With Born to Run, Springsteen defined himself sonically (as an arena-rock anthem writer) and thematically (parked where the American dream meets everyday disappointment). But the incredible run of records he produced afterward developed, shifted, and sometimes upended that style, message, and personality. It is, of course, the duty of rock stars to never repeat themselves, to constantly be reinventing themselves. And listening to The Album Collection Vol. 1, it becomes clear that those shifts emerge from the different musical styles Springsteen pushed to the forefront of his sound on every new album. So while you can hear Springsteen and the E Street Band’s roots as an R&B and early rock and roll cover band on Born to Run’s “10th Avenue Freeze Out,” it’s not until The River and its short, three- or four-minute numbers like “I’m a Rocker” and “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)” that these influences stand front and center.
Still, as with Dylan, the range of styles that Springsteen draws upon becomes most explicit when you hear his live recordings, side projects, and unreleased material. We Shall Overcome, Springsteen’s 2006 album featuring covers of folk songs written or made famous by Pete Seeger, spotlights the kind of storytelling that Springsteen would use in songs like “The River.” Springsteen rented his first guitar when he was six after seeing Elvis perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, and that inspiration is most evident in Springsteen’s straight-from-the-hips croon on “Talk To Me,” a track recorded during the sessions for Darkness on the Edge of Townbut released only in 2010 on The Promise. Springsteen has also cited the electro-punk band Suicide as an influence, particularly on 1982’s Nebraska, but that’s more obvious from his statements and his live covers of Suicide’s song “Dream Baby Dream” than from Nebraskaitself, on which the high-pitched wailing that’s reminiscent of Suicide frontman Alan Vega is just one of many elements that help form the album’s unique sound.
When you listen to Springsteen’s albums together, you hear one voice, one man trying on new suits and fashions. But that’s a pleasing fabrication, a way to view the music in its most simplistic and heroic form. It’s not that anyone could have done what he or Elvis or Dylan did, not that their musical talents are superfluous. But what sets them apart equally is a desire and ability to become larger than life; to, as Tony Tost writes of Johnny Cash, a man of similar talents, clothe themselves “in myth, expelling a new self again and again through labor.”
*****
But there’s an important element that has gone unspoken here. If we’re talking about influences then we’re also talking about appropriation. If we’re talking about legends then we’re also talking about the fact that their edifices are built on others’ less successful careers. Springsteen, Dylan, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis: these are all white artists taking up styles originated by black musicians. It was, after all, Otis Blackwell, a black man, who wrote “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” and “Great Balls of Fire.”
Things are no different today. In his review of Taylor Swift’s 1989, New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote that “modern pop stars — white pop stars, that is — mainly get there by emulating black music.” And even though he makes the point to argue that Swift avoids that route, the larger truth is that in rock and pop, artists stand on the shoulders of their influences (or their songwriters) and the bigger they get, the more those influences get buried. It’s a peril engrained in both rock stardom and pop stardom insofar as both function according to the same logic of individual exceptionalism.
There are legends in blues and country as well, of course, but they tend to be subsumed under the larger mythology of their musical genre. Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson are prime examples. The former is alleged to have sold his soul to the devil to become a famous bluesman; the latter was apparently blinded at age five when his mother threw lye in his face, and died destitute while sleeping in the ruins of his burned down house. Ultimately it’s no matter whether those stories are true because the legends are not meant to elevate the artist but to emphasize their sacrifice to the music — the goal is to lift the music, as a powerful and engulfing and mystical force, rather than the man. It’s the difference between, on the one hand, genres defined by tradition, whether stylistically (acoustic, political folk) or even structurally (the 12-bar blues), and ones obsessed with repeatedly subverting what came before. To put it another way, the difference is between genres like folk where, as Greil Marcus writes, “any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular,” and ones like rock where the goal, the prize for innovation, is individual fame. A wide range of artists and styles laid the groundwork for Springsteen’s music, and while they’re never hidden on his albums they always bear the prominent imprimatur of their creator: The Boss.
Listening to Basement Tapes, you hear Dylan surrendering himself to whichever genre and style he’s indulging in at the time. There’s hardly a Dylan there; mostly there’s just the blues, country, the songs for which the word timeless fits because, even though they’re unknown, you have heard them before with only slightly different lyrics or with only a change in key. You can also hear all of Dylan — bluesman, folk singer, rock troubadour, country music lover (not his recently announced Frank Sinatra phase, though) — in the Basement Tapes. But that’s true as a consequence of what makes these recordings, particularly as presented in their entirety in Basement Tapes Complete, so remarkable: rather than the sound of an emerging musical aesthetic, they provide an aural record of that murky swamp of musical myth from which such legends arise.
Xu Xi (“Habit of a Foreign Sky” and others)
Lois-Ann Yamanaka (“Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater” and others)Chandor has something like a combination of “Macbeth,” a Theodore Dreiser novel and “The Godfather Part III” in mind with this story about Abel Morales (Isaac), a suave, fast-rising but fundamentally decent Latino entrepreneur who has carved out a niche in the heating-oil business through hard work and shrewd salesmanship, only to discover that in the crime-ridden New York of 1981, those are not enough. Abel’s trucks are being hijacked by an unknown enemy, and his drivers left brutalized or pistol-whipped on the weedy margins of the city’s bridges and highways. Meanwhile, Abel has overextended himself in an ambitious real estate deal with a Hasidic landowner, and soon discovers that no banks will touch him because he’s facing investigation and possible indictment on unclear charges. He’s likely to lose everything he’s worked for his entire life if he can’t figure out who’s trying to destroy him and make it stop.
As you learned if you saw “Margin Call,” Chandor has a Karl Marx-like understanding of how capitalism functions on a granular level, and renders even the most picayune details of Abel’s struggle to survive grimly fascinating. But perhaps the most important struggle is within Abel himself, a Corleone-in-reverse who continues to claim that he’d rather go broke than go dirty, despite the mounting evidence that it’s a little late for that sort of scruple. Abel’s ballsy, disillusioned wife, Anna, certainly has a few things to say to him about his innocent and deluded faith in the American dream. This is yet another convincing performance from Chastain, even if hideous spectacles and severely teased hair are not enough to make her look the part of a hard-boiled Italian-American girl who has risen from the bungalows of Brooklyn. It’s Anna who runs the finances and keeps the books; it’s Anna who realizes that Standard Heating Oil is at war with a competitor (if not several) who must be forced to reveal himself; and if the D.A.’s investigation finds actual crimes inside the company, it will have been Anna who committed them.
All this is rendered, as I said already, in memorable and exemplary fashion. And it’s all just a little more boring than it ought to be. If Isaac and Chastain both get awards nominations, they will deserve them, and the cast also features Albert Brooks as Abel’s lawyer, Alessandro Nivola as a suave and sinister Mafioso competitor and David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma”) as the half-apologetic D.A. hoping to bring Abel down. Chandor has accumulated most of the ingredients of a great film, and partly assembled them, without ever finding that third or fourth gear that would allow these characters and their story to transcend the grimy, claustrophobic, overdetermined universe that surrounds them. “A Most Violent Year” has both a car chase and a foot chase; it refers to classic crime films by Sidney Lumet or William Friedkin, but can’t duplicate their sense of momentum or urgency. But it also isn’t abstract or contemplative enough to break free of those expectations and function successfully as an art-house mood piece.
With Born to Run, Springsteen defined himself sonically (as an arena-rock anthem writer) and thematically (parked where the American dream meets everyday disappointment). But the incredible run of records he produced afterward developed, shifted, and sometimes upended that style, message, and personality. It is, of course, the duty of rock stars to never repeat themselves, to constantly be reinventing themselves. And listening to The Album Collection Vol. 1, it becomes clear that those shifts emerge from the different musical styles Springsteen pushed to the forefront of his sound on every new album. So while you can hear Springsteen and the E Street Band’s roots as an R&B and early rock and roll cover band on Born to Run’s “10th Avenue Freeze Out,” it’s not until The River and its short, three- or four-minute numbers like “I’m a Rocker” and “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)” that these influences stand front and center.
