Before Bruce Springsteen starts singing "This Land Is Your Land" again, perhaps the self-righteous asshole should figure out who owns what land and who is paying taxes on it.
What the fuck happened to this guy?
Glad you asked because Bruce Springsteen's tax loopholes non-payment on 200 acres of farmland did not occur in a vacuum, since 2001 Springsteen has become tone deaf politically and from bad to worse musically, while remaining our greatest living rock and roll live performer.
Follow me here:
1. After two fantastic though, and note this, love selling solo albums, 9-11 occurred and he mistook this as a mandate to bring back the E Street band in a series of missteps.
2. His worst album (by far) to date, The Rising, was the result. It did OK, but it was truly a dog with fleas. Nothing gelled and song after song edge between creepiness and self-satisfaction. In the smoke and body parts of 9-11, there is that in it that refused to get its hands too dirty. Instead, it worked as weird out metaphors of ascension and rebirth. Compare Springsteen's disaster restructured into Bruce's blue collar image (he was much more interested in the Firemen then the civilians) with John Adam's On The Transmigration of Souls. Adam's is in the power of tragedy and is doing his own transmogrification. Those of us who lived through that day can testify, Adams is correct: he captures the feelings, and for Springsteen it is all fires and rises up and getting parties started.
3. in 2000, Bruce went on a greatest hits tour and it was excellent. I saw him 5 times. In 2002, the E Street Band were at Shea Stadium and I have never seen them worse. Bruce tried to sell us on "Mary's Place" as a replacement for "10th Avenue Freezeout' and he couldn't. Every sludgy polemic brought us deeper the mire, it was a long winded, bloated show.
4. He subsequently steadied his live show but his albums, solo and with the E Street band, continued to be a miss and miss occasion with even the best of them "The Ghost Of Tom Joad", needing Tom Morello to give it life.
5. In 2004, Bruce cashed in his credibility and rode the lot on John Kerry… John Kerry? The bloke who is married to the Heinz Ketchup? That's the future of the US. The minute Bruce got into partisan politics, he lost his ability to lead from the outside. I thought he always understood that at the heart of Americanism is individuality… he certainly claimed to, but he gave up his position as Mr. Smith to become Mr. Kerry. Once your interest moves from the person to the system, you are finished as the voice of your generation, and you are just another political stoolie.
6. So the crap albums kept on coming, culminating in a Rolling Stone 5 star review for Springsteen's worst album ever, 2010's execrable Working On A Dream.
7. Followed by two mindboggling great performances at MSG -the Rock And roll Hall Of fame anniversary gig, followed by the greatest time I've ever seen Bruce and one of the greatest concerts, his The Wild, the Innocent, And The E Street Shuffle concert. To my mind, it removed any doubt that Springsteen was in James brown class as a live performer. Nobody alive is better.
8. But who is this billionaire, and why did he accept tax subsidies on his farmlands while castigating Governor Christie for screwing the working poor? Where is his justification? Where is his mea culpa?
I called Springsteen a moral leper for this and that's what he is.
He has been going through a long, smirky, self-satisfied road throughout the 21st century, and it is about time Famer Bruce began figuring out exactly what he is and how he plans to prove it.