The first thing I did to completion upon arriving home this winter break was read Ain't No Sin To Be Glad You're Alive: The promise of Bruce Springsteen by Eric Alterman. As Jefferson Cowie of Dissent put it (better than I could), it is "part history, part rock criticism, part biography, part autobiography, part industry analysis, and part rumination on the state of the world..."
Raised in Jersey by a father from Jersey, I am by default a Springsteen fan. His voice woke me up from the basement on weekend mornings, the soundtrack to my dad's workout routine. It wasn't until this past fall, though, when I desperately needed, in the realest way yet, to escape the thoughts I was trapped with, ignore what threatened to sink me, that I was able to connect with the music of Bruce Springsteen the way fans, like my father, talk about. His music saved me; has been saving me. It turned out not to be an escape, but rather an honest conversation with someone in search of understanding.
Here is a passage from the book, on my favorite Springsteen album, Darkness on the Edge of Town:
"In returning to the studio with Jon Landau, Springsteen aimed to record an album whose heart, he said, lay 'somewhere between Born to Run's spiritual hopefulness and seventies cynicism.' If so, it was the latter that dominated, though the former never admitted defeat. The new record, Springsteen had resolved, 'couldn't be a warm, innocent album' like Born to Run because 'it wasn't that way for me anymore. That's why a lot of pain had to be there, because it's real, because it happens.' Embodying that pain were characters who felt 'weathered, old, but not beaten. The sense of daily struggle in each song greatly increased. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege.'
Once again Springsteen spent more than a year preparing the album. He wrote and recorded an enormous number of songs, but eventually rejected all those-- including the great ones-- that he felt compromised its bleak mood. There are no happy or even remotely frivolous songs on Darkness. Springsteen said he "didn't make room for certain things because I just couldn't understand how you could feel so good and so bad at the same time. And it was very confusing to me.'
The songs on Darkness are about the characters Born to Run left behind. The record turns on an axis of anger; each song focuses on the desire to break bonds that have become chains, while lamenting the losses such a break necessitates. It is about recognizing that anger and hatred and the turning away of one's heart are the logical responses to the forces that claw away at your soul, but not the only possible ones. It is an album about the power of individual faith, of perseverance, of heart (but not, quite clearly, of love), to find a place to make a stand, however small and unlikely to succeed. Two kinds of people live in Springsteen's Darkness universe: 'guys [who] just give up living / and start dying little by little, piece by piece,' and 'guys [who] come home from work and wash up / and go racin' in the street.'
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