Posted on 03/04/2012 9:32:38 AM PST by Chi-townChief
Woody Guthrie idolized Jesus Christ, but Woody could do without preachers. Holed up in a New York City flophouse in 1940, he penned his two greatest songs, each inspired by this point of view. “Jesus Christ Was a Man” depicted the Christian namesake as a worker “true and brave” who championed the rights of the common people and was betrayed by the political elite. “This Land Is Your Land” was Woody’s reaction to another song that bugged him to death, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” As Joe Klein wrote in Woody Guthrie: A Life, Woody saw Berlin’s narcotic standard as “just another of those songs that told people not to worry, that God was in the driver’s seat.” Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, Woody reasoned that such sentiments encouraged passivity in the here and now. Woody believed God had already blessed America — made it for you and me — and that it’s our duty to use our God-given talents to maintain that blessing and live up to its gift.
Bruce Springsteen is often connected in the culture to Woody’s working-man spirit; no doubt he’ll be involved in some of the events this year celebrating the centennial of Woody’s birth. The swell of Occupy Wall Street protests and their seeming lack of new music thus ratcheted up some anticipation of Springsteen’s latest record, “Wrecking Ball,” his 17th studio album (out Tuesday but currently being released online song by song, day by day).
He’s written some lyrics that address and allude to the country’s recent financial crises and social inequities, but “Wrecking Ball” is a conflicted creation. In the end, Springsteen, now 62, merely falls to his knees and calls on “a shepherd” to come sort it all out.
Springsteen doesn’t write fiery protest songs. He relates conversations, repeats monologues, thinks aloud. It’s an effective tactic because it speaks with us, possibly for us, but rarely down to us. It certainly works in the opener, the single “We Take Care of Our Own,” a basic “Badlands”-style stomper and an ironic rallying cry. One can predict another “Born in the U.S.A.” moment here at some political rally, where a politician blares the song as he steps to the podium, having heard only the deceptively reassuring, patriotic chorus instead of the antithetical lines underneath (“There ain’t no help/The cavalry stayed home”). We can’t rely on outside aid, he’s saying; we’ve gotta watch out for each other.
The front end of the album steams ahead with similar sentiment. “Them fat cats,” he sneers in the desperate “Easy Money.” Around nearly every early verse, Springsteen — a 1 percenter who’s not exactly charging $5 a ticket for his shows and has long been nicknamed, perhaps troublingly in this particular context, the Boss — pokes at rich people and those who guard their sums. “The banker man grows fat / Working man grows thin,” he observes in “Jack of All Trades,” and that’s after noting, “Up on Banker’s Hill, the party’s still going strong / Down here below, we’re shackled and drawn.” In “Death to My Hometown,” he laments the quiet destruction of Main Street America, reciting an anti-corporate party line: “I never heard a sound / The marauders raided in the dark / And brought death to my hometown.”
Near the end of that one, though, Springsteen makes his call — a call for a real protest song, singing:
Now get yourself a song to sing
and sing it ’til you’re done
Sing it hard, and sing it well
Send the robber barons straight to hell!
The greedy thieves who came around
and ate the flesh of everything they found
whose crimes have gone unpunished now
who walk the streets as free men now.
The songs on “Wrecking Ball” might not be those songs, but perhaps the moment will focus their messages and help spread the values of a movement still finding its legs. Most of these lyrics were written well before protesters occupied public spaces around the world, and none of them are unusual standouts above his countless other trodden-upon characters and snapshots of America’s economic dark side.
What has changed is that one or two of these characters wear ties — a first, Springsteen recently admitted to Rolling Stone. That’s been the minor miracle of Occupy Wall Street: the realization by American wage slaves that they are justified in taking to the streets, too, that coveralls and khakis are welcome in the marches, that we all have defiant songs to sing, and loudly.
