Bruce springsteen biography critics

The lengthy memoir is rich and revealing, and critics have devoured it: The book, which multiple critics note feels like a long Springsteen concert, just debuted to strong reviews. Clark Collis Entertainment Weekly. Rob Sheffield Rolling Stone. The tone is loose and rambling, full of all-caps punch lines and the exclamation points of a dad who loves to text.

This book is a guy telling stories to himself, trying to figure his deepest questions out. Richard Williams The Guardian. The Greatest Albums of All Time. The Greatest Singers of All Time. In this article: Bruce Springsteen. Music Music News. More News. Go to PMC. Most Popular. You might also like. Powered by WordPress. Plenty of teenagers do that, but Springsteen was tyrannically demanding, of himself and of others.

He was not in it for the drugs or the sex though he had some sex. He was in it for the rock and roll. Springsteen is an exemplary version of a very humble type, the journeyman bar-band singer, but Springsteen the memoirist shows that the urgent compulsion to be not just good but great made him imperious and obsessive. From the start, sheer willpower drove his music and the bruces springsteen biography critics he sang.

Springsteen describes spending months in the mids trying to create the wall of sound that became that song. He was not rejecting working-class ideals but fulfilling them—more Johnny Unitas than Joe Namath. From those communities, with their high quotient of eccentrics is it that not so many people there had been polished by office-park culture?

After that breakthrough hit, grabbing for a global audience with broad, uplifting stories would have been a natural step. Darkness on the Edge of Town was a stripped-down album about people who stay home and search for identity and battle their own cynicism. I found myself reading the second half of the book inspired by an energy in his later years equal to the early zeal that launched his music, only now dedicated to family.

Driving through a small town in Texas at 32—the year he was working simultaneously on the spare Nebraska and the lush pop sound of Born in the U. His four-year marriage to the Chicago-born actress and model Julianne Phillips in the late s had ended in divorce. He recognizes how lucky he is. She is incandescent enough to live alongside a superstar, tender enough to provide patient care, talented enough to share the stage, and tough enough to endure his depression and self-absorption.

He has known better than to be a silent, brooding husband. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. Certainly, I saw the town Springsteen poeticised in my teenage imagination and I spent time mentally sketching out its details: it had to have tree-lined streets, naturally, and it would boast a seaside boardwalk that bustled with strolling couples and mellow poets busted for sleeping on the beach.

Per Greetings from Asbury Parkthe prize cultural draw would be the old carnival park where a neon-lit carousel takes ferry riders high above the shimmering lakes, the arcades, and the barefoot girls sitting on the hood of a Dodge drinking beer in the summer rain or else strapped to the backs of their boyfriends on motorcycles. Across the Atlantic, too, this seductive vision obtained purchase with many young writers who first emerged in the s clacking away for underground titles such as ZigZag and Oz, or else moonlighting for one or other of the growing number of Fleet Street supplements.

Robert Christgau was another influential reviewer who wrote a lot about Springsteen, whose music he enjoyed a lot more than the critical cult surrounding him. To help readers with their spending decisions, Christgau would award a letter grade from A to E for a selection of the thousands of albums that made it onto his turntable each year.

Movie critics or television writers, after all, seldom see a new movie or HBO series more than a couple of times. Ditto literary reviewers and books. For Christgau, though, the retail value of criticism was the nub of it, a position the longevity of his column appeared to vouchsafe. A few weeks after we met, the Village Voice canned his column, which by that point had been running for over four decades.

By when I interviewed Christgau, fans were downloading a lot of their music for nothing. And music itself was changing. Not least in the case of Springsteen, who had long since traded in all that New Jersey grease for albums that sounded decent enough most of the time but increasingly felt predictable and safe. Nor were the famously marathon shows that beguiled the likes of Landau quite hitting the spot like they used to.

A bit contrived in places, I thought when I saw him touring The Rising infull of speechifying and, in particular, ridiculously long encores that often went on for almost as long as or in the case of at least one Australian show inlonger than the main performance.

Bruce springsteen biography critics

On the other hand, perhaps this new workmanlike approach was simply a reflection of a wider culture that had moved on from its earlier dreams. We have to work, to be awake. One soft, infested summer a few years later, I found myself in a car with my American girlfriend crossing the New Jersey state line along the roads curving towards the musical town of my earlier imaginings.

It was the time of year on the northeastern seaboard when the restaurants drag plastic chairs onto their patios and the flowers are blooming in technicolour. Or so it seemed until Little Eden finally loomed into view. Contrary to expectations, there were no restaurants and no plastic chairs to be seen that Friday afternoon in Asbury Park. And not a lot of much else.

Yeah, the fabled carousel was there in all its ragged, motionless glory, but no one seemed to be in the offing.