Band Face Off - Round 12

[Jyqm]

Originally Posted by face of glass

Starostin is the only critic I've seen to make valid points against Springsteen, I haven't found any others (at least in America the traditional school of rock criticism [the Creem/Rolling Stone wing of it] has done nothing but praised Bruce) but of course that is due to my lack of research. If you have other examples of this, I would like you to give me some links.

No! I think you missed my point. I was saying I wish you would just post your own thoughts on Springsteen, whether or not they mirror Starostin's. It's a bit more engaging to have this discussion with each other rather than me discussing Starostin's quotes with you acting merely as a middleman.

The interesting thing is that he RARELY dares to combine them on the same album and therefore doesn't want to give an impression of true diversity, instead he prefers to split these distinct sides of his to half in order to not alienate certain parts of his audience. This isn't to say an album like The River doesn't have parts of both but hell, it's a double album anyway.

I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions here. I don't think Springsteen's bipolar album releases reflect a lack of willingness on his part to demonstrate his own diversity, nor do I think he's intentionally trying to split his fanbase. (On tour, that's another issue; his current tour is very clearly meant for die-hard appreciative fans, and not the casual E Street folks who just want to hear the hits.) The reason he splits these distinct sides of his music is precisely because he sees them as distinct sides. Springsteen is someone who has always been very conscious of making his albums cohesive pieces of work (Human Touch being really the only exception). An album that interspersed E Street party rockers (or even more "serious" and "dark" E Street rockers) with bleak acoustic material would probably sound totally incoherent to Bruce's ears (probably to mine as well). I don't see how splitting up material that is so musically different somehows fails to demonstrate diversity. After all, would you claim that Elvis Costello is failing to present his true musical diversity because he didn't release his Delivery Man songs on one album with his Il Sogno ballet?

In addition, there's also the issue of the institution of the E Street Band to contend with. Especially at this point in Bruce's career, this is a big group of people who all have their own lives going on. They're not at Bruce's beck and call every day of the year. So when he recruits them for a project, I think he feels that it should be a project totally dedicated to that band aesthetic. He can get the most of the band that he possibly can, and then he can focus on a solo project and let them all get back to their other lives of smooth jazz albums and late night talk shows and mob killings.

I think I've got a lot of other scrambled thoughts about this, and I could probably go on for paragraphs, but I think my point is simply that it's far too reductive simply to say, "Well, Springsteen splits his albums into rockers and folkers because he doesn't want to be seen as diverse and doesn't want to alienate certain parts of his fanbase." (And to me neither of those claims makes a lick of sense. The fact that he releases such startlingly different albums DOES demonstrate his diversity quite plainly, and the fact that he releases albums made up entirely of dark acoustic material DOES alienate a large part of his fan base.) (And anyway, after the Vote for Change tour last year, I think it's a bit silly to claim that Bruce is afraid of alienating certain parts of his fanbase.)