I love it when Bruce Springsteen releases new material, because it is the opportunity of a lifetime to read Rolling Stone at its very worse. This is when it gets so bad it is actually funny.
The magazine contorts itself to overpraise the rocker so well past his prime he has apparently forgotten how to write a song. And RS gets its biggest gun, David Fricke, to overstate the case for them.
Whatever happened to Fricke-the Nick Kent lookalike who used to be a fave writer of mine,has gone from weakness to weakness and here he is on Springsteen's unbelievably average "We Take care Of Our Own" -a dumbass song I thought was OK until I read Fricke's abysmal review and I will now downgrade from a B+ to a B-.
Why? Because it inspired dribble like this: "A precise, devastating assessment of a nation exhausted by economic straits and locked in an uncivil war of values stoked by selfish Washington gridlock." Here, let me quote this precise, devastating assessment for you:
"We take care of our own
We take care of our own
Wherever this flag's flown
We take care of our own
We take care of our own
We take care of our own
Wherever this flag's flown
We take care of our own"
I don't think Bruce thinks he is a hypocrite, he is one but he is too stupid to know it. He actually believes this nonsense has meaning (and that he has a dog in the race), while it actually has no meaning, no position, no point of view, no villain. It is blather because it can't hit its target when the President is black. Fricke is a hypocrite. What the fuck is he talking about? "The broken promises actually come with contagious deja vú, a darkened twist on familiar pleasure. Springsteen's urgent growl is set in a streamlined pop of shadowy synth-like countermelody and throaty-jangle guitar, like the mid-Eighties lift of "Dancing in the Dark" hungover with disappointment." Needless to add, it doesn't do anything remotely close to that. It is a monotomous piece of self-important mental masturbation dressed up as political opinion. Fricke knows it, I know, everybody surrounding Bruce knows it but nobody dare tell him.
Fricke's 4 star review is hysterical. It is such rubbish. How much is he paid to lie through his back teeth about Bruce Springsteen?