I may have been entirely wrong about Bruce Springsteen
And in an embarrasingly obvious way, too. More later.
My dislike of Bruce Springsteen was based on what I took to be a mismatch between his intentions and the resources he had available to him (or allowed himself to use), that is, stadium rock. For all his, I didn’t doubt, earnestness, his music (or what I’d heard of it) always seemed to me to be inescapably false. No matter how much you may believe in them, it’s in the nature of clichés to be false, so you can’t tell the truth if all you have to use are clichés; you can’t make genuinely sincere music if you sound like Bryan Adams.
So, last night I was in the Live and Let Live, listening to an improptu set by Diamond Dave. Sometime during his cover of ‘I believe in a thing called love’, it occoured to me that rock (and, by extension, Springsteen) has a whole other tradition to draw on, which I’d entirely ignored. Maybe Springsteen has actually been talking the language of folk music, and I’ve not been listening. This would, or could, give him an idiom in which the things I thought he wanted to say would actually be sayable.
So, I spent this morning downloading Springsteen tracks, and it turns out this is right, at least sometimes. ‘Backstreets’ (despite sounding like Meatloaf) and, especially, ‘I’m On Fire’ just are folk songs, albeit with 80’s rock production.
Of course, Alistair has already said all this in his Correct Opinion on the subject. However, I missed his point originally, possibly because when Alistair wrote that Springsteen “comes from the American populist tradition of Walt Whitman, John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie,� I assumed he must be talking about content, rather than form. I couldn’t see any formal similarity between Whitman or Steinbeck and Springsteen, and so ignored any formal similarity with Guthrie; you see, the last word I’d use to describe either of the two writers is ‘sincere’. They’re concerned with truth in general of course, but not with individual truths. However, if Springsteen is really a folk musician, then he won’t be sincere either. Folk music is almost paradigmatically insincere, as it’s often rather twee identification with ‘troubadours’ and ‘bards’ makes clear. It’s lyric poetry, the construction of a fake experience in order to universalize and communicate the real experience. And in that context, Springsteen’s clichés are anything but. It was while this train of thought hit me half way through ‘Rosalita’ that I realised I do like Bruce Springsteen, after all.
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