So I'm Listening to 'Devils & Dust' by Bruce Springsteen...

'Two hundred dollars straight in, two-fifty up the ass,' she smiled and said

[...]

She slipped me out of her mouth, / 'You're ready,' she said / She took off her bra and painties / wet her finger / slipped it inside her / and crawled over me on the bed

(heheheheh, I said "sticker")

Illegally download "All I'm Thinking About."

xpost

assuming he sings them, as opposed to reciting them, it's kind of hard to judge just by looking at the lyrics on your computer screen. i mean, you could be right, i haven't heard the song. but written lyrics are no way to judge any music.

i know what she means by "bruce in bruceface" though. he sort of shuffles around cliches familiar from his old work but without enough narrative spark to enliven them.

i'm curious to hear this but i don't expect it to be much better than "pretty good," honestly.

ha! but if audioslave do indeed suck the lyrical suck -- and i've never taken the time to investigate -- it's because of the way the lyrics sound, not the way they look. i'm sure a lot of your favorite bands have embarrassing lyrics on paper, but you don't worry about it because that's not the way you hear them. it's certainly true of a lot of my own faves.

I'm no Amy-hater (I was a very bitter boy in 2003 - ignore threads from then) but I do take offense at the implication that loving Bruce Springsteen more than your parents signifies adulthood. But people from Philly/Jersey are weird about this guy.

my read of it is that rocking-the-pain-away is itself comforting, thus calculated, and that's why it works. maybe she didn't want to add "because it's comforting" to the end of the sentence because along w/"rock-the-pain-away" she didn't want to repeat herself. but I haven't asked or anything.

Haha, except that she comes off looking especially ridiculous in this one considering she's been a fan for only two years.

Jack Bruce …”In hindsight there was some truth in it but it really hurt at the time.”

At least when Tim Buckley wrote songs like this there was a really hilarious bite to the song. ("Trying a little trick honey/Ah, that you never used before/I wanna be your victim/Your sweet little victim of love/Come on and beat me, whip me, spank me/
Mama, make it right again")

I don't have a problem with any of those things. I couldn't care less if that article was written by her or by a fat balding black Jewish gay male. Nobody on this thread who has criticised the review has even said anything about Amy, other than to compare the Bruce review with the Sonic Youth one (which is a comparison that makes itself and needs no elaboration). Nonetheless, the people who are rushing to defend her are looking past the legitimate criticisms of the piece and are rushing to make pithy accusations of ageism, sexism, or whatever.

The problem with her "passion" is that it feels forced. I can't buy into her sentiment because she disliked Bruce's music for her entire life, then bought into his music along with some sort of college liberal "we're gonna change the world" dreamweaving, and then decided that his new album is crap. Sorry, but I'm not feeling the crushing letdown that she obviously wants us to empathise with. That's her fault as a writer and a fairweather Bruce fan, not as a 20-something woman.

ok never mind i shouldn't even have finished your post. forget it.

Oh, okay then; I would think Blenderification might be equated with "selling out," by maybe not. Anyway, sometimes I think the music section has become more boring too. But then I remember boring pieces that I ran five years ago, or that my predecessors ran for years, and I think of great new writers who have come into the section in the past couple years, and I don't feel so bad. I don't believe I publish more first-person stuff (which I've always liked, though in general my bosses haven't been crazy about it) or less "criticism and ideas" (which I've also always liked) now than I ever have, and I think it's foolish to pretend one negates the other anyway. But yeah, nobody is going to be a fan of every writer; what else is new? Tastes differ. I guess it just bugs me that the Voice music writers who people dismiss as hacks on this board almost always tend to be of Amy Phillips's gender. (She's not alone, but I don't feel like bringing other names into this.) At any rate, I actually think that one's response to the Voice music section these days might depend a lot on whether one sees it on line or in print, which might somewhat sway what exactly one considers the "music section" (i.e., the "blurb and blog" stuff, which isn't part of the three and half pages plus occasional feature I concern myself with week in/week out--honestly, I don't have time to think about b&b much beyond offering stray advice here and there to website folks; it's not like it *replaced* anything in my mind, the rest of the section is still there {and greg tate is writing way more reviews now than he has in years, by the way}, but yeah, if blurbs and blogs are what you're going to focus on, you're going to believe the section has changed more than I tend to believe the same.)

