Word: springsteen
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Simultaneous with the release of Tracks, Bruce Springsteen's new four-disk compilation of previously unreleased masters, stores across the country began to sell Songs, a 306-page book anthologizing every lyric Springsteen ever penned. These expensive, lavishly-produced new releases--together, the photo-heavy book and the beautifully packaged compilation will cost the die-hard fan $100--coincided exactly with Springsteen's nomination for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and roughly with the release of multi-disk compilations by Springsteen's fellow Hall of Famers Bob Dylan and (posthumously) John Lennon...
Critics always seem to give Springsteen the benefit of the doubt: He seems so sincere, sings so softly about issues of social inequality, that few have seriously suggested that Springsteen is now in the business of making money and generating publicity rather than music. (Few have noted, for instance, that it is now almost impossible to watch an awards show or benefit performance without running into the ubiquitous Boss.) And so the positive spin on Tracks is that now, when the giants of rock music are weighing in, Springsteen, too, is asking to be re-valued and re-evaluated...
Since 1992, Springsteen has released only one album of new music, the fairly boring and indifferently-received The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), which told long stories with underlying messges of social protest to the accompanying of a softlystrummed guitar, and which sold only 585,000 copies: small change for a giant like Springsteen, whose 1984 release Born in the U.S.A. was one of the best-selling albums of all time. But in the year Joad was released, Springsteen issued his first Greatest Hits compilation, which sold a healthy 2.2 million copies, followed last year by a live album...
...both iconography and content, the new compilation admits what anyone might have realized: for years, Springsteen has been more retrospective than productive. Each of Tracks' four disks spans a period in Springsteen's recording life: but while the first three albums cover the years 1973-1987, the final 11 years of Springsteen's recording history are condensed onto a single album--mostly containing songs recorded in or before 1992--which is encased in a jacket whose cover shows, in blue-tint monochrome, a rearview mirror and the roadside behind...
...quality of the songs on Tracks varies widely from the terrific to the utterly assinine: most songs sound unremarkable but familiar. The first disk, however--covering the years 1972-77, but focusing heavily on 1972 and 1973, the years of Springsteen's major-label break-through--is almost uniformly very good, by far the best disk of this compilation; this is owed, in large part, to the remastered demos which Springsteen recorded solo for Columbia Records, with which the album opens. These songs will be familiar to fans of Springsteen's older work: they were released, played by the full...