Bruce Springsteen: an irrelevant soul album where he poses like a well-off Joe Cocker

We live in a time in which the day before yesterday is already a concept that is too far away.

Everything is immediate and needs to be consumed without the possibility of rest.

Every week, every day, you are worth what you are able to consume.

And, if you are a creator, your value is increasingly measured by novelty.

You value, as a creator, the new thing that you are able to put in the coal machine.

Culture as a commodity for fast consumption, short shot, which lacks transgressive, alternative, independent and risky ambition.

It even lacks an author's seal in the face of cultural and social standardization.

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Springsteen puts the turbo

Bruce Springsteen, the well-known American musician and one of the most respected voices in international rock, has always been one of the great authors of popular music.

Now, with his new album,

(Sony), an album of soul versions from the sixties and seventies, he has lost his role as author in a work to pay homage to African-American music that captivated him since he was a teenager, when he was a kid who breathed based on songs 24 hours a day.

Like any typical tribute, Springsteen gives

to the songs of other composers, something that has not been seen since that tribute to Pete Seeger's folk work on the album

(2006).

Thus, this work is something of an anomaly in the career of the author of

.

The anomaly shouldn't be a problem, but in this case it is.

The battle-hardened folk costume of

fit better into the musical mold of Springsteen, who knew how to give a different air, halfway between vindication and celebration, to a traditional songbook in American memory.

Springsteen, elevated and liking himself to unsuspected limits in the role of the voice of the average American citizen, took that battle and road folk to a curious and grateful territory, where he and a large and very interesting band formed for the occasion very well blended.

Today, the musician from New Jersey seeks the same horizon with soul, that genre of black pride and overflowing passions, but he is left without achieving it.

Like

and on many other occasions throughout his life, he again dispenses with The E Street Band, his indefatigable company group and with whom he always reached the highest levels.

For this new album, he surrounds himself with The E Street Horns and a string of backing vocalists.

A decision like any other and, surely, successful.

Only there is a big drawback: the result says little.

sins flat out.

Cover of the album 'Only the Strong Survive'.

Springsteen adjusts so much to the mold of the songs he covers that he borders on insignificance.

Something similar to what happened to him in

(2019) happens to him, when the exercise in style at the time was Californian country.

He offers an overly topical look.

It is no longer that he tore his clothes or set a garden on fire, which he could have done, but that it did not really work out for him to mold his own sound or, if it came out with that music so loved by him, it was difficult to marvel.

He lacked exciting character, full of his own identity signs, combining the traditional legacy with his vibrant personal experience.

it was just a well-intentioned showcase country record, for all audiences, like those concerts that are designed to satisfy the brother-in-law and mother-in-law who accompany you to see Bruce for the first time.

And yet, then, when coming across as a lover of cowboy America was all that mattered, he wrote his lyrics, took care of the final packaging, and showed a certain recognizable purpose on

.

Now, with

not even that.

He neither composes nor seems to care about the smell of

compilation and commercial gallery that the album gives off.

Therefore, it is neither

nor

It's something quite minor, something quite irrelevant.

It is worrying that an artist of his quality, his talent and his impact has once again fallen into a certain obsession with adjusting to the perverse logic of our times.

If, as was pointed out at the beginning, the day before yesterday is already a concept that is too far away, Springsteen is as if he accepted it, even renounced yesterday.

Because he had yesterday: he had released an album like

with The E Street Band at the end of 2020.

A work with verve, pride and redemption in which he and his band had found a renewed sound of rock with a classic matrix and the taste of a lifelong joint, the one in which nights are dreamed of epic, even if they really hurt.

Due to the pandemic,

could not be defended live when it was published and it was a bummer.

The question, then and now, is: so what?

That album could wait until the tour that arrives in 2023. It was an album that smelled like the last winning card and that linked with part of a still-living spirit of toast to the old days.

In this way, articulating a tour under the soul of that letter and everything that had survived was an option that seemed magnificent.

But not.

