Bruce Springsteen tries to capture the mood of the nation...
THE MISSING
by ALAN LIGHT
The New Yorker
On his new album, Bruce Springsteen tries to capture the mood of the nation.
Issue of 2002-08-05
newyorker.com
If there was ever a moment for Bruce Springsteen to take back his place at rock's center stage, this would be it. His last album of new work, "The Ghost of Tom Joad," came out seven years ago, in 1995. After that—despite an extensive world tour in 1999 and 2000—he struggled to find a subject or a sound compelling enough to build an album around. Then came the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. In the months that followed, Springsteen wrote and recorded thirteen new songs; they have now been released, along with two tracks that were written earlier, as an album called "The Rising." This seems to set the stage for a familiar scenario: the rock veteran's triumphant return to relevance, form, and, ultimately, Grammy recognition (see Bob Dylan, Santana, and U2). But instead of writing the album that would undoubtedly have put him back in the spotlight—a "Born in the U.S.A." for the new era—Springsteen came up with something riskier and more surprising, something more than the country's archetypal living rock star fulfilling his obligation as America's rock-and-roll conscience.
From the start, Springsteen's songs have reflected a tension between his obsessive love of rock and his respect for the simple, direct power of folk music, leading to both the majestic scope of "Born to Run" and the quiet intensity and Woody Guthrie-inspired moralism of "Nebraska" and "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Anthemic, operatic epics like "Thunder Road" and "Jungleland" seemed, in their expansiveness, to invoke the complete history of rock and roll, and helped him break through to a mass audience. And songs like "The River" and "Badlands" achieved a near-perfect balance between despair and defiance, drawing as much on John Steinbeck and John Ford as on Chuck Berry. After "Born in the U.S.A." (1984) sold fifteen million copies and established Springsteen as a pumped-up, dressed-down, blue-collar megastar, he pulled back, turning to honed parables of immigrant experience and small-town American life set against intimate musical backdrops. Today, he is among the world's greatest rock icons, but he has had only one album reach No. 1 on the charts since "Tunnel of Love" (1987), and it was a greatest-hits album released in 1995.
"The Rising" sounds like nothing Springsteen has ever done before. Although this is his first studio album in eighteen years to draw on the full power of the E Street Band, its producer, Brendan O'Brien, didn't go for a live, classic-rock-band approach. Instead, Springsteen sings over dense, constructed blocks of sound, heavy on strings and stacked guitars, light on Clarence (Big Man) Clemons barroom sax solos. His voice seldom rises to that strained, fever pitch familiar from his arena concerts. The lovely, gentle sway of "You're Missing" is one of the most delicate tracks he's ever recorded, whereas the Middle Eastern texture and slashing guitar of "Worlds Apart" bring to mind Sting or Peter Gabriel. Even "Mary's Place," the one song on the album that sounds like a classic E Street "Rosalita"-style barn burner, never reaches the rave-up heights we expect. The song, which describes a gathering at a party or a bar, comes to a break about two-thirds of the way in, and turns into a chorus singing "Turn it up!" This is the part in a Springsteen song when the music should lift off irresistibly—but nothing happens. The chorus repeats for a few more minutes and then fades out, as if Springsteen just can't find a way to give in to joyous rock-and-roll release.
The lyrics are even more atypical than the sound. All the signature Springsteen narrative and detail has been stripped out: there is not a single Joe Roberts or Bill Horton wrestling with his conflicts, no Crazy Janey or Magic Rat, no working on the highway or racing in the street. The language is bare, almost generic; words and images repeat from song to song. The five songs that most explicitly evoke the attacks—"Into the Fire," "Empty Sky," "You're Missing," "The Rising," and "My City of Ruins"—reduce the events to an anonymous domestic fragment ("Just an empty impression / In the bed where you used to be," or "Coffee cup's on the counter, jacket's on the chair / Paper's on the doorstep, but you're not there"). Rather than tell individual stories as allegories of a broader social condition (the way the characters on "Born in the U.S.A." and "Nebraska" chronicled the fallout from Reaganomics), Springsteen seems to be striving for something universal to capture the mood of the whole nation. Language that strives for universality can often lapse into imprecision, though, and in some cases Springsteen's decision to avoid fully fleshed-out stories plays away from his greatest strength: without his finely observed narratives, bouncy, doo-wop flavored cuts like "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" and "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)" seem lightweight—pleasant, if minor, lookin'-for-love songs with dark undercurrents.
But, more often than not, Springsteen achieves moments of understated eloquence and grace. Sudden flashes of elevated symbolism recall the mystic vocabulary of early albums ("On the plains of Jordan, I cut my bow from the wood / Of this tree of evil, of this tree of good," he sings on "Empty Sky"); the dual mythologies of religion and rock and roll have long run together in Springsteen's work. On his last tour, he promised concertgoers "a rock-and-roll baptism." But now the language of faith and redemption seems to have assumed a more sober meaning for him; "Fire," "Ruins," and the title track all culminate in rousing, life-affirming prayer.
"The Rising" contains none of the political engagement we might have expected to find on a Bruce Springsteen 9/11 album. In fact, this is ultimately an album about love. "The Fuse" and "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)" have a sexual heat that has mostly been absent from Springsteen's work. On songs such as "Worlds Apart" and "Lonesome Day," which address the limitations of relationships, we see more fully how the world after September 11th has lent an urgency to themes of independence that have often been present in Springsteen's writing. "You're afraid to love something so much, you're afraid to be in that love," Springsteen said in 1992, describing the tensions in his offstage life that surfaced on the albums "Lucky Town" and "Human Touch." "Because a world of fear leaps upon you, particularly in the world that we live in. . . . My specialty was keeping my distance, so that if I lost something, it wouldn't hurt that much."
Despite the new sonic and lyrical direction of "The Rising," there is no mistaking its resonances with Springsteen's earlier work. The indelible connection between grief and joy—an ongoing preoccupation of Springsteen's—lies behind every one of the songs, including those written before the attacks. ("My City of Ruins," which Springsteen performed during the "Tribute to Heroes" telethon on September 21st, was actually inspired by the disrepair of Asbury Park.) Springsteen has said that the narrator of the first verse in the spare, haunting "Paradise" is a female suicide bomber, but it's easy to miss that. What's clear is the song's sense of yearning for human connection, and a wish to "get to that place where we really wanna go," which Springsteen has been singing about since "Born to Run." "Worlds Apart" may refer to "Allah's blessed rain" and have a chanting chorus, sung by the Pakistani qawwali singer Asif Ali Khan and his group, but the troubled couple it describes could come straight off "Tunnel of Love."
All the songs on "The Rising" reach a point where the singer warily considers a future of being alone, and concludes, as Springsteen has again and again over the years, that perseverance is the greatest heroism. This album reflects a new sense of what it's like to live with mortality—after all, Springsteen, at fifty-two, is no longer young. But for him music has always been about survival, not victimhood. Twenty-two years ago, the night after John Lennon was murdered, Springsteen took the stage in Philadelphia. "It's a hard world that makes you live with things that are unlivable," he said. "And it's hard to come out here and play tonight, but there's nothing else to do." |
