There's a Bullshitter on the Edge of Town
Matt Welch | May 3, 2005, 1:59pm
Demonstrating once again that if there's anything more brutal than damning with faint praise, it's praising with clear-headed self-loathing, Slate's Stephen Metcalf takes a scalpel through The Boss' bullshit, in a piece subtitled "Why I Still Love Bruce Springstreen." A sampling:
Thirty years later, and largely thanks to [Jon] Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He's a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You're either in or you're out. This has solidified Bruce's standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it's killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers--they're not saying Bruuuce, they're booing--Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than "the new Dylan," as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we've reached a strange juncture. About America's last rock star, it's either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.
To walk back from this impasse, we need to see Springsteen's persona for what it really is: Jon Landau's middle-class fantasy of white, working-class authenticity. Does it derogate Springsteen to claim that he is, in essence, a white minstrel act? Not at all. [...]
Next to, say, Iron and Wine, Devils & Dust too often sounds like a chain store selling faux Americana bric-a-brac. One always suspects with Springsteen that, in addition to a blonde Telecaster and "the Big Man," a focus group lies close at hand.
Whole ambush here. As someone who has liked Bruuuce enough to make a mixed tape for his bewildered non-Jersey wife during the courtship phase, I'm grateful Metcalf put into words how it all went so horribly wrong (even if the blame-Landau theory gets Springsteen off the hook too easily, and a second culprit goes unnamed -- his 18-year drought of distinctive melodies). It must be damned hard to avoid drinking your own Kool-aid when your good work is over-analyzed by a legion of hyperventiliating, half-intellectual non-musicians (this is the great unresolved trauma in Bob Dylan's Chronicles), but that doesn't mean we all shouldn't share a belly laugh when the likes of Springsteen and Steve Earle seem to lose their bearings entirely, becoming the type of insufferable artiste that the increasingly unrealistic-sounding blue-collar heroes in their songs would surely pelt with a 40-ouncer.
I had a last-minute opportunity to see Bruce play a live acoustic show for free just last night, something that would have caused me to wet myself two decades ago, but after reading Springsteen hagiographer Robert Hilburn of the L.A. Times report that the Boss begins each show on this tour by instructing the audience to shush up, turn off their cell phones and refrain from singing along, it didn't seem worth breaking my plans for.
For some reason-related Springsteenia, here's Jersey brat Nick Gillespie's 2003 mockerry of the Boss' free-speech whining and 1996 fact-check of The Ghost of Tom Joad; plus Brian Doherty's 1997 review of The Mansion on a Hill, 2002 pan of The Rising, and excellent 2000 essay, The Strange Politics of Millionaire Rock Stars. (Link via Sploid.)
Tim Cavanaugh | May 3, 2005, 6:48pm | #
Mansion On the Hill is the foundation text of Landau-as-villain Springsteenology, but while he emphasizes the business stuff, Goodman does point to Landau's real crime—which was aesthetic, not financial. Like many a limousine liberal before and after him, Landau (along with his moronic protégé Dave Marsh) has an essentially conservative and philistine sensibility: Dig his critical writings, which include pans of Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and the movie version of
The Exorcist, to get a sense of his distaste for anything that is even slightly outré.
It's the worst kind of sensibility you can have for rock, and while Matt is right that The Boss himself deserves most of the blame, it's not a coincidence that the transformation of Bruce into a fake-working-man bore began with Landau's arrival. The where-did-Bruce-go-wrong conversation usually names
Born In the USA as the place where it all started to go south, but that's wrong.
Born To Run was the watershed;
Darkness On the Edge of Town was the beginning of the end.
The pro-Landau faction would have you believe that the drumming of Vinnie Mad Dog Lopez and Ernest Boom Carter, and even more ludicrously the piano stylings of the great David Sancious, were somehow off, that there are audible errors on
The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. This is bullshit, and in twenty years of challenging listeners to identify even one of these supposed errors, I have come up emptyhanded. The problem with these guys was that they were capable of playing a variety of stuff—jazzy riffs, pompous pseudo-Romantic improvisation, faux funk, and other interesting weirdness—that wasn't suited to the foursquare simplicity Landau approved. Weirdness is the enemy for Landau, and he made it the enemy for Bruce. The problem isn't (only) that Springsteen can no longer write a strong melody (that's a hazard for any aging songwriter); it's that he would never again write a line as gloriously misconceived as "Nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pregnant, pleading immaculate conception."
Bruce should have gone through a punk phase, glam phase, a techno phase, a hair phase, a grunge phase, and so on. The persona that Landau midwifed made that impossible.
stubby | May 4, 2005, 1:46pm | #
I've been reluctant to add anything because I can't discuss music with the same erudition and depth of knowledge as the people on this thread. But what the hell.
I'm 41 - either a young Boomer or an old Gen Xer (I prefer the latter, cos I was born after JFK died) (and Boomers irritate me) - and I started listening to BS when I was in junior high. After listening to all that crappy 70s pop - please note, I was not musically sophisticated; I spent my allowances, willingly, on Bay City Roller albums and I'm pretty sure I recall buying "Seasons in the Sun" as a single - Bruce was pretty impressive. I clearly remember the first time one of my friends' brothers played TWTIATESS for us, and that's still my favorite Bruce. Asbury Park, great. Darkness, not bad. BITHUSA, not so much, but it was the 80s and I had no better taste than anyone else (obviously - I still remember all the lyrics to Billy Don't Be a Hero and I spent my college job money, willingly, on the Thompson Twins. And you know what? I still like Meat Loaf.)
Where was I? Oh yeah - Born in the USA. Dancing in the Dark. Courtney.
CHEESE. Even in 1985, with my shoulder pads and my Andrew McCarthy crush and my Synchronicity T shirt, I watched that video and I thought "That ain't right." And then some Serious Rock Critic - don't know if it was Marsh, or someone else, but I know for certain it was in Rolling Stone - wrote a gushing wet buttkiss review of BITUSA and specifically mentioned the DITD video and the reviewer stated, with what I can only assume was a straight face (there was no irony in the 80s, was there?) that the video confirmed Springsteen was one of the best "rock dancers" around.
WTF? What's a "rock dancer"? Is this a large field? Is being the best one a big deal? And is what Bruce did in that video really considered dancing? I don't think that's dancing...I think that's Middle Age White Guy Rocking Back and Forth Granted, Yes, More or Less in Time to the Music, but it's not dancing. Some people think what Mick Jagger does is dancing (I think it looks like he needs Dilantin), but that was not that. That video was appalling. The reviewer should have been appalled. I mean,
I was appalled and, as I think I have mentioned, I was listening to the Thompson Twins (and Night Ranger. Night. Ranger.) at the time.
I never could look at Bruce the same way again, and I never could buy into any of his subsequent incarnations. And Working Class Rock Star Millionaire Populists bug me more than Boomers. Bono is marginally less retchful than Bruce, or John COUGAR Mellancamp or Steve Earle, but only marginally.
Anyway - yeah, supposedly serious critics have long treated Bruce the way Tom Cruise treats L Ron. I still like a lot of the guy's music; but then I would, wouldn't I?
