America was staggering when Springsteen appeared. The president just resigned in disgrace, the U.S. had lost its first war. There was going to be no more oil in the ground. The days of cruising and big cars were supposed to be over. But Bruce Springsteen’s vision was bigger than a Honda, it was bigger than a Subaru. Bruce made you believe that dreams were still out there, but after loss and defeat, they had to be braver, not just bigger. He was singing ‘Now you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore,’ because it took guts to be romantic now. Knowing you could lose didn’t mean you still didn’t take the ride. In fact, it made taking the ride all the more important.
- Bono, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, 1999
“Rock ‘n’ roll is, today, too big for any center. It is so big, in fact, that no single event—be it Springsteen’s tour, Sid Vicious’s overdose or John Lennon’s first album in five years—can be much more than peripheral. Writing in August 1977, Lester Bangs may have gotten it right: “We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.”Thanks everybody for a great thread.
“Rock ‘n’ roll now has less an audience than a series of increasingly discrete audiences, and those various audiences ignore each other…. In one sense, this is salutary and inevitable. The lack of a center means the lack of a conventional definition of what rock ‘n’ roll is, and that fosters novelty. Rules about what can go into a performance and, ultimately, about how and what it can communicate are not only unenforced, they’re often invisible, both to performer and audience. That rock ‘n’ roll has persisted for so long, and spread to such diverse places, precludes its possession by any single generation or society—and this leads not only to fragmentation but to a vital, renewing clash of values. We agreed on Elvis, after all, because he was the founder, because he represented the thing itself; if we will never agree on anyone as we agreed on Elvis, it’s equally true that Americans have never agreed on anyone as they agreed on George Washington.
“But this state of affairs is also debilitating and dispiriting. The fact that the most adventurous music of the day seems to have taken up residence in the darker corners of the marketplace contradicts rock ‘n’ roll as aggressively popular culture that tears up boundaries of race, class, geography and (oh yes) music; the belief that the mass audience can be reached and changed has been the deepest source of the music’s magic and power.
“The music does not now provide much evidence that this belief is based on anything like reality, and on a day to day basis this means there is no longer common ground for good rock ‘n’ roll conversation.
“To find an analogy one must imagine that many Americans who care passionately about baseball would be unfamiliar with George Brett. Bands with very broad—or at least very big—audiences continue to exist, of course, but they don’t destroy boundaries; they disguise them, purveying music characterized principally by emotional vapidity and social vagueness….
“A concert by Bruce Springsteen offers many thrills, and one is that he performs as if none of the above is true.”
- Greil Marcus, “The Great Pretender,” 1980
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posted by R. Mutt at 4:13 AM on September 23, 2009