Review:

on 2011-02-28 CharlesMartel Said:

Bruce Springsteen has been one of those artists who has always been on the periphery of my musical sphere. Initially touted as being a successor to Bob Dylan, I never really got any appreciation of his work and never bought any of his albums. Interestingly, no one I knew had a different opinion and so there was not really much a way in which I could gain any sort of affinity with him by checking out his albums owned by others. The reason for this is relatively simple - the sort of music I tend to gravitate towards is that which strikes a chord with me. The further it is from my circumstances and my aspirations, the less likely I am to find myself drawn towards it. And that was very much the case with Bruce Springsteen.

The truth is that Springsteen has always been too, well American, for my tastes. I don't mean that in a negative way, but the meaning and the ethos of his music is America. I find it is something that does not cross the Atlantic. A lot of his music about life in small town, industrial and post-industrial America has no counterpart for someone who was brought up in the UK. His political affiliations, while I can relate to some of the sentiments expressed within it, does not have the same resonance with me.

I can relate to the problems of the UK under Thatcher but not those of the US under Reagan, however similar they may have been in terms of the devastating effect they wrought. When I listen to the bleakness and sterility of the future, I listen to post punk, not Bruce Springsteen. This is such a prominent feature of his music that he often forgets there is a world outside of America.

When Springsteen first toured Britain in the mid-seventies his record company put up posters announcing at last the UK is ready for Bruce Springsteen. It did not go well. His tour flopped. It was years before he began to make headway in the UK again. Perhaps I was not alone in feeling that Springsteen was uniquely American phenomenon.

Yes, he is a good songwriter, and some of these songs are classics. So, yes, you guessed it, I don't want a collection of albums of which I will only listen to a couple of tracks on each, I went for the compilation. And it is a good compilation, though unlike some other compilations I own, I cannot sit and listen to this the whole way through. Springsteen went in for blue-collar stadium rock, although it took him a while to do it. I was never into blue collar stadium rock because I cannot relate to it. It is not something which has ever found a place in the UK and I never really understood the culture behind it - it was not for me.

His more commercial offerings I found irritating after a while. "Born in the USA" was perhaps the exception, an indictment of the effects of Reaganism on ordinary people. Curiously, that song has been more often appropriated by those on the opposite end of the American political spectrum to Springsteen, completely ignoring the reality of the message behind it. Those songs which did appeal to me included "The River" and "The Rising", both of which stood out for me but for completely different reasons. I still listen to this quite a lot, in pieces, but I have not sat down and heard the whole thing through for a very long time. . Parts of it grow on you. Parts of it remind you of a once great talent who seems more of a parody of himself than he was when he first started out. Parts of it, I have to say, bore me.
Rating: 6/10