Monday, February 2nd 2009
The Truth: Bruce Springsteen
Whoring The Glory Days
Bruce Springsteen’s Super Bowl Halftime set was a highly orchestrated 12-minute medley run through pieces of four songs from his catalogue: Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, Born To Run, Working On A Dream and Glory Days. With about thirty musicians onstage making up the E Street Band (not counting the gospel choir, which I don’t think I’ve seen a nationally televised musical performance without since Obama’s inauguration- just sayin), you’d think there’d be a finely tuned wall of sound to rock our asses and bring us back to a time when The Boss really actually was a shot caller and stood for something more than calculated exposure.
Instead, we got feedback squeaks, uneven levels and a scripted, cheeseball “flag on the play” mini-skit. “It’s Booooooss tiiiiiiiiime,” Steven Van Zandt warbled ecstatically into the mic, as convincing as Amy Winehouse declaring sobriety, starting tomorrow.
It made me feel old.
Bruce is there because he’s got a record to promote. It’s no secret, he openly admits it, with a side-note chuckle about not even liking football. But that makes no goddamned sense. He’s long past the point of new fan migration. Go to a Springsteen show and see how many people give a bloody shit about the new material.
The performance was terribly contrived. Everyone in the entire stadium was apparently given a little glow stick and instructed to wait until the right time to wave it around- which just happened to be the beginning of the new song. No lighters, no cellphones, no digital cameras to be seen- completely staged.
As that ranting broken record Bob Lefsetz pointed out, “The old Bruce was an outsider, not a cheerleader. Worse, the old Bruce stood up for the little guy. The old Bruce wouldn’t allow an exclusive to be sold at a big box retailer that locked its employees inside. He’d pen an anthem protesting the abuse. He’d skip the Super Bowl, after all, didn’t high school football players chide him for his long hair, beat him up?” Exactly.
I don’t know if you’ve heard his new record, Working On A Dream; it came out a couple days ago. It’s a big band waste of time- same old formula, same old tricks. Totally uninspiring. But it’s getting critical blowjobs all over the map, because someone in the upper ranks apparently decreed that it’s time for a Bruce revival. Maybe they were pissed that The Wrestler didn’t win him an Oscar nomination. Or maybe they got nostalgic watching Little Steven blast Jersey thugs on reruns of The Sopranos. Hell, there could even be a deeper “Hey guys, Americana’s cool again!” thing going on in this country, with Hope and Change replacing Shock and Awe as the token phrase of our presidential administration. Whatever the case, we’re not supposed to resist the revival, despite Springsteen’s own very recent admission that he “dropped the ball” on his Mr. America image with his exclusive Wal-Mart distribution deal.
He stood as a living embodiment of the working man for nearly four decades of Born-in-the-USA, red-blooded blue jeans rock n’ roll, then flipped a bitch and signed a deal to sell his greatest hits album exclusively at a monolith retail chain with a long, shady history of treating their employees like shit- a cancer on the entire concept of the small-town grassroots nostalgia he’d made a career out of narrating. Then he signed up for a big-stage spectacle production of his new album pitch, on a scale that would make Broadway jealous, and ultimately came off as canned and artificial as a Britney Spears performance.
Glory Days, indeed. At least he looked like he was having fun. But Neil Young would’ve told NBC to fuck off- or at least put performance above showmanship.
*shrug* I admit it was a little weird to see Bruce doing something as staged as the Super Bowl, but I thought he did a good job.
As a fan, I looked at it like this: Bruce with the E-Street band in concert is a unique, life-changing experience that trumps any questionable decisions he may otherwise make, like releasing a new album of weak outtakes or the Wal-Mart deal. And by doing the Stupor Bowl, Bruce had a chance to put his excellent live show on display for millions of people who otherwise probably would have never seen it. Even a few of my friends who weren’t big fans saw it and were like “okay, I see why you like this guy so much.”
Other than the pyro and the gospel choir, the halftime show was just a compressed version of an actual Springsteen show (including the silly exchange between him and Van Zandt, which they’ve been doing for years)…I would’ve been upset if he’d strayed from his game or duetted with Justin Timberlake, but he did exactly what he does every night, albeit by compressing it all into 12 minutes.
One of the worst performances I’ve seen in a long time.
BTW, if we’re going to criticize something about the Super Bowl, let’s talk about everyone in the universe splooging over Jennifer Hudson’s awesome lip-synching abilities. What a fucking joke. I know she’s been through a lot, but if you’re going to present yourself as a ‘singer,’ you should, y’know, SING.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090202/D96342300.html
Sure it’s a total whoring of sentimentality by the organizers to even have her there, but give the girl a break. It’s not like it was her choice to lip-synch. Besides, she fuckin crushed the song.
Oh get over it. Even if she did lip sych, dude, that was HER VOICE she was lip synching to. So in actuality she did, y’know, SING.
Springsteen’s gig; I dug it. Saw nothing wrong with it. It served its purpose, entertained the crowd, gave those who will never get a tix to his show because they sold out in .90210 seconds a taste of what they’ll miss and it was fun. That’s what it’s supposed to be; uplifting, even, in this time of trouble. Maintaining an air of rock and roll superiority is a tiresome thing and somewhat pointless when you already know your place in the scheme of things. Go Boss. It was indeed BOSS TIME!!!!
for whatever it’s worth, here’s the clip of the porno that comcast in arizona accidentally cut to during the super bowl:
http://hellyeahbro.com/funny/2009/02/that-porno-that-comcast-accidentally-cut-to-during-super-bowl-xliii/
2 Things,
1. I got no porn, I’m in Arizona, what the hell man. I’d be pissed if it hadn’t been all cock.
2. Springsteen has been an old washed up shell of a man for a LONG time, this was just an exclamation point on the erosion of his soul.
It seems to be all about the porn. From the ads that were banned to the blowjob at the end. Man, I’d be pissed if I’d missed the end of the Superbowl for that. And Bruce’s nut slide into the camera, man, that lense was violated. Still, Big Ben is hot, I’d create some porn with him.
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