A Sound of Sheer Silence

{I wrote this about a month ago, when the Bruenig piece was current, and then decided not to post it.  After thinking about what I wrote today , I changed my mind.  This is basically unedited from that original draft, except for a few typo fixes.} Friend-of-the-blog Elizabeth Bruenig, who is now a columnist for the Washington Post (yay!), wrote an excellent and thoughtful piece about the recent Aziz Ansari  incident/revelations.  Bruenig's position, if I might summarize it, is that the Sexual Revolution brought with it the notion that sexual interactions should be treated in essentially the same way as any other sort of social interaction.  And, in the context of other, normal social interactions, it is considered to be appropriate and praiseworthy to try to meet the needs and wants of other people.  So, as an example, if I am in a group that wants to go out and eat sushi, but I don't really care for sushi all that much, I might keep my objections to myse...

"The Rising" (off of The Rising (2002)) Concert Footage: Sao Paulo (Brazil), 2013 To understand why "The Rising" is the #1 Springsteen song for me, I have to tell you a story.  In the summer of 2002, I took a trip.  The primary purpose of the trip was a family reunion for my mother's side of the family in New Jersey, and I was joined by my mom and my sisters.  After that, the four of us took a memorable trip to Boston to look at colleges for my sister Katie.  I then put my family on a plane back to Florida, and took the train into New York City to see my friend Adam.  Adam and I went to college together, and we were (and are) good friends.  Among his rather diverse skill-set, Adam has a television production background, and at the time he was working for a company that was documenting on video the recovery/clean up efforts at the site of the World Trade Center. And so, on an absolutely perfect July day, he and I went to the site where the World Tr...

"Atlantic City" (original version off of Nebraska (1982), E Street Band Version [shown] first released on Live in New York City  (2001)) Concert Footage:  Hyde Park, London (U.K.), 2013 Well they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night Now they blew up his house, too. I maintain that the best opening to any song the opening to the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood"---" I once had a girl/or, should I say, she once had me. "  That's John Lennon at his songwriting best--men have a tendency to reflexively talk about "their" girl, when in many, many cases the shoe is on the other foot, and Lennon communicates this in his trademark economy of words. The second best opening to any song, in my opinion, is "Atlantic City."  It is like a punch to the face--you can't hear "they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night, now they blew up his house, too," and be indifferent to what is coming next.  The name "the...

"Adam Raised a Cain" (off of Darkness on the Edge of Town  (1978)) Concert Footage: Nationwide Arena, Columbus, Ohio (U.S.A.), 2014 The British Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton once famously called original sin, "the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved."  In other words, if you strip away the (somewhat convoluted) theological infrastructure surrounding the idea, you are left with the basic observation that we carry with us the baggage of those that came before us.  All of us are products of our environment, whether we want to be or not.  Some of those products are relatively banal, some are deeply wounding and leave permanent scars.  But all of us have them, and all of us struggle, to one degree or another, to get beyond them. "Adam Raised a Cain," my favorite Springsteen deep cut (or maybe "deep-ish" cut), is a song about original sin.  Indeed, it says so right in the title--one generation after eating from the Tr...

"Thunder Road" (off of Born to Run  (1975)) Concert Footage: Air Canada Center, Toronto (Canada), 2016 The three iconic songs off of Born to Run  are "Born to Run," "Jungleland," and "Thunder Road."  I go back and forth on which of those I like the best.  Musically, "Jungleland" is the most memorable because of the saxophone solo, originally performed by the legendary Clarence Clemons a/k/a "The Big Man."  "Born to Run" is the most anthemic song, despite not being particularly positive ("It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap, we've got to get out while we're young," etc.)  In the end, I decided to go with "Thunder Road," mostly because I realized that I can rattle off every word of the song out of reflex. Most of Springsteen songs are storytelling songs, but "Thunder Road" is maybe the ultimate storytelling song.  It has no chorus or bridge, just a continuous nar...

"American Skin ( 41 Shots )" (first released on Live in New York City (2001), version shown off of High Hopes (2014)) Concert Footage: Nationwide Arena, Columbus, Ohio (U.S.A.), 2014 On February 4, 1999, Amadou Diallo was killed by New York City police officers in front of his apartment in the Bronx.  He was unarmed--the officers claimed that he was pulling a gun on them, when it fact he was reaching into his pocket to get his wallet.  The officers shot 41 times in total, hitting him 19 times.  The officers were tried on 2nd degree murder charges, and acquitted by a jury in Albany, New York. "American Skin (41 Shots)" was originally inspired by the Diallo killing, and debuted on 2000's E Street Ban Reunion Tour.  During the tour, which had ten shows in New York's Madison Square Garden, NYPD officers working security turned their backs to the band during the song, and a police association called for a boycott of the tour.  It faded away for a while, b...

"She's the One" (off of Born to Run (1975)) Concert Footage:  Madison Square Garden, New York (U.S.A.), 2007 That thunder in your heart at night when you're kneeling in the dark, it say's you're never gonna leave her But there's this angel in her eyes that tells such desperate lies and all you want to do is believe her And tonight you'll try just one more time to leave it all behind and to break on through Oh, she can take you, but if she wants to break you, she's gonna find out that ain't so easy to do And no matter where you sleep tonight or how far you run Whoa-oh, she's the one She's the one The message of "She's the One," if reduced to one cliched sentence, would be: "Women; can't live with them, can't live without them."  Like I said, it that is well-worn ground for songwriters, which is why it is cliched.  But there are treatments of cliched tropes that further the cliche, and the...

