Springsteen's Back, and He's Pissed

Hello, all. I have been performing feats of administrative calibration and entropy for the past few weeks, and I have not, aside from some embarrassing personal stuff and revelatory wakefulness, had that much appropriate to write about for great public consumption. I have also been waiting for weeks for Bruce Springsteen to release his promised new album, Wrecking Ball, and I have listened to it more than a couple of dozen times over the past few days. I think it is time to share some opinions with you, and, Boss, if you read these comments, know that they are from the heart. I will not make these comments pretty. I bought Working on a Dream, and, while I enjoyed some of the tracks and appreciated your paying tributes to all kinds of pop music (especially your tribute to The Byrds, "Life Itself," and the Orbison tribute of "Queen of the Supermarket"), and I thought that a couple of tracks really belonged on Magic (the title track and "Queen"), I just could not find myself loving the album as a whole. I was particularly let down by having the heavenly, loving "The Last Carnival" followed by the bathetic "The Wrestler." I realize you earned an Academy Award nomination for that song, but the repeated images of "one" as disability, culminating in the one-legged dog image, became pitiful to an absurd extent.

Because, I have to say, I think Magic is the single best album you've released in the latter part of your career, even better than The Rising, another album I deeply admire. While The Rising offers us encouragement in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, it also expands our concepts of hope. I believe when I hear that album that you have distilled the urgent need so many of us felt for assurance in our capacity to endure and revive. I think Magic surpasses The Rising, however, in that you voice the disgust many of us feel in having been flimflammed through our attempts to survive those losses. Your songs do not always overtly attack the empowered administration at the time ("Magic" itself offers a subtle yet sharp attack), but the entire album harnesses that frustrated energy of Born in the U. S. A. and demonstrates, often with kindred musical stylings but always with the same intensity, that even a generation later we wind up resisting those same strangling, impersonal "leaders" who screw us at seemingly every turn. I have got to say that as an album, Magic stands up, track to track to track. I can and have listened to it for hours.

Oh, I'm writing as if Springsteen is reading this note. Let me back up a bit. Wrecking Ball takes all the intensity of an E Street Springsteen and broadens the sound by augmenting it with Seeger Sessions instrumentation. As a result, many of these songs are more amplified folk than rock. It works, making Wrecking Ball an Americana album pulling from all kinds of American song traditions and making a rompin', stompin' breakdown/hoedown of an album. The great majority of the album offers political commentary as the Boss takes stock of America in its second decade of the new century. By the Boss's reckoning, we are in rough shape. The majority of the songs have a setting of financial woes--even the moving love song, "This Depression," repeats "I need your heart," as if the only sustaining factor in our times is love. "Easy Money" at first sounds like carefree encouragement to make a quick buck until the lyrics reveal criminal intent. The desperation of "Jack of All Trades," which begins with a list of skills held by the singer and the jobs he can do, ends with his assertion that he would also be able to kill those responsible for causing the hardships. More often, though, the songs offer encouragement, a call to faith, persistence, and courage as well as a confidence in heart and persistence. From the comic image of the dead's waiting to reclaim their own in "We Are Alive" to the open defiance of "Wrecking Ball," "Death to My Hometown," and "We Take Care of Our Own," to the promise of "American Land" (the final track sounding like the best Pogues imitation ever), Springsteen calls on us to persist and withstand the hard times. Sometimes a rock chant makes me believe that will work. In this album, it does.

Is Wrecking Ball as good as Magic? I still prefer the older album. First, "You've Got It" is a straight love song, and that fact makes it different from every other song on the album--even "This Depression" emphasizes the financial characteristics of that song's setting. I also wish there had been one good close harmony like on "Gypsy Biker" from Magic. That last is a matter of taste, I admit, but the sadness on Magic has a grim defiance to it that the elegaic songs on Wrecking Ball could sometimes use.

But if Springsteen and/or his people find this blog, I also find myself asking if there is an intended but unacknowledged ambiguity in the opening track, "We Take Care of Our Own." In the lines "Wherever this flag's flown, / We take care of our own," and the lines, "There ain't no help, the cavalry stayed home," especially in the contexts of mentioning New Orleans and "shotgun shacks," it seems to me that a couple of things are happening. First of all, the song appears to assert that the government has not helped the poor enough (if "the cavalry," so often a symbol of help in desperate times, doesn't help, then we must rely on each other in our own communities). I also noticed that all the places mentioned in the song are American places. The fact of the matter is that with our many international obligations and engagements, our flag flies all over the world. Springsteen's song appears to be making the comment that we Americans are always looking out for American best interests, no matter what our overseas engagement happens to be and what the consequences might be to the indigenous people. I suspect that Springsteen intends for these comments to remain subtly in his work, and I am surprised to hear that the Obama re-election campaign may be considering it as one of its rallying songs. "We Take Care of Our Own" sounds to me like something the singer of "Born in the U. S. A." would be singing a generation later.

I am awfully fond of Wrecking Ball as an album, and I will likely listen to it as a complete work again and again. When Bruce delivers a state of the union album, it is spot-on and worth listening to. It's time to listen again.

My Sense of Time Is Slipping

As March begins here in east Tennessee, we have already seen spring-like temperatures, there are budding plants in my front yard, and the grass could use a mowing. I am grading essays and realize that the semester has already reached its midpoint. I have been writing regularly, submitting regularly, and attending more meetings than I can remember. I am not certain how so much gets accomplished, and I can always think of more to do. I find myself in this situation every semester, and work offers only a version of what I see at home.

There are times when all I can do is look at my kids and try to see where they went. Firstkid is off at college, and he stands assured and happy in that part of his life. Middlekid is taller than his mom, and those baby cheeks from only last year are gone. Thirdkid has started losing that awkwardness of being too tall too fast, and I am pleased to see how comfortable she has become with herself, hoping she can keep that confidence as the added pressure of middle school starts.

I'm just checking in now. I got an idea for some writing that I need to pursue, and I have some personal editing to do--not only in my writing but in the way I will face the end of the semester. My window is open today.