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"FacebookPinterest\n\n To understand the myths, you need to go to the place of worship. For anyone concerned with Bruce Springsteen, that place is the live show. A few weeks ago, Springsteen and the E Street Band closed out the first leg of their tour supporting the new Wrecking Ball at Newark&amp;#39;s Prudential Center. Somehow, it&amp;#39;s the first time he&amp;#39;s ever played the city, but it&amp;#39;s hardly a crowd of newcomers. It&amp;#39;s the rabid fanbase Bruce has become known for, the sort of crowd where when someone says, &amp;quot;This is my fourth show,&amp;quot; they mean this leg. It&amp;#39;s the kind of devotion to things of legend. And Bruce Springsteen is a thing of legend.\n\n Wrecking Ball is Bruce&amp;#39;s first since the recession, its premise the fact that things don&amp;#39;t really feel all that different now than they did in the heart of it. This isn&amp;#39;t unfamiliar territory for Springsteen, who&amp;#39;s long been known for his empathy with the struggles of common people and his effort to give them a voice. But there&amp;#39;s something different about Wrecking Ball, a tension between myth and realism, and not a populist myth written onto Springsteen like in the past, but a set of fantasies that are coming from him. \n\n Previously, it was easy to divide Springsteen&amp;#39;s career into two neatly defined eras: romantic and realist. There&amp;#39;s the Springsteen of the early and mid 1970s, the romantic of The Wild, the Innocent, the E Street Shuffle and Born to Run, who trafficked in 1950s fables of a mythologized New Jersey full of young rebels in leather jackets escaping down endless highways. 1978&amp;#39;s Darkness on the Edge of Town is where the shift began. Suddenly the dreamer, the bohemian-bearded and knit-capped Bruce on the cover of The Wild, the Innocent, the E Street Shuffle was supplanted by Bruce the Realist, the one staring back at you from the cover of Darkness with just a leather jacket, white T-shirt, and a challenge. The Bruce that wrote hard-hitting stories of real people with real troubles in &amp;quot;Reason to Believe&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Downbound Train.&amp;quot;\n\n This is the Springsteen most people most readily think of, as realism and populist empathy came to dominate his output in the &amp;#39;80s, musically and lyrically. Out with the multi-part, orchestrated songs of E Street Shuffle or Born to Run. In with rock &amp;#39;n&amp;#39; roll, pissed off and charging on &amp;quot;Badlands&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Adam Raised a Cain,&amp;quot; or pounding through three-chord progressions all over The River and Born in the U.S.A. \n\n Wrecking Ball is the album that completely disrupts the divide of his career. It professes to be his next big realist statement, with Springsteen himself tying it back to the 1982&amp;#39;s sparse Nebraska. And, yeah, Wrecking Ball engages with all of the post-recession frustrations people would expect Bruce to explore\u2014thematically. But this isn&amp;#39;t Nebraska , an album so haunting and simple in its stripped-back acoustic approach that its American Dream ghost stories practically bleed through the empty spaces in the instrumentation. The weird thing about Wrecking Ball has to do with context, that it arrives at a moment where the realist Springsteen would seem to have the most work to do, when his fans might expect the grittiness of Nebraska or Darkness, or, hell, even Devils and Dust, in order to honestly reflect the social conditions of the times. Instead, Wrecking Ball claims to be the hard-hitting, socially conscious Springsteen\u2014which it is, lyrically\u2014while it musically returns to romanticism. In a sense.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n It becomes clear at Newark that there are actually two competing narratives in the recent show: Wrecking Ball, and the story of the E Street Band itself. The nature of Wrecking Ball begs for Springsteen to return to the moments of folk tradition and protest music in his back catalogue. It&amp;#39;s also the first E Street tour without Clarence Clemons\u2014the band&amp;#39;s longtime sax player, main onstage foil for Springsteen, and his close friend. In response to the Big Man&amp;#39;s death last year, Bruce spends a lot of the show steeped in the band&amp;#39;s history. An E Street band show has always been something otherworldly. In the early &amp;#39;80s, Springsteen&amp;#39;s realist zenith, they were playing their legendary four, even five hour sets. People talk about the mythic proportions of those marathon shows; the difference now is the mythology is written onto the show by Springsteen himself, as he and the band work within the new narratives of Wrecking Ball&amp;#39;s populism and the E Street stories.\n\n The Wrecking Ball story of protest and falling on hard times is a major element. The band comes charging out, with &amp;quot;We Take Care of Our Own,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Wrecking Ball,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Death to My Hometown&amp;quot; all appearing in the first thirty minutes or so. The somber &amp;quot;Jack of All Trades&amp;quot; is a thematic pivot point. At the Newark show, Springsteen introduced it lamenting how &amp;quot;folks lost homes, jobs, [and were] preyed on in an un-American way.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Rocky Ground,&amp;quot; another one pretty explicitly dealing with the shakiness of our economy, almost always opens the encore.