Springsteen clearly sympathizes with Occupy, the 99 percent, whatever we’re calling them this week, but he just as clearly wants to keep a little distance. For example, he masks himself with some odd accents on a few songs. “Death to My Hometown” is delivered in an Irish brogue that matches the tune’s lively Celtic instrumentation. On the title track, a transcendent eulogy written in 2009 upon the destruction of Giants Stadium, Springsteen sings about being “raised in the swamps of Jersey” but chews a dialect that’s pure southeast Oklahoma.
Musically, the album’s satisfying, if not superb. Producer Ron Aniello fills in the spaces of these songs, which allegedly began life as “Nebraska”-style acoustic folk, with light electronic beats and plenty of guest support without overburdening anything. Assistance includes sporadic input from a few E Street Band members, including the final sax solos from the late Clarence Clemons (on “Land of Hope and Dreams” and “Wrecking Ball”). Libertyville’s Tom Morello contributes thoughtful electric guitar to, unfortunately, a couple of the album’s less powerful statements, “Jack of All Trades” and “This Depression” (a meditation on mentality, not economics).
Springsteen ends the album by letting even higher voices speak on his behalf. The Bruce-by-numbers “Land of Hope and Dreams,” an E Street-wide epic he’s been toying with for more than a decade, quotes Curtis Mayfield in between train rides and assurances that “faith will be rewarded.” The whistled, trumpeted “Ring of Fire”-like impressions underneath “We Are Alive” mix up the struggles of railroad workers, civil-rights marchers and illegal aliens with “a cross up yonder on Calvary Hill” and further promises that “our souls and spirits rise.”
“Rocky Ground,” in particular, features a looped sample (someone shouting, “I’m a soldier!”) and gospel singer Michelle Moore cooing the song’s hook and then — people get ready — rapping the refrain. Springsteen, meanwhile, encapsulates his parting thoughts within a barrage of biblical language, from flocks and shepherds and 40 days and Canaan to more vague platitudes like “a new day is rising” and “a new day’s coming.”
“Pray … that your best is good enough,” Springsteen now advises. “The Lord will do the rest.”
Somewhere, hopefully, there’s a young, new Woody Guthrie out there, listening to this album and scribbling, scribbling.
He’s not the Boss of me.
If he’s the Boss then we’re disgruntled employees.
Woody’s guitar didn’t “kill fascists” UNTIL later in war.
Woody's guitar changed its tune shortly after 22 June 1941, which was before the US entered World War II.
Curiously, that's when the US labor movement, the media, and non-fascist leftists became really interested in getting the US involved as well.
Pearl Harbor wasn't until 7 December 1941.
“Woody’s guitar changed its tune shortly after 22 June 1941”
Exactly. The left was against the war, so long as Germany and Russia were working together to divvy up Europe amongst themselves, but as soon as the Germans revealed their plan to dispose of the Commies, the left changed its tune. They’ve never been anti-war, anti-war is just a cover to sucker the masses into opposing wars against the left’s allies.
Michael Stanley’s cool, a fellow Clevelander!!!
P.S. I thought This Town would be the oldie ...
Who sits in front of a $500 flat-screen TV eating all that junk food while his obese 12-year old son with breasts plays on a $150 X-Box 360. Poverty in America is a joke. It doesn’t exist, like hunger. I’m so f**king sick of hearing ‘’poverty in America’’. It’s bullshit. If poverty does exist in America it’s an indulgence.
Arlo is an Occupier, not so conservative.
He just released a new album last week ‘The Hang’. I have not heard it but I have heard the title song;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7zvSRYR4z8
and “Breaking Down”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s90imz4sFRc
I also just received the tickets for his March 25 concert @ the Tangier in Akron. His shows are always a good time!
He described himself as a conservative Rebuplican, even gave reasons. I didn’t say anything about where he goes to sing. Remember Rush Limbaugh had SIR Elton John perform at his wedding, does that make SIR Elton John any less of a lib?
ff
——Bruce Springsteen was great ... about a thousand years ago.-—
“The River” was his best. A fabulous album. But he’s been declining since then. His vision has progressively constricted, from the trials of every man, down to liberal cliches.
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