"Trapped" (cover song, originally by Jimmy Cliff) Concert Footage: Nationwide Arena, Columbus, Ohio (U.S.A.), 2014 Bruce Springsteen has sung a lot of songs in his career.  In addition to his own work (in the form of 18 studio albums), he often plays covers.  Some of the covers are of songs he wrote for other people that have gone on to become hits, such as "Because the Night" which was a hit for Patti Smith and then later 10,000 Maniacs.  But some of them are just straight up covers.  And because there are so many of them, they tend to cycle in and out of setlists--they will be a routine presence in his shows, then fade away, then come back. Such is the case with "Trapped."  "Trapped" was originally performed by reggae pioneer Jimmy Cliff.  After a bit of Google-fu, it turns out that "Trapped" was first covered by Springsteen on 1985's  USA for Africa  charity album (best known for "We Are the World"), and then ...

"Death to My Hometown" (off of Wrecking Ball (2012) Concert Footage:  Apollo Theatre, New York (U.S.A.), 2012 Bruce has a large number of songs in his catalog that relate to the collapse of American cities.  In fact, if there is one consistent thread running through all of his work, it might be that.  Off the top of my head, I can think of at least a half-dozen songs that have this as an element or a significant theme--"The River," "Born in the U.S.A.," "The Promise," "Johnny 99," "My City of Ruins," "Factory."  And there are many more. This is a controversial opinion, but I think his songwriting on this topic has gotten better as time has gone on.  I think many of the earlier songs can be a bit too formulaic, such that they all become variations on the same song ("is this the one where the factory closes down, or the one where there are no construction jobs, or what?")  The other problem is tha...

"Lonesome Day" (off of The Rising  (2002)) Concert Footage:  Rose Center, New York (U.S.A.), 2002 2002's The Rising is my favorite Springsteen album.  A large part of that has to do with very idiosyncratic and personal reasons, which I will get to in a future post.  But another big reason is that The Rising  is the most diverse album tonally and sonically.  You have very slow, punishingly sad piano ballads like "You're Missing," and you have aggressively upbeat, positive songs like "Waitin' On a Sunny Day."  You have songs about crumbling communities ("My City of Ruins") and songs about things getting made right ("Counting On a Miracle").  You have straight forward rock songs ("Mary's Place") and you have more experimental tracks ("The Fuse"). If there is anything that joins these songs together, it is their complete refusal to adopt a Manichean view of the world.  Every song on the album th...

"Glory Days" (off of Born in the U.S.A.  (1984)) Concert Footage:  Hyde Park, London (U.K.), 2013 Well, after a couple weeks off for the holidays, back to the Springsteen countdown.  We start our official top ten with a track off of the album that put Springsteen into the stratosphere, 1984's Born in the U.S.A.   I was listening to  Born in the U.S.A. last night, and I was struck by how great it sounded.  With the exception of two tracks ("I'm on Fire," and "My Hometown"), every single one of the tracks is a high-energy, expansive rock song.  It's all very "big," and in that sense it is not surprising that it resonated with people in the mid-80s, a time when uncomplicated excess was seen as cool.  All of the songs are also very fun from a musical perspective--the experience of listening to them makes you smile and bop your head along to the beat and sing along (the well-known "Dancing in the Dark" and the less well kn...

The last Friday Fun series went pretty well--I enjoyed it at least.  So, for this series, I am going to try the impossible and come up with a list of my top ten Springsteen songs.  The impossibility of the task is demonstrated by the fact that I couldn't keep to ten and had to add these two honorable mentions.  I am also not going to include two songs I have already talked about, "Reason to Believe" and "Land of Hope and Dreams."   I don't want to rehash what I said previously, which is why I am not including them in this list, but they are both certainly among my ten favorite Springsteen songs, and "Land of Hope and Dreams" is either #1 or at a minimum #2. As far as the song clips go, I am going to go exclusively with live concert footage, because that it is the only way to fully appreciate the Springsteen experience.  I've seen him twice (once in DC in 2012 and once in Columbus in 2014, which is the source of a number of the clips I am goi...

1.  Many years ago, I read a book by Karen Armstrong entitled The Battle for God .  In the book, Armstrong tries to define and explore the concept of "fundamentalism."  Technically, fundamentalism refers to a specific movement in Protestant Christianity, stemming from the Niagara Bible Conference in the 1880s and 1890s that defined what it believed to be the "five fundamentals" of Christian faith.  However, the term "fundamentalism" has expanded to other religious contexts, so we talk about Islamic Fundamentalism, Jewish Fundamentalism, etc.  In fact, in her book, Armstrong discusses the history of Jewish, Islamic and (Protestant) Christian fundamentalisms in parallel. But what is fundamentalism?  Armstrong argues that it has three basic components--a substantive component, a political or social component, and a rhetorical component.  The substantive component is a whole-cloth rejection of the values of the broader society in which it finds itself--i...

1. When this winter started, there were two things I thought we going to happen before it was over.  First, I was going to get out of the snow before it was over, to go scuba diving and to get some sun and to recharge from the grey and the shoveling and all of that.  Second, I was going to take concrete steps to leave the Catholic Church. Well, it is clear now that only one of those is going to happen.  And I am sitting in Key West, Florida, watching the sunrise. . . . ********************* 2. Bruce Springsteen's sixth album, Nebraska , is a dark work.  It is just Springsteen, his guitar, and a harmonica.  The themes are violence and hopelessness, with crime as the link between those two.  It's a haunting album. But the genius of the album, for me, is the last song, Reason to Believe .  After the despair and alienation of the previous nine songs, Reason to Believe changes the conversation.  It is not in any way upbeat--it involves a dead...