\n\n For all the sobriety in the lyrics and tone of those songs, there are elements at play within the music that undercut the realism. The romanticism of Wrecking Ball is different than that of The Wild, the Innocent, the E Street Shuffle or Born to Run. Those albums had sprawling epics that created total, other worlds of fantasy and escapism through both the lyrics and music. Wrecking Ball has a romanticism rooted in its collection of disparate historical musical strains.\n\n Many of the songs on Wrecking Ball started out as just Springsteen and an acoustic guitar. You can still hear that. Songs like &amp;quot;Easy Money&amp;quot; and the title track feel like protest songs reprogrammed for the 21st century, made sleek and muscular. But they still echo some old traditional structure, if not as blatantly as some of the other new tracks. The chain-gang ramshackle of &amp;quot;Shackled and Drawn&amp;quot; has a vaguely Irish folk fury to its hatred of the bankers up on the hill, but it&amp;#39;s not to be outdone by the much-more-explicitly Irish folk (and punk) influenced &amp;quot;Death to My Hometown&amp;quot; (complete with penny whistle). Both feature prominently in the set, the former disappearing for a few shows only to return as a live highlight from the album.\n\n Then there&amp;#39;s the country-western lope of &amp;quot;We Are Alive,&amp;quot; which, as many have noticed, cribs the horn riff from Johnny Cash&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Ring of Fire.&amp;quot; A concluding track on the album, the song came late in the Newark set, with Springsteen explaining his aim to end on a more uplifting note after an album (and show) that supposedly leaned on sober moments of realism. It spends a verse tracing an explicit history back through American struggles, calling up the ghosts of The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 alongside the ghosts of 1963 Birmingham.\n\n The man pretty much spells it out himself there. Wrecking Ball seeks to situate itself amongst some old, ingrained American narratives, those sorts of traditions that seem ancient, or like they never quite existed anyway. This is one of the weird parados with the album and the tour. Springsteen turns back to traditions of protest and folk structures, with each example being totally realist in its own context, but somehow helping craft a mythic fabric when Springsteen re-appropriates them for Wrecking Ball. It&amp;#39;s at this moment, where Bruce uses a mythic language of old American folk to get at contemporary issues, where the romantic and realist collide on the album.\n\n They&amp;#39;ve played with the setlists, bringing in a variety of old songs to blend with the Wrecking Ball narrative. More often than not, the old songs are telling in their ultimate return to the romantic, oddly drawing only lightly from Springsteen&amp;#39;s most clearly realist moments. Rather than situate Born in the U.S.A. track &amp;quot;Downbound Train&amp;quot; (played once this leg) alongside &amp;quot;Jack of All Trades,&amp;quot; Bruce opened with &amp;quot;No Surrender,&amp;quot; with the effusion &amp;quot;I want to sleep...with these romantic dreams in my head.&amp;quot; Sure, &amp;quot;The Promised Land&amp;quot; is a reliable crowd-pleaser, but it&amp;#39;s also a working man tale predicated on dream and myth, using Biblical imagery to sketch out some desire for escape. It&amp;#39;s played at pretty much every show instead of something like the enraged &amp;quot;Darkness on the Edge of Town.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Thunder Road,&amp;quot; previously a rare live performance, closed the main set of almost every show for the first half of the leg. That&amp;#39;s perhaps the Springsteen song of romantic escape, beginning with a harmonica peel of disenchantment and building to that outro steeped in Americana dreams of barreling down the highway, leaving your hometown behind.\n\n The point is that there&amp;#39;s an almost endless amount they could be doing with the set to make it the realist, hard-hitting narrative Springsteen seems to have wanted with Wrecking Ball. Instead, they lean on songs that, true, allude to the listlessness or existential paralysis that defines all of his most realist stuff, but still do so within a more mythic framework. They underscore the romantic structures underlying the new material. Ultimately, it seems the approach Springsteen&amp;#39;s angling for with the live show is one of hope and transcendence of a bleak reality, something more akin to the post-9/11 communalism of The Rising than to his past turns with working man woes.\n\n When introducing &amp;quot;We Are Alive,&amp;quot; Springsteen talked about situating Wrecking Ball in that overarching narrative:&amp;quot;Voices of the dead always inform your present, always inform your future.&amp;quot; That quote might as well describe the other narrative as well, the one of E Street lore, the one in remembrance of deceased members Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici. Songs of the E Street Band&amp;#39;s origins return in &amp;quot;The E Street Shuffle&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My City of Ruins,&amp;quot; gets recontextualized once more, from an elegy for a depressed Asbury Park to an elegy for 9/11 to an elegy for the fallen members of the E Street Band. It&amp;#39;s the first moment in the show where Springsteen acknowledges the loss, and the first chord struck in the E Street myth-making aspects of the show&amp;#39;s narrative.