The Boss is still very much The Boss. The few doubts I had after his disappointing album a couple years ago have been completely wiped away in 2012. Wrecking Ball is right there in the conversation for his best work since Born in the USA. In fact, there are only three of his records that I think are unquestionably better (Born to Run, Darkness, Born in the USA). It probably doesn’t really come out as his 4th best record, but it’s at least in the conversation. Which is pretty impressive for someone who has contemporaries that haven’t produced anything relevant in decades.
And, after seeing him on Tuesday night, I can report that his live shows are just as energetic as ever. He played for over 3 hours with only a few seconds of pause in the whole night. There were a ridiculously large number of the classics (Badlands, Born to Run, Thunder Road, Rosalita, Dancing in the Dark, to name a few), a nice smattering of the old and new, including some blistering performances of the great songs on the new record. I feel incredibly blessed to have seen Jeff Mangum and Springsteen within the course of just a couple weeks – those are easily two of the most mind-blowing concerts I have ever been to.
What makes Wrecking Ball such a great record? Well, in large part it’s a function of Springsteen’s complete willingness to jump headfirst into it without worrying about whether it’s cool. It does, of course, mean that a few of these tracks are a little over-seasoned. “We Take Care of Our Own” kicks things off in precisely that zone of slight indistinction. It’s a great song, that sound big and brash. It just *sounds* bright. And the message is almost aggressively straightforward: “this is America. We ought to take care of everyone, not just the rich and secure.” That theme does make me just a tad uneasy, given that I’m inherently very skeptical of things that can be deployed in a jingoistic way. Sure, we can take care of our own, but what about all those on the other side looking in? Especially when paired with ‘wherever this flag is flown.’ I want to ask: so that includes all our foreign military bases, I guess? But really, this is just another “Born in the USA” type of problem. The whole album is built around the idea that ‘we’ are most powerful when we conceive of ourselves in terms of openness and hospitality. If you want to discover a slightly clunky nationalism, sure it’s there. But that’s not all there is by any means.
You get some more of this on “Death to My Hometown” where he rolls out his best Celtic barnburner and lashes out with intense anger at the role of finance and money: “They destroyed our families, factories, and they took our homes / They left our bodies on the plains, the vultures picked our bones.” On my first listens, I was turned off by the simplistic nature of his critique. Who is the ‘they’ here? Rich people? Robber barons? Outsourcing? It’s not really clear. And the exceedingly general nature of the critique feels like a problem. Most of his best work on this theme is far more particular, featuring a real STORY (see: The River, Youngstown, etc.). I feel like the overly general nature of the critique makes it hard to really DO anything with it.
That said, I think my point from a couple weeks ago really stands here. This song (and, more broadly, the whole album) is not meant to be a view from nowhere. It’s telling a specific kind of story, and it’s really quite important to hear it on those terms. While I have some general skepticism about paeans to lost manufacturing in terms of the policies that get proposed (basically kneejerk protectionism), a society that isn’t terribly upset about those who are left behind is a poor society–even if you can’t just (and shouldn’t want to) go back to the 1950s.
Same thing goes with “Shackled and Drawn,” which reads a bit too much like a paean to the guys working the fields – something that was out of date even when Springsteen was getting started, much less now. And he’s got a goofy fake-Okie accent. But it scorches live, and it’s not Bruce’s fault that he is a child of a particular place in history. Sure you get the occasionally hokey song, but the influence of his folk heroes are a clear net positive on his work as a whole.
So far I’ve talked about the good songs that still give me slight reservations. But I’ve also got some pure, unabashed love for parts of this record. First and foremost is “Land of Hope and Dreams,” which has actually been kicking around for a decade at this point, but finally gets the studio treatment here. And it’s a tour de force. You get basically the entire Springsteen mythos here: trains, lost souls, community, redemption, and a killer saxophone solo from the Big Man (one of his very last, sadly). And again, the fact that the mode of reference is almost anachronistic these days is actually part of the point. It’s a call to remember what is great in our past, not to say that we can go back, but to caution us about what it means to move forward.
You get the same kind of sentiment (phrased in a different way) on “Wrecking Ball.” Sung from the perspective of the old Giants stadium, waiting to be knocked down, it strikes a tone of defiance, resolution, and acceptance. It’s a great metaphor, because you get the sense that this is really a song about Bruce himself, and the ever-present fact of age. All things must pass, and he knows it, but that doesn’t mean there is no honor in standing astride of time shouting no. If the end must come, he says, let me face it proudly and make the very best of what is left to me.
Other highlights include the rousing “We Are Alive,” which has a slightly quirky beat and pitches the general themes of the album in the grand terms of ghostly remainders. Or the elegiac “Rocky Ground,” which took a while to really work for me (it’s very busy sonically, and includes a rap interlude, and sampling!), but has grown into one of my favorites. The biblical imagery works, his voice walks the line between weary and defiant, the horns are simply beautiful, and the rap bit is pitched perfectly. It’s a real testament that he’s attempting things like this, but an even bigger testament that he can make it all work.
Sure, there are a couple goofy tracks on this record. And no, it doesn’t all work perfectly. But when it does work, the heights it scales are glorious. And it’s the best album I’ve heard so far this year.