From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Cult of Bruce
The fawning over Springsteen is now officially nauseating.
He's back.
Bruce Springsteen, the man who almost got me assaulted in 1984, is once again topping the pop music charts with a new album, "The Rising," written as a response to Sept. 11. He's the subject of hagiographies in Time and Rolling Stone and was interviewed by Ted Koppel and entertained by Katie Couric, who genuflected (rhetorically) before his greatness on "Today."
Back in 1984, when I was a college student, I panned the album "Born in the U.S.A.," Bruce's breakthrough (coming years after the early so-called triumph of "Born to Run"). The college paper ran an entire page of letters calling me a fool--one from my own brother. I was even warned about going to a certain bar favored by some of The Boss's disciples.
Had I only realized then what I do now: There is no reasoning with Springsteen fans. They form their own religion, or rather their own cult. Bruce's return is their Second Coming, and third and fourth, depending on how you count. Indeed, religion is the only way to explain the Pauline tone of the Return of the Boss.
"Bruce Springsteen has gathered many a superlative over the years," Kurt Loder panted in a five-star Rolling Stone review. I had a flash of hope that a "but" was going to follow that clause, but then came the geyser of gush: "Even for him, though, 'The Rising,' with its bold thematic concentration and penetrating emotional focus, is a singular triumph. I can't think of another album in which such an abundance of great songs might be said to seem the least of its achievements."
The music, indeed, is beside the point, but perhaps that is just as well, because Springsteen's can be bombastic and throbbingly dull. But never mind. Springsteen's admirers are caught up in his iconic image, his heroic working-class poses, his Asbury Park grittiness, his attempts to speak for the alienated, etc. Thus what matters is the "message," the latest pronouncement from The Boss.
We've been told more than once in recent weeks that someone stopped Bruce's car on Sept. 11 and shouted, "We need you!" The press has apparently joined the choir of petitioners. To say that, on "Today," Katie Couric was giggly and schoolgirlish is an insult to giggly schoolgirls. Ms. Couric, a member of our fierce, cantankerous independent press, could not come up with a single decent question--unless you consider 87 variations on "How do you do it?" probing.
Ditto oracle Ted Koppel, who offered the same template as every other journalist: Springsteen was upset by the terrorist bombings and as a Man of the People decided to write an album about it. He is an American icon and a savior! End of conversation. Then Ted had Bruce as an overnight guest at his beach house, something the haired one never did for Boris Yeltsin. (Can you imagine the cultural uplift if "Today" and Ted gave similar time to one of America's great jazz or classical singers--you know, people whose music deserved such adoration? You probably can't; neither can I.)
In his Rolling Stone review, Mr. Loder brought new artfulness to the fawning: "The small miracle of [Springsteen's] accomplishment is that at no point does he give vent to the anger felt by so many Americans: the hunger for revenge." So much for Bruce's lyric (admittedly weird) from the song "On Empty Sky": "I want a kiss from your lips / I want an eye for an eye." Even Springsteen is powerless over the Springsteen cult.
A cultural critic in the New York Post called "The Rising" "a celebration of the human spirit." Well, maybe. But doesn't that apply even more to songs that are better crafted, that lift the spirit through the genius of their sound? The title song on "The Rising" is ham-fisted and stiff--a cheesy anthem by a cheesy Jersey band. It really doesn't matter that one of the songs on the album is about a firefighter's widow and speaks "for us all." Supposedly important lyrics with bad music behind them equals bad music. Billy Strayhorn penned one of the most uplifting songs of all time, the Duke Ellington theme "Take the A Train." It's about riding a subway. Bruce would have put a homeless guy on the train, never mind what he would have done to the tune.
Naturally, after years of mega-success, a millionaire many times over, Bruce still wears the same crappy clothes and assumes the same working-stiff stance--a deeply silly sign of deference to the fetish of "authenticity" that is the core of rock culture. But don't hold that against him! "Springsteen doesn't know what a 40-hour workweek feels like," a writer for Time magazine admitted, "but he knows how a 40-hour work week makes you feel." Alleluia!
If the cult of Bruce has a high priest, it is Eric Alterman, the columnist for the Nation magazine and the author, in 1999, of the adoring "It Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen." In it Mr. Alterman recounts his thoughts at the moment he went weak-kneed and actually got to meet his god: "There were any number of times since I had turned fifteen when I felt as if Bruce were somehow saving my life. He had provided the one constant between my adolescence and my adulthood, between my being the son of my father and the father of my daughter. He had been a source of hope and inspiration, of friendship and fortitude, of therapy and solidarity, of consolation and exhilaration."
What more is there to say? The current album has Mr. Alterman a little tortured, since it is patriotic, in a smarmy way, and thus possibly exploitative of a tragic moment and of "America's mighty mass-marketing machine." Indeed, "The Rising" raises, for Mr. Alterman, "some complicated questions about art, politics and commerce." Even so, Springsteen gets a pass from Mr. Alterman, who scalps a member of his other religion, leftism, when said member questions Bruce's motives in the Village Voice. After all, says Mr. Alterman, Bruce "has done more than any American artist" to give voice to the "other" American--that is, "the humiliated Vietnam veteran, the fired factory worker, the hunted illegal immigrant, the death-row inmate," etc.
He's also given voice to some other American breeds: the toady, the sycophant, the lapdog journalist, the tin-eared bore. Maybe Springsteen himself is a bit put off by the mad ardor of his fans, like a guru embarrassed by the zealousness of his followers. Or maybe not.
Mr. Judge is the author of "If It Ain't Got That Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture."