Anyway, to be honest (and as any sane person who's ever had a job might understand), I'm not crazy about talking about my job on line {which is why I avoided the thread you linked to above}; you also really have no idea how vocal a stance I may have taken here as far as the directions the Voice has taken re word-count, coverage of Saddle Creek bands, the website, etc. Let's just say I've dealt with the stuff every day for years, okay? Hard to believe in my mind that somebody could have dealt with it better, but you're welcome to think so if you want. And I also wish people who believe they can write better than the writers I publish should put their money where their mouth is and pitch me an idea once in a while. If it would make the section better, I'd welcome it. (And when it happens, which is actually fairly often, I do.) But that probably just makes me selfish.

Didn't Simon Reynolds catch a bad one recently (and for writing an article with dodgy classist/rockist inferrences) ("don't be fooled by her brown skin"?)?

I don't hate any of the writers in the Voice at all (and indeed my irritation with the whole Springsteen/Democrat/benefit love feast aspect above has jack to do with Phillips, it's because I am a freakin' cynic and would likely -- I resist saying definitely -- have reacted that way at nineteen as much as I do now). I'm just hesitant to pitch more to you, Chuck, in that I either find myself having little to say about things that are more immediately attention getting among many other people/writers/whatever or that what I do find interesting seems not to have much in the way of a potential niche. This is probably more building phantoms in my head with stereotypes of what *is* covered, but if a lot of the newer albums I'm listening to tend to consist of modern obscurodrone (without direct connections to, I dunno, Animal Collective or something), reissues of postpunk stuffage or random mp3s I've grabbed from the ether, then I tend to think, "I dunno, would Chuck et al even *care*?" Which is gracelessly self-defeating, I realize, but still. (I mean, personally I'd love to write on the reissues of the first couple of Gene Loves Jezebel albums somewhere because not only do I think they're hysterically over the top craziness but because they inadvertantly predated a lot of screamo/flail bizarreness. I'd LOVE to write about the Cure reissues but I already know how you feel about the Cure! Etc.)

haha you're not like me cuz I was a toddler then!

Aw. But it moves so well.

to this I say AMEN:

"Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He's a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You're either in or you're out. This has solidified Bruce's standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it's killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers—they're not saying Bruuuce, they're booing—Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than "the new Dylan," as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we've reached a strange juncture. About America's last rock star, it's either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain."

http://www.newyorker.com/goingson/recordings/articles/050509gore_GOAT_recordings

"Popular music is good at using speed, physical sensation, and unmediated language to articulate the experience of life. Short stories are good at using carefully edited prose to slowly reveal the universal truths in everyday accidents. Making the former do the latter’s job sounds like a bad idea. That’s because it is a bad idea, though nobody told Bruce Springsteen."

adj : without the interposition of other agencies or conditions; "unmediated relations between God and man"

does Desmond Child qualify as an "agency"?

By Sasha's definition of pop's strong suits - "speed, physical sensation, and unmediated language" - it seems that the ultimate pop music would be something like Pig Destroyer: Speed? Check. Physical sensation? If you turn it up loud enough... Unmediated language? Well most of the time you can't even tell what the guy is screaming, so that is pretty unmediated.

This paragraph is a bit better.

Listening to The Ghost of Tom Joad again. It seems quite good, no problems, nothing dislikeable. It seems very close to Devils & Dust - 10 years apart, but so similar lyrically and structurally I feel. But the other similarity: the way he sings. He puts on this mannered (it it supposedly southern?) voice, on Tom Joad especially and in parts of Devils & Dust, which makes the words nigh incomprehensible!

Has anyone else had this problem with this late-Boss vocal strategy?

I've just realized that most of this thread is not about the Boss, but obscure Americans arguing what they did or didn't say about other obscure Americans.

Yes, I was excited to get Tom Joad when I read that it would be an acoustic record, but I've never gotten over the vocal affectation. I enjoyed Devils and Dust more. I think I'll revisit these songs; maybe after all the years I'll enjoy the voice more.