To know what tour is coming now.

Everything indicates that, especially in Europe, it will once again be another social event surrounded by entertainment, without vertigo.

It worries that, after that great album that was

, now comes with this other one, with

produced by Ron Aniello.

It didn't seem necessary, and yet for its creator it is.

It goes without saying that also for his record company.

The need to take out this work will surely respond to a personal interest and should not be given more thought.

Okay.

However, as a personal interest —the only one that should matter to an artist— he shows an excessive concern for offering new material, even if he has little to contribute.

It shows a concern for being for being, for appearing for appearing and for continuing to feed a public figure who does not know how to stop the projection of an image that always seeks to enlarge more and more.

And even more so if we look at his latest movements: his book and his radio programs with the former president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Until here it would be the personal reason,

although one cannot help but remember the day that Wikileaks disclosed many years ago that Springsteen had an absolutely insane contract with Sony for record obligations until he was almost 80 years old and in which his future did not give him the option of abandoning or relaxing.

It was like working in the coal cellar: putting coal periodically so that the capitalist machine, staged in rock music, would not stop working.

With regard to the interior of the album, the best thing about

is that rescue that Springsteen makes of unknown artists for the general public through his beautiful songs, as well as being accompanied in two compositions by the wonderful Sam Moore.

Because Springsteen, aside from being a great musician, is a great listener.

Salvaged artists like Jerry Butler, Commodores, Four Tops, Walker Brothers, William Bell and Jimmy Ruffin.

Precisely, in his version of the glorious

we find some of the evils of this album: Springsteen tries to blend in with the version.

He doesn't have a bad song left, no, but nothing remarkable either.

It is a kind of carbon copy in which what changes is the high-pitched voice of the afflicted and extraordinary Ruffin for that of Springsteen, which ends up being too prominent to show off, somewhat faked.

It happens on the whole disk.

It's like Springsteen is posturing with soul.

There's no other way to hear it unless you worry about listening to the originals in the voices of all those black artists.

Bruce is too worried about excelling as a singer on another record than his own.

Bruce Springsteen introduces Jimmy Iovine at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on November 5 in Los Angeles. Chris Pizzello (Invision)

Another definitive example is the latest version:

known in the voice of Diana Ross.

Springsteen has given it the same sugary vibe as Diana Ross and The Supremes, but it's not the same.

Oh, how is it going to be... That finesse in singing cannot be bought or imitated.

You have it and that's it.

The worst thing is not that Bruce is measured with Diana Ross by trying to sound like her.

No. The worst thing is that he measures himself against himself.

On the fabulous outtake album

Darkness on the Edge of Town

recording sessions ,

showed us a discarded song with the same title as this Supremes theme.

It's obvious from Bruce's lyrics that there was a lot of inspiration in the Motown girl band's songwriting.

There, then, Springsteen, instead of playing the parlor copy, made an effort to offer a very personal vision of white soul crossed by rock, a

melancholy beating with a heart of wounded pride.

Anyway, nothing to do with the current version.

That way of attacking music, back in 1977-78, even attacking it to let fly its tributes to other genres, was very different from today, from this easy record that is now being published.

Because

It's the record a struggling New Jersey singer would make when all his cartridges have been burned.

Or, to see it with more media impact and guaranteed fame, the other new album that Joe Cocker would have recorded, well off in a suit and tie, with the important caveat that Cocker was much better at this genre.

Either of the two options leads to the same thing: it is an album that will be forgotten.

We live in strange times and the day before yesterday is already a concept that is too far away.

Springsteen releases this new album as if it were one of those Netflix series or another platform that it seems that everyone talks about in a handful of days and a week is already in the drawer of oblivion, without even reaching the end of the first season.

A fast consumption and without any notable artistic purpose.

And it's a real shame because Springsteen's yesterday with the E Street Band burning the last cartridge of his will always be more important than the current logic of the times.

Or because the best rock and roll memory should never be thrown into the coal machine like one more piece.

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