\n\n What follows varies from show to show. The rarity slot has often been filled by perennial fan favorites, with &amp;quot;Thundercrack,&amp;quot; the multi-part workout that often closed shows in the mid-&amp;#39;70s, making a frequent appearance. &amp;quot;Rosalita&amp;quot; has appeared far more consistently than one could&amp;#39;ve expected on recent tours. Alongside &amp;quot;Thunder Road,&amp;quot; these resurrected epics recall the ghosts of that E Street Band of the 1970&amp;#39;s, the one that looked like a band of urban outlaws.\n\n One constant is &amp;quot;Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out&amp;quot; in its new position at the end of the encore. The band drops out just as Springsteen delivers the line about Clarence acapella: &amp;quot;The move was made uptown and the Big Man joined the band.&amp;quot; The crowd cheers for an entire minute as a montage of Clarence images plays on the screens above, and then the band kicks back in. Acknowledging the passing of Clarence could&amp;#39;ve become funereal. Instead, it&amp;#39;s a celebratory catharsis ending the show nightly.\n\n Alternatively nostalgically or in tribute, the current E Street Band spends a good third of the show telling stories about the E Street Band. Compounded with the romantic-when-it-should-be-realist Wrecking Ball element of the show, the E Street mythologizing seems to bring the tour ever further into a narrative detachment from the realities it claims to present. You walk away stunned, because they are, as ever, an undeniably powerful live act. But you also walk away wondering\u2014has Bruce Springsteen taken the line from &amp;quot;No Surrender&amp;quot; to heart and disappeared into those romantic dreams in his head?\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Bruce Springsteen is one of those American pop cultural icons arguably considered a bard of America. This is inarguable if you split it generationally (Guthrie, Dylan, Springsteen) or, of course, if you&amp;#39;re from New Jersey. Springsteen is conceived of being, yes, legendary, but legendary in terms of his &amp;quot;realness&amp;quot;\u2014for the way he has seemingly been able to attract millions of fans through intimate portraits and hard-hitting poetics rather than empty platitudes. What does it mean when an artist like this, professing to be at one of his most engaged, realist peaks, reacts to our national condition by returning (fleeing?) to the language of dreams and myths, to the romantic structures of his early music?\n\n At this point in his career, Springsteen could easily just play into his own mythology. In fact, there&amp;#39;s a certain degree of inevitability about it when you&amp;#39;re carrying four decades of critical acclaim and iconic music. It doesn&amp;#39;t matter how relevant you currently are as a recording artist. You&amp;#39;re still going to be bogged down by your legacy. Everything you do will be read in the context of that narrative.\n\n The cynical take on Wrecking Ball and its accompanying tour\u2014the sheer intensity of Springsteen&amp;#39;s live show notwithstanding\u2014is that it symbolizes Springsteen losing his touch with his own career&amp;#39;s narrative, his music, and his audience. At best. At worst, it represents a surrender on Springsteen&amp;#39;s part, the moment where he chooses the wrong devices to deliver his social messages\u2014the ultimate fall for an artist built up on his realness and empathy. Though the vitality of the live show challenges any notion of Springsteen &amp;quot;giving up,&amp;quot; there remains a way of looking at Wrecking Ball as the moment where Springsteen has fully retreated into the fabric of his own mythology, walking off into some sunset he made legendary back on Born to Run.\n\n Or, it&amp;#39;s reassurance. The Boss&amp;#39;s return to the mythic isn&amp;#39;t a process of losing touch. In fact, it could be proof that he has actually maintained an uncanny sense of communication with the people and the times. In the context of 2012, myths might truly be the most immediately legible mode of conveying his messages. It&amp;#39;s the image-saturated digital era, the era where we more than ever conceive of and communicate about our world in fictions, in fantasies. And at the same time, it&amp;#39;s a year where, as the middle class continues to be threatened, people like to talk about the American Dream, long the central topic of both romantic and realist Springsteen, is most endangered. It&amp;#39;s an era in need of some myths. Tellingly, people sit down during the straightforward, direct &amp;quot;Jack of All Trades,&amp;quot; but stomp along to the fury of &amp;quot;Death to My Hometown.&amp;quot;\n\n Wrecking Ball suggests Springsteen is able to restructure and recreate himself at will in order to adapt to the times and his audience. He&amp;#39;s not retreating into the annals of American fables and folk structures in order to give up. He&amp;#39;s raising ghosts to understand our present, to paraphrase his in-show introduction to &amp;quot;We Are Alive.&amp;quot; The warring romantic and realist halves of Wrecking Ball reflect the duality of a country attracted to slogans of &amp;quot;HOPE&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN&amp;quot; while we struggle to figure out if we&amp;#39;re going to ever believe in anything again. That&amp;#39;s the core, unspoken tension of the album, the little strain of the zeitgeist that Springsteen, as always, has tapped into. Bruce is still here. He&amp;#39;s just learned to speak the language of the times once more, telling us the stories we need to hear about ourselves."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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