Still, as with Dylan, the range of styles that Springsteen draws upon becomes most explicit when you hear his live recordings, side projects, and unreleased material. We Shall Overcome, Springsteen’s 2006 album featuring covers of folk songs written or made famous by Pete Seeger, spotlights the kind of storytelling that Springsteen would use in songs like “The River.” Springsteen rented his first guitar when he was six after seeing Elvis perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, and that inspiration is most evident in Springsteen’s straight-from-the-hips croon on “Talk To Me,” a track recorded during the sessions for Darkness on the Edge of Townbut released only in 2010 on The Promise. Springsteen has also cited the electro-punk band Suicide as an influence, particularly on 1982’s Nebraska, but that’s more obvious from his statements and his live covers of Suicide’s song “Dream Baby Dream” than from Nebraskaitself, on which the high-pitched wailing that’s reminiscent of Suicide frontman Alan Vega is just one of many elements that help form the album’s unique sound.
When you listen to Springsteen’s albums together, you hear one voice, one man trying on new suits and fashions. But that’s a pleasing fabrication, a way to view the music in its most simplistic and heroic form. It’s not that anyone could have done what he or Elvis or Dylan did, not that their musical talents are superfluous. But what sets them apart equally is a desire and ability to become larger than life; to, as Tony Tost writes of Johnny Cash, a man of similar talents, clothe themselves “in myth, expelling a new self again and again through labor.”
*****
But there’s an important element that has gone unspoken here. If we’re talking about influences then we’re also talking about appropriation. If we’re talking about legends then we’re also talking about the fact that their edifices are built on others’ less successful careers. Springsteen, Dylan, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis: these are all white artists taking up styles originated by black musicians. It was, after all, Otis Blackwell, a black man, who wrote “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” and “Great Balls of Fire.”
Things are no different today. In his review of Taylor Swift’s 1989, New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote that “modern pop stars — white pop stars, that is — mainly get there by emulating black music.” And even though he makes the point to argue that Swift avoids that route, the larger truth is that in rock and pop, artists stand on the shoulders of their influences (or their songwriters) and the bigger they get, the more those influences get buried. It’s a peril engrained in both rock stardom and pop stardom insofar as both function according to the same logic of individual exceptionalism.
There are legends in blues and country as well, of course, but they tend to be subsumed under the larger mythology of their musical genre. Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson are prime examples. The former is alleged to have sold his soul to the devil to become a famous bluesman; the latter was apparently blinded at age five when his mother threw lye in his face, and died destitute while sleeping in the ruins of his burned down house. Ultimately it’s no matter whether those stories are true because the legends are not meant to elevate the artist but to emphasize their sacrifice to the music — the goal is to lift the music, as a powerful and engulfing and mystical force, rather than the man. It’s the difference between, on the one hand, genres defined by tradition, whether stylistically (acoustic, political folk) or even structurally (the 12-bar blues), and ones obsessed with repeatedly subverting what came before. To put it another way, the difference is between genres like folk where, as Greil Marcus writes, “any song belongs to all and none belongs to anyone in particular,” and ones like rock where the goal, the prize for innovation, is individual fame. A wide range of artists and styles laid the groundwork for Springsteen’s music, and while they’re never hidden on his albums they always bear the prominent imprimatur of their creator: The Boss.
Listening to Basement Tapes, you hear Dylan surrendering himself to whichever genre and style he’s indulging in at the time. There’s hardly a Dylan there; mostly there’s just the blues, country, the songs for which the word timeless fits because, even though they’re unknown, you have heard them before with only slightly different lyrics or with only a change in key. You can also hear all of Dylan — bluesman, folk singer, rock troubadour, country music lover (not his recently announced Frank Sinatra phase, though) — in the Basement Tapes. But that’s true as a consequence of what makes these recordings, particularly as presented in their entirety in Basement Tapes Complete, so remarkable: rather than the sound of an emerging musical aesthetic, they provide an aural record of that murky swamp of musical myth from which such legends arise.
Xu Xi (“Habit of a Foreign Sky” and others)
Lois-Ann Yamanaka (“Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater” and others)Chandor has something like a combination of “Macbeth,” