Despite the urge to dismiss Bruce Springsteen's newest album about September 11th with 'yuck', long-time Springsteen devotee Harry Browne finds that The Rising takes a hard look at a human tragedy to present some of the Boss's most original work
When the media reported last week that a veritable heavenly host of pop and rock stars will bring out songs to mark the anniversary of September 11th, the desired and appropriate public reaction was: Yuck. Similarly, when much of the pre-release hype about The Rising suggested that Bruce Springsteen had made an entire album based on September 11th, the reaction should have been: Double Yuck.
Even the upmarket, New York Times version of the hype, along the lines of "tales of 9/11 heroism and sacrifice inspire Boss to find his true voice", should have prompted widespread gagging. Could anything possibly trivialise these horrendous events more than their transformation into lyrical fodder for an ageing rocker who's getting bored with his organic farm and wants to hit the comeback trail?
However, Bruce Springsteen at 52 is such a revered rock senior citizen that the retching never came. Moreover, there is no mistaking, and apparently no questioning, his 30-year relationship as chronicler and troubadour to the US working class - a class that for many years only received media acknowledgment in discussions of Springsteen's work, but has now become venerated in the form of New York City firefighters. (Out-of-town tourists, I'm told, line up to be photographed outside firehouses: "Everybody smile and say 'Heroes'!") Now that the album is out, sans any mention of the H-word, the truth can be told. Thanks be to God, Bruce Springsteen looked hard at the human stories surrounding September 11th and did what any decent man should do: he flinched. The Rising is shot through with imagery and fragments that draw upon the public and publicised narrative of last September and since; but the songs are careful about how they intrude on the various protagonists, and The Rising features rock's best storyteller telling hardly any coherent stories, its most concrete lyricist singing some of his most elusive lyrics. And the man who 27 years ago sang "All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood" has gone very metaphysical indeed.
Yes, the title song (and first single) is written from the point of view of a dead World Trade Centre fireman. Yes, another likely single, Into the Fire, is from the perspectives of a dead firefighter's partner and, briefly, of someone rescued by him.
Yes, the arrangement of type on the CD cover, in which Springsteen's name, in white, is vaguely airplane-shaped and comes "through" a flame-coloured tower of letters, is in questionable taste.
However, the quality, and qualities, of Springsteen's art as displayed here transcend "tribute" and transform specific moments of pain into music of vitality, originality and even spirituality.
This is only surprising inasmuch as his great, almost operatic rock albums stopped flowing in (take your pick, depending on taste) 1980/1984/1987. The Ghost of Tom Joad, a very fine, largely acoustic CD full of Guthrie-tinted tragedies from America's forgotten frontiers, was released in 1995, but those of us who hoped for more of the same were frustrated, albeit pleasantly, when Springsteen turned to an interminable, though enjoyable, oldies tour with the E Street Band in 1999 and 2000.
Now here he is, back with those same E Street boys, but - with the help of new producer Brendan O'Brien - squeezing new sounds out of them and out of himself. At this early stage of listening, I certainly won't place The Rising beside The River (1980) or Born to Run (1975), albums of still-startling grandeur and thematic coherence; nor does it display Tom Joad's delicate mastery of the small scale. However, for musical and vocal "stretching", shattering of audience expectations of the "Springsteenesque", only 1992's inferior, soul-flavoured Human Touch comes anywhere close to The Rising (and not that close, really).
SEVERAL songs allude not to the arena-rock glory days of two decades ago, but to the harmonies and clappy rhythms of 1960s and early 1970s pop. Let's Be Friends (Skin to Skin) sounds for all the world like Sly and the Family Stone at their hippie-dippiest. That's really Bruce Springsteen singing, in a smiley sort of whisper: "I know we're different you and me / Got a different waaa-aay of walkin'/ The time has come to let the past be history / Yeah, if we could just start talkin'."
That's Bruce too with violinist Soozie Tyrell; with cellos all over the shop; with hurdy-gurdy, glockenspiel, orchestra bells; with the Nashville String Machine; with the Alliance Singers gospel choir; and, most impressively, with Asif Ali Khan and Group for the Middle-Eastern sound of Worlds Apart. Just occasionally, the orchestration gets a little overwhelming (e.g. the strings on the deceptively simple, plaintive You're Missing), and the arrangement on rocker Countin' on a Miracle makes even Born to Run sound thin. But mostly, the album's sound complements its strong songs - at least half of The Rising's 15 make powerful first-listening impacts. (My notebook is punctuated with "Wows".)
The two songs most directly "about" 9/11 are among the strongest. In The Rising, a firefighter faces the darkness, sees the spirits that have died with him, has a vision of "Mary" (the standard injunction to Bruce to get another woman's name, please, is lifted in light of the religious significance here) and then has a "dream of life", while the gospel-tinged chorus calls him "up for the rising". Into the Fire also sings the gospel of faith, hope and love, along with the blues of a loved-one's loss, as the singer goes falsetto: "I need you neeeear, but love and duty called you someplace higher". For Springsteen, lyrically, fire has always held special significance; songs such as Fire, I'm on Fire and, from this album, the sexy-menacing The Fuse are sharp examples of the standard "light my fire" metaphor for sexual excitement.
In his most daring "exploitation" of 9/11, Into the Fire allows the fire in the World Trade Centre to half-segue into the fire of a lover's bed, then back again: the fireman who died because he went "up the stairs, into the fire" is recalled intimately by his partner: "You gave your love to me and lay your young body down / Up the stairs, into the fire . . ." It is subtle, sensitive, carefully judged, deeply moving.
In Nothing Man, with a melody and singing performance that approach perfection, a survivor's discomfort with his vaunted "courage" sends him, perhaps guiltily, to the supreme sacrifice represented by the crucifix on his nightstand. Mary's Place (there she is again) is a mourning song that doubles as a party track, and is a theme statement to boot, with death transcended by collective joy in the here and now - or is it the Blessed Virgin's hereafter? The album, for all its religious imagery and choruses of faith, vibrates with doubt about the location of salvation. Paradise starts from the point of view of a suicide bomber waiting for his heavenly reward, but by the end of this song the operative simile is "as empty as paradise".
Given the title, it's hardly surprising that The Rising is coloured by a kind of liberation theology (but no mention of Pearse and Connolly). This is most obvious in the beautiful finale, My City of Ruins, with its pained portrait of urban poverty and insistent "Come on, rise up!" chorus. However, though first performed to open the TV tribute concert shortly after September 11th, this was written before that fateful date; the newer songs of loss and salvation don't have the same obvious social content, as though Springsteen, wary of exploiting 9/11, were also tentative about a State of the Nation record in the circumstances. Nonetheless, his lurking left politics, present from Factory (1978) and Point Blank (1979) to Nebraska (1982), My Hometown (1984), Spare Parts (1987), Tom Joad and American Skin (41 Shots) (2000), are here again in the careful, implied critique of post-9/11 militarism on The Rising.
'Better ask questions before you shoot / Deceit and betrayal's bitter fruit" he sings in Lonesome Day. This song, Empty Sky and Paradise raise questions about seeking redemption through violence, while Let's Be Friends and the eastern-flavoured Worlds Apart are pleas for peace, love and understanding. The latter song, in particular, recognises that there's nothing facile about the plea, that peace will be hard-won, at the margins of societies; it evokes this with lyrics reminiscent of the archetypal quest song, Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), and its crashing "I'll be on that hill" climax.
Worlds Apart ends: "I'll meet you on the ridge, between these worlds apart / We've got these moments now to live, then it's all just dust and dark / Let love give what it gives Let's let love give what it gives". The US will pay Bruce Springsteen due respect in the coming weeks, but will it listen?
• The Rising is on release from Columbia Records
