REVIEW BY RICHARD PITHOUSE
The Essential Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen
Columbia records
It is a time when the relentless commodification of everything has largely driven politically and artistically valuable popular culture underground. So it is remarkable that Bruce Springsteen last year issued uncompromising attacks on US President George Bush and the murderous racism of the New York Police Department; wrote a deeply empathetic song about a teenage suicide bomber in Palestine; was celebrated by academics as the contemporary avatar of the spirits of Walt Whitman and John Steinbeck; and continues to be America's most enduringly popular musician.
They are achievements that no one with any interest in rock music or the liberatory potential of popular culture can ignore.
Last year, Springsteen, at the age of 53, released a critically celebrated album and performed the most popular tour in music history.
Springsteen produces music at something like the rate at which Pablo Neruda wrote poems. Some discographies list more than 400 songs; the last radio station to play Springsteen's full catalogue back-to-back needed to dedicate 56 hours to complete the project.
Getting a sense of his work is a big undertaking. The Essential Bruce Springsteen aims to make this a little easier. It is a 30-track selection that draws from all of Springsteen's 12 studio albums, as well as his most recent live album, Live in New York City. It comes with a 12-track bonus disc that includes a number of previously unreleased live performances and studio recordings stretching back from 2002 to 1979. There are also three songs from film soundtracks.
Springsteen has conceptualised each of his albums with the same totality of care that a great director puts into a film. The songs always speak to each other and while they stand alone, sometimes magnificently, they cannot be fully understood by themselves. Trying to do that would be like fast forwarding through Apocalypse Now to find the good bits.
To fully appreciate Springsteen's music you have to, as with most music that transmutes experience into art, listen to the entire album. Neither the visceral defiance of a song like "Badlands", nor its assumption that happiness has to be founded on rebellion, can be fully comprehended without investing equal attention in the other nine songs on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978). For example, "Factory" describes men walking through factory gates in the rain with "death in their eyes" and warns that "somebody's going to get hurt tonight".
But that doesn't mean that a good collection of individual songs like The Essential Bruce Springsteen isn't a welcome guide to deeper appreciation.
There just isn't space to fit on two CDs all the Springsteen songs usually considered "essential". So "Stolen Car", "Racing in the Street", "Factory", "This Hard Land" and the blues version of "Born in the USA" are not included. But the 30 tracks give a good account as any of the development of Springsteen's work over the years and certainly replaces the 1995 Greatest Hits album as the definitive Springsteen collection.
However, the surprises are all on the bonus disk which includes tracks in which Springsteen explores the outer reaches of his art with a falsetto voice, an E-string turned down to a dark D, drum loops and folk sounds considerably rootsier than those that haunt the brilliant Nebraska (1982). There are genuinely sublime moments. But many of the live performance recordings feel like bootlegs of a solid performance of a good song on an ordinary night. They always rock, but often don't reach much beyond that.
The decision not to spread the overview of Springsteen's main work over all three discs is surprising. The decision to include tracks likely to appeal mainly to the serious fan in a project aimed at the newer or more casual fans, who are less likely to be riveted at the thought of a country blues version of "Countin' on a Miracle" or a rocking but not transcendent 20-year-old live performance of a Jimmy Cliff cover is also surprising.
The Essential Bruce Springsteen offers far more of the truth about the spirit and achievements of Springsteen than, say, a more commercial album like Legend offers about the spirit and achievements of Bob Marley.
The Essential Bruce Springsteen shows that radical doesn't have to be marginal and the popular doesn't have to be crap. No retreat baby, no surrender.
From Green Left Weekly, February 11, 2004.
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