I finally got around to buying Bruce Springsteen's The Rising, along with a bunch of other stuff, and can't resist throwing my $0.02 into the discussion about it.
This is a difficult record to write about, in a number of ways. For one thing, it's a rather long album (pushing the limits of the CD format), and could easily have been trimmed by a few songs without losing any quality (I'd suggest "Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin)", "Further On (Up the Road)", and "The Fuse"). It also sprawls in a musical sense, covering pretty much all the bases you can cover with the E Street Band. (Which are a lot of bases, given that it's basically a band built around excess-- two keyboardists and three guitars, for God's sake. Were Clarence Clemons a smaller man, they'd probably have two saxophone players as well...)
The biggest difficulty by far, though, has to do with the subject matter. As anyone who hasn't been living in a cave knows, this is Springsteen's September 11 album, with the bulk of the tracks touching on one aspect or another of that horrific event. There are songs about lost loved ones, songs about firemen, and songs about the anger and rage of the aftermath. It's hard to separate the album from the trauma (despite the big uplifting gospel shout of the title track, knowing what it's about gets me all choked up), and that's the sort of thing that can easily get in the way of determining whether the album is any good or not. (See, for example, Neil Young's Sleeps With Angels, about Kurt Cobain's death, which Rolling Stone gave five stars at the time of its release, but now pretends not to have reviewed, because, well, it's just not that good an album...). The important question to ask about a new record is not "Is this a good album right now?" but "Five years from now, will I still think this is a good album?" It's a difficult question to answer, made more difficult by the fact that this album, and these songs are so inextricably bound up in recent history.
That said, the answer is almost certainly "yes." There are some tracks that are probably slightly over-inflated by their currency (chief among them being "Worlds Apart" which gets lots of critical attention for including qawwli singers, but aside from that inspired touch, isn't that great a song), but for the most part, Springsteen manages to avoid the trap of excessive topicality. The songs gain an added resonance from the context of September 11, but with a few exceptions ("Into the Fire," "Empty Sky," "Worlds Apart," and possibly the title track), most of these songs would work nearly as well in a different context. They're about loss and separation, true, but the cause of the loss is unspecified-- Mary's Place" is about a wake, but the singer's wife could as easily have been killed by a drunk driver as a terrorist. And even "My City of Ruins," one of the songs which might seem to be most strongly linked to the September 11 tragedy, was written before the attacks, and is about more general urban decay.
Article comments
1 - Walt
I was incredibly slow to warm to "The Rising", and I have been a Springsteen fan since at least 1975.
I blame it on an MP3 download and poor system speakers. This is a dense, layeered, textured record which sounds horrible on inferior equipment. That, and he always seems to make his first sinle so middle-of-the-road that it seems lame to me. I remember this so well from "Tunnel Of Love," a superbn record which was far better than that sappy single "Brilliant Disguise." And I think "The River" is one of the worst songs on "The River." So, "Lonesome Day" fit right in for me. "Da-da-da-da, dada-da-da-da..." I mean, it could have been Paul Westerberg with a hangover for God's sake. But still I downloaded it anyway and proceeded to hate it. I got maybe 3 songs in and killed it, never to look back.
Then I heard "Worlds Apart" on public radio and said, "this sounds like Bruce, but not like any Bruce I've ever heard."
Then I started hearing "The Rising" on radio and decided it was a decent song.
Still, I did not think that the album could possibly be a solid whole. He hadn't delievered a solid whole album since "Tunnel Of Love," and that was 1988 or thereabouts.
But of course I had to get the "Live In Barcelona" DVD, and everything changed for me. For one thing, he is in INCREDIBLY good voice these days, able to sing in several different characters, all completely effectively. Bruce is in some sort of Barry Bonds-like state of getting better as he gets older as a singer.
The DVD blew me away, and the songs from "The Rising" stood up as complete equals with his catalog of hits and standards. He relies heavily on "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" in Barcelona, and since this is my favorite Springsteen record, for me to say that "The Rising"s songs stood up to those - "Badlands", "Promised Land", "Prove It All Night", the title track - well, that's as high as my praise goes.
I have better sound on my PC these days, so I gave the MP3 another listen. It sounded much better except for one thing: Bruce's singing is tentative, especially early on. Where he lets go furiously in performance, he is almost reverentially cautious on the record. Which only goes to prove that Bruce and the E Street Band are basically a single entity, inspiring each other to - well, to "Rise Up." I ended up wondering how much better the record would be if they recorded it now. Or how much better a record of the best live cuts of these songs would be.
So my advice - if you haven't bought the CD yet, re-direct your money and buy the DVD instead. I don't care who you are, when you were born or HOW FAR AWAY FROM NEW JERSEY: You will fall in love with Bruce, all of his bandmates and his incredible abilities as songwriter, arranger, bandleader and performer, once you have sat through this concert.
And that my $.02.