{"id":31780,"date":"2012-12-04T12:15:02","date_gmt":"2012-12-04T18:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=31780"},"modified":"2012-12-03T10:29:19","modified_gmt":"2012-12-03T16:29:19","slug":"bruce-springsteen-is-americas-greatest-conservative-songwriter-part-v-faith-strength-hope-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=31780","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Springsteen Is America’s Greatest Conservative Songwriter, Part V: The Cross Of My Calling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rock and roll has always been, ostensibly, about upsetting the existing order. \u00a0In the beginning, its very existence upended what passed for “order” in popular culture, at least to the extent of helping create a “youth culture” – something that’d never existed before, and really started in America. \u00a0As culture and the genre evolved through the sixties, pop music smeared itself in the “revolutionary” rhetoric of the rest fo the counterculture; in the seventies, the punk counter-counterculture (at least in the English art-school variety) flipped the hippies’ putative idealism on its head in an orgy of self-indulgent nihilism. \u00a0Post-punks – U2 would be the most famous and enduring of the bunch) in turn, flipped\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0on its head in an welter of often self-righteous activism.<\/p>\n

And against that backdrop, the music of Bruce Springsteen has always been refreshingly non-revolutionary. \u00a0In terms of musical style, Springsteen has always been something of an archivist. \u00a0Labeled one of many “New Bob Dylans” early in his career, he careened through Van Morrison-style white R&B on his first two albums (Greetings from Asbury Park\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle<\/em>), a high-octane update of the Four Seasons and Roy Orbison-via-Phil Spector (Born to Run<\/em>), a country-western record filtered through thirty years of rock and roll tradition (Darkness of the Edge of Town<\/em>), a salute to the spirit of Mitch Ryder via the Beatles (The River<\/em>), a Woody Guthrie update (Nebraska<\/em>)…<\/p>\n

…all of which at least stylistically reflect a principle that philosophical conservatives hold dear; an idea that can be\u00a0called the Principle of Prescription – <\/strong>the idea that\u00a0most of the great ideas on which our\u00a0society\u00a0was founded are good enough as<\/strong> is. \u00a0We may be able to improve on them, but it’s a high jump indeed.<\/p>\n

Of course, musical styles aren’t “the great ideas on which our society was founded”; they’re just music.<\/p>\n

And Springsteen certainly spent his time railing against some of society’s pre-existing notions; early in his career he was as angry a lapsed Catholic as ever strapped on a guitar in a studio. “Lost In The Flood”, from\u00a0Greetings…,\u00a0<\/em>(“Nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pleading immaculate conception”) )was just the tip of an anti-papal iceberg early in his career, a current of anti-church bile that sent a million tingles up the legs of would-be anti-establishment dilettantes like Dave Marsh and Robert Christgau – and utterly familiar to anyone who’s ever known an angry lapsed Catholic; the angry twenty-something railing against his Catholic upbringing has been for decades a clich\u00e9 in American pop culture.<\/p>\n

But then fast forward thirty years; in the aftermath of 9\/11, Springsteen released his last almost-universally-acclaimed-as-“great” record,\u00a0The Rising<\/em>, which is still one of America’s better 9\/11 memorials. \u00a0In the wake of three presidential elections where Springsteen worked nonstop for Democrats, its’ hard to remember that the biggest critics of The Rising\u00a0<\/em>were, in fact, liberals – because of the themes the album repeated over and over again [1]<\/p>\n

From “My City Of Ruins”, the first song Springsteen performed after the attacks?
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