You could run but you couldn’t hide. In the weeks surrounding the release of Bruce Springsteen’s new record, the man was everywhere. Interviews in Time, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times, a live concert from the Jersey shore, Letterman appearances on two consecutive nights, three installments of Nightline—yes, Nightline, because even though it’s not an arts and culture show, you have to understand that this was more than a record. This was about 9/11. This was about Healing A Nation. If the media blitz was all you had to go on, you could have been excused for wondering if that was the World Trade Center in Bruce’s pocket or he was just glad to see us.
The hype made it Springsteen’s fastest-selling record out of the box; it also made a remarkable piece of work a whole lot harder to hear. By the time most of us got around to listening, you already knew the question you were supposed to ask of it (the first great work of art about 9/11?) and the answer you were compelled to offer up (yes!). The way pundits and publicists everywhere (and, wittingly or not, Bruce himself) used 9/11 to flog the record grew offensive, not least because the very notion of “9/11 art” is a category that—for now, at any rate—has far less to do with art than with marketing.
Sure it’s a 9/11 record, if you want to be literal about it. The events of that day crystallized something for Springsteen. They got him off the couch and into the studio. There wouldn’t be a new Bruce Springsteen record now if it weren’t for September 11. But it’s easy to make too much of that, and practically everyone has. Here is Joyce Millman describing one song, “The Nothing Man,” in her Salon review: “A shell-shocked rescue worker can’t fit back into everyday life.”
I guess it does sound that way. Except for this: “The Nothing Man” is eight or nine years old. It first appeared on an album Springsteen completed but never released in 1994. There are two other songs on the record written prior to last fall’s attacks, and at least two more that sound to me like fairly radical rewrites of other little-known or unreleased Springsteen songs. The song genealogy isn’t important in itself. The point is that if you listen to all the shouting about 9/11 you’re going to miss the real heart of The Rising—a work that was a long time coming, and one that’s both of a piece with Springsteen’s past and an unsettling departure from it.
Some reviewers did get it, in their own fashion. Writing in the Village Voice, Keith Harris observed, “If there hadn’t been a September 11, Bruce Springsteen would have had to invent one.” (Is that supposed to be a bad thing?) Dave Marsh affirmed the same thing, minus the sneer. He wrote a single line about the record: “A middle-aged man considers death and chooses life.”
A lot has changed in Springsteen’s little corner of the universe since The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1995. In that time he turned 50, buried his father, and began the process of watching his children grow away from him and into the world. And, no doubt, wondered how he would ever make a Bruce Springsteen record again. Bruce records have always borne a special burden, of which no one is more conscious than Springsteen himself. They involved a pact with his audience forged a long time ago: It’s a mean world, but come along with me and I’ll get you to the other side. The promise was of redemption and a kind of transcendence. Kick around these badlands long enough, refusing cynicism and holding to your dreams, and you’ll reach a promised land.
That’s a young man’s creed and an older man’s cage. Unless you are exceptionally blessed, or a dolt, you cannot help noticing as you get older that there really is no promised land. Or rather, that life has innumerable means of snatching it from your grasp time and again. Of these none is more potent than mortality itself, and that’s the real subject of The Rising, a collection of 15 death-struck prayers to a God who’s not there and to a constellation of friends and loved ones who may or may not have enough left inside themselves to answer.
I mean, what’s all this shit about healing? I certainly see all the lyrical gestures in that direction, and there’s a measure of healing in the music itself, which sounds more vibrant than any Springsteen album since Born to Run. But to my ears this is the most harrowing record he’s ever made. (That title is supposed to belong to Nebraska, or alternately Tom Joad, but those records had their comforts, chief among them the satisfaction of hearing Springsteen bear stubborn witness to lives that, for official purposes, did not exist.) It’s telling that the most beautiful song on the record is also the most chilling. “Paradise” contraposes two characters from very different circumstances, each of whom is squandering a life on some vision of deliverance from earthly troubles. In the end the singer concludes it’s all a lie: “I search for the peace in your eyes/ They’re as empty as paradise.”
It’s a song I don’t believe Springsteen could have written until now. The Rising represents the first time he’s dared to be so explicit about breaking his old pact, revoking that assurance about reaching the promised land through might and mettle. You are never going to live there, he admits in “Paradise” and elsewhere. Sorry. But there’s something else you can have: moments of the promised land, of unexpected joy and grace, that are capable of sustaining you if you possess the humility, good faith, and good sense to treasure them when they come.
What makes the record harrowing is the fleeting, provisional nature of those connections. In the face of all the death and heartache on The Rising, the mere assurance that you will be able to rise above it from time to time can feel like cold comfort indeed, especially coming from an artist with as much faith in redemption as Springsteen once had. In that sense the record demands more of its listeners and promises less than the Bruce of old. There’s not much fun or much scent of the Hero’s Journey about it, just whatever strength there is to be derived from facing one’s own life, and the fact of loss, as unflinchingly as possible. That’s grown-ups for you. Always changing the rules.
Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake.
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