24
Feb
What is Bruce Springsteen talking about when he says, “We take care of our own”?
“With his new album, Wrecking Ball, Springsteen has matched my weakness for his work with the weakness of his work. Granted, he’s aging; five years older than me, Springsteen is sixty-one now. Still, age is a limited defense for having released an album as wan and shallow as Wrecking Ball. If he’s tired, as he has every right to be, his job as an author of songs is to make something of that tiredness in his music—to make pop-music art of what he knows and feels, as Leonard Cohen (at age 77) has done this year with his lyrically autumnal new album, Old Ideas, or as Paul Simon, at 69, did last year with his So Beautiful or So What. Instead, Springsteen has avoided the ahrd work of vividly, intimately evoking the human experience in favor of platitudes and sloganeering in quasi-jingoistic bromides like “We Take Care of Our Own.”
—David Hajdu, “Today’s Bruce Springsteen is a Pale Imitation of the Real Thing”
Photo courtesy of Rolling Stone.
