Listening to the Broadway record, I mostly thought about how I was glad that Dylan hasn’t (and likely won’t) diminished his magic by explaining it away. I thought a lot of Bruce’s spiel was corny and rote and unfortunately what I hate knowing about rock and roll though I occasionally like feeling it. Small stakes baloney about getting out from under your immediate adolescent circumstances. Yawn.
I feel Bruce is best understood as a kind of American Morrissey. An interpreter of mid-century glamor and outre masculinity. A romantic with a social realist’s obsessions. A distant, sensitive person’s mask fashioned into what he thinks an outgoing, big-hearted rough-and-tumble person should be.
Also, “The Rising” is a garbage song and Bruce is a lousy consoler. His best work features a lot of pointing out how shitty and doomed things are so we better suck it up or run away or explode in a paroxysm of pointless violence. Don’t give me fake Catholic bullshit and trout twitching on the end of the line, Boss. RAISE THE BLACK FLAG AND START DRAWING BLOOD. Otherwise you just sound like my dad.
