Bruce strikes a chord Springsteen and other classic rockers come around to the idea that good music doesn’t just come from guitars
Has Bruce Springsteen had a personality transplant? Fans might be forgiven for pondering that one after his much-discussed, tweeted and Youtubed keynote address at South by Southwest last month.
Bruce’s hour-long talk touched on many things — from the alarming look of Eric Burdon and the Animals to the enduring optimism of Woody Guthrie. But the quote that begged for the biggest headline somehow slipped right by:
“We live in a post-authentic world,” Bruce announced to the young musical hopefuls. “The elements of what you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human experience and expression is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way of doing. There is just doing.” Whoa! With those few lines, one of rock’s toniest brand names questioned the very belief system that raised him so high in the critical and popular mind-set to begin with. Here was Mr. Authenticity pronouncing the whole notion of that term outmoded, smallminded and beside the point.
Of course, he was speaking about authenticity in quotes — about the calcified notions of what it has come to mean over the last three to four decades. During that time, the boomer bullies of classic rock have asserted their music as the genuine article, casting every other form in its wake as lesser, if not downright counterfeit.
Pronouncements like Bruce’s would seem eye-rollingly obvious to the all those who’ve long felt there’s equal artistic expression in (still) often maligned art forms like rap, electronic music, teen pop or whatever unnameable new style arises to assault the conventions of song form and rhythm.
But for an old-school, hard-line rocker like Bruce to challenge musical divisions and hierarchies at this point says something key about where we are now and, perhaps, about where we might be heading.
Especially since he’s hardly the only presumptive “rockist” to lately question that point of view. Guitar worshiper Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters weighed in on this same issue in February — if by accident. He backed into it after delivering a Grammy acceptance speech many “non-rockists” took to be fighting words.
“This award means a lot, because it shows that the human element in music is what’s important,” he said of his win for songs recorded entirely on analog equipment. “It’s not about what goes into a computer. It’s about what goes on here [indicating his heart].”
The twitterati felt such lines cast Grohl as everything from a fogey to a bigot. Which, naturally, caused the unfailingly affable Dave to release a long and witty mea culpa the very next day.
“To clarify ... I love ALL kinds of music,” he wrote. “From Kyuss to Kraftwerk, Pinetop Perkins to Prodigy. Dead Kennedys to Deadmau5. Electronic, acoustic, it doesn’t matter to me.”
His response may have been opportunistic in more ways than one. With electronic music on the commercial ascent vying for the same aggressive market as rock, no less, it makes sense for old-line guitar gods to get on board.
But if Dave’s olive branch got him off the hook, it hardly ended the enmity between the warring factions of pop. Perhaps the most glaring example I’ve encountered of late came not from a musician or critic but from a reader. After I penned a negative review of Bruce Springsteen’s new “Wrecking Ball” album, a commenter named Martind28 proposed a separate-butunequal system of evaluating music. “Maybe in magazines and newspapers, reviews of real music should be separated from contrived audio entertainment, such as rap, hip-hop, modern R&B and digital stuff, to create a logical balance,” he wrote. “It’s irrational to give a negative review to an honest effort, that falls short based on its standard, and a positive review to something that is dominated by a drum machine because it measures up to such a low standard.”
Where to begin with this one?
Setting aside the commenter’s scorched earth contempt for every single expression of hip hop, contemporary R&B and electronically based music, it still wouldn’t make sense to segregate a review of someone perceived as super-serious (i.e. Bruce) from someone assumed to be ultra-frivolous (like, say, Britney). Obviously, by any measure the former has infinitely more talent than the latter.
Yet, that didn’t prevent Bruce from putting out a stone cold bore of an album this year while the army of folks that add up to “Britney” managed to concoct a terrifically zippy single within the last year (“I Wanna Go”). If Ms. Spears herself probably had no more to do with that song than the person who swept up the studio where it was recorded matters not.
A great single is still a great single. What matters most in music isn’t how it was concocted by its creators but how much feeling it evokes in its listeners. In their own ways, that’s all Bruce and Dave were trying to say.
If you don’t believe them, ask the latest classic rock auteur to weigh in on the matter. In Carole King’s forthcoming autobiography (out April 10), this songwriter’s songwriter asks the musical question: “Has today’s technology lowered the quality of music from that of previous generations?”
Hell no, she answers. “I believe that as long as people have hearts and minds and the capacity to laugh, cry, dance, feel, and fall in and out of love, a good song will always find an audience because it connects us to our humanity,” she writes. “If technology can help people make that connection, I’m a fan.”
If the ultimate Natural Woman believes that, why shouldn’t you?