REVIEW BY RICHARD PITHOUSE
Live in New York
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band
Sony Music
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band have released a new double live album that has achieved the unusual feat of winning extraordinary critical acclaim and commercial success.
In 1984, Springsteen's Born in the USA album sold 18 million copies. The man whose fans saw him as an avatar of the spirits of Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck was suddenly a pop star. The songs slotted right into top-40 radio.
A close up of Springsteen's rear-end, in tight jeans, was on the album cover. The huge US flag that framed the shot of Springsteen's butt was there because Springsteen still hoped, in a Whitmanesque way, to persuade the US to call itself to account for the distance between its harsh realities and its legitimating myths of freedom and equality.
But pop stars aren't taken that seriously and most people missed the point. The title track was a radical critique of US society. When Ronald Regan, whose conservative politics Springsteen loathed, used it in his election campaign, many of Springsteen's new fans didn't see the contradiction.
In 1995, Springsteen made a decisive break with hit radio and pop stardom with his visionary album, The Ghost of Tom Joad. Inspired by Steinbeck's novel, Grapes of Wrath, each of the album's deeply moving and politically radical songs were about people battling against the odds. The album manages to simultaneously mourn social injustice and affirm the resilience of the human spirit. Because Springsteen dispensed with sing-along choruses and laid his half-spoken, half-sung lyrics over evocative soundscapes it's impossible to misunderstand the vision of the album.
While many critics regard The Ghost of Tom Joad as one of the greatest US albums, it was far too good for top-40 radio and did not win a mass audience. Springsteen had not expected the album to be a commercial success but was pleased that it won back his original fans and inspired the best amongst the new generation, including Rage Against the Machine, who later covered the title track.
Now, 17 years after Born in the USA, Springsteen has returned to a mass audience with Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band Live in New York. The album entered the US charts at number five and is selling by the truckload. It is rich with the choruses, riffs, melodies and borrowings from blues, soul, gospel and country that have given rock its excitement and popular appeal. But the album's often joyous and celebratory feel has not been achieved at the expense of political or artistic compromise.
Springsteen, a man who thinks very carefully about every aspect of his work, has chosen to join the Clash and Rage Against the Machine by emblazoning the new album's discs with the radical symbol of a five-pointed red star on a black background. The five-pointed star is an ancient symbol of immanence, the idea that the sacred inheres in humanity in the here and now.
An important part of the enormous spiritual power of Springsteen's work lies in his ability to transcend the division between the sacred and the profane by locating real value in the struggles, compromises, conflicts and triumphs in the everyday lives of ordinary people. He brings careful attention and real wisdom to the world of work, family and comradeship. Springsteen's art, in other words, is grounded in immanence. Immanence is an inherently radical idea because when God, America, The Leader, The Market or anything else is set up as a transcendent force above human life, humanity is debased.
Marx and Engels chose well when they decided on the five-pointed star as the international symbol of the first Communist League. Like Springsteen, they didn't anticipate any easy victories and so they made it red to symbolise the blood spilt in struggle. These days many radicals put the red star of socialism over the black flag of anarchism to distance themselves from Stalinism.
The US flag is a resonant symbol. But it's difficult to take the flag back from the conservatives who have set up the USA as a new God before which humanity, including most Americans, must abase itself. A red star on a black background is a clear, direct and defiant symbol of a commitment to the sacred value of each human life. Springsteen's political commitments may not have changed that much since Born in the USA, but in 2001 he is not allowing anyone to misunderstand or misrepresent his ethics.
Springsteen's latest album features dramatically new interpretations of some of his best songs. "If I Should Fall Behind" is turned into an exquisitely tender duet with Patti Scialfa. There are rousing versions of "Born to Run", "Badlands" and "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out"; a stripped down and mournfully bluesy "Born in the USA"; a defiant and resolute "Youngstown"; a steaming "Murder Incorporated"; a version of "Mansion on the Hill" even more haunting than the original; a soaring "Jungleland" and an interpretation of "The River" which could raise goosebumps on the dead or, which is much the same thing, fans of top-40 radio.
There are also a number of new songs, including the celebrated "American Skin (41 Shots)" which was written in response to the extraordinarily violent murder of an unarmed African immigrant by the New York Police Department. It has led to the NYPD calling Springsteen "commie scum" and refusing to provide security at his shows.
"American Skin" is an exceptionally powerful song and Rolling Stone was quite correct to advise their readers that this song alone is easily worth the cost of the double album. The slightly baroque "introducing the band" bit wears thin after a few listens, but that's a small price to pay for 19 songs performed with rare passion, insight and musical brilliance.