, Producer of the Year (Prince + Revolution) 1984
RS: #2 Album of the ‘80s
SARG: 9
“Jump”—Van Halen, from 1984
Billboard: #3 Song of 1984
Christgau: B+
Eddy: #12 Heavy Metal Album; one of the Top 15 Albums of 1984
Grammy: song nominated for Best Rock Performance 1984
RS: #81 Album of the ‘80s
“World Destruction”—Timezone, 12” Single, from Deconstruction: The Celluloid Recordings (Bill Laswell)
Christgau: “classic”
Eddy: “hokey”
“What’s Going On”—Husker Du, from Zen Arcade
Christgau: A-, #23 Album of 1984
Eddy: #304 Heavy Metal Album
RS: #33 Album of the ‘80s
SARG: 10, #4 Alternative Album
“Answering Machine”—Replacements, from Let It Be
Christgau: A+, #2 Album of 1984
RS: #15 Album of the ‘80s
SARG: 10, #31 Alternative Album
“I’m Goin’ Down”—Bruce Springsteen again
“When Doves Cry”—Prince again
Billboard: #1 Song of 1984
“Trapped Under Ice”—Metallica, from Ride the Lightning
Eddy: #187 Heavy Metal Album
“Chartered Trips”—Husker Du again
“Run Runaway”—Slade, from Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply
Eddy: one of the Top 15 Albums of 1984
“Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba”—77s, from All Fall Down
“First Movement (Fast)”—Steve Reich and Musicians with Chorus and Members of the Brooklyn Philharmonic (Michael Tilson Thomas), from The Desert Music
“Material Girl”—Madonna, from Like a Virgin and The Immaculate Collection
Billboard: #67 Song of 1985
Christgau: LV-B; IC-A+, #4 Album of 1990
Eddy: IC-one of the Top 15 Albums of 1990
SARG: LV-9; IC-8, #11 Alternative Album
“Darlington County”/ “Working On the Highway”/ “Downbound Train”—Bruce Springsteen yet again
“Ride the Lightning”—Metallica again
“I’ll Wait”—Van Halen again
“Turn To Me”—Lou Reed, from New Sensations
Christgau: A, #10 Album of 1984
SARG: 8
