Word: springsteen
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BECOMING A Bruce Springsteen fan was comparatively easy. At the time his first album appeared three years ago, rock music had fallen into a state of premature senility, seemingly the victim of wastes accumulating within its vital organs, musical arterioscleroses. The new performers, almost universally terrible, offered no hope for salvation: the anonymous heavy metal shock troops were in the forefront of rock, along with glittery personalities from trendy London (or maybe L.A.) and, worst of all, the pre-teen baby rock groups. True, some of the trusted standbys (the Stones, the Dead, a few Beatles) were still alive...
...SPRINGSTEEN shuffled into this bleak landscape a few years ago and it was immediately clear that he was not just another pre-packaged rocker. His music simply did not sound like anything else being played at the time. Listening to his first two albums you wondered if Springsteen had slept through the Sixties, for his style owed almost nothing to recent groups: his music was influenced directly by rhythm and blues and early rock and roll, not rhythm and blues as the Rolling Stones played it and rock as handed down by the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. Springsteen managed...
...narratives, stories of a world peopled with semi-greaser kids not too far away from high school graduation who spent most of their time hanging out, trying to be cool, driving old cars down interstates late at night and making periodic stops at lovers' lanes. Even though the characters Springsteen sang about were a particular type (East Coast, specifically New Jersey urban; middle class; apolitical) he managed to convey something of the quality of American adolescence in general--the pain, the self-and-status consciousness, the particular tackiness of those years. His songs recognized the power of adolescent experiences...
...What set Springsteen's lyrics apart from the vast majority of rock songs was that they were worth listening to. Even though his imagery was accessible and his themes were easy to relate to, he successfully managed to avoid banality. Springsteen grasped one of the basic problems of rock and roll: as a mass-culture, relatively unsophisticated art form, it deals best with simple ideas and emotions, conveyed straightforwardly ("I wanna hold your hand", "I can't get no satisfaction"), and because of that, runs the risk of becoming mediocre. Springsteen doesn't try to be another Dylan...
...beginning to wonder about the intellect of TIME'S editors when they are so quick to put a mush-mouthed, off-keyed nothing like Bruce Springsteen on their cover and yet take five years to bestow that honor on the one who deserves it the most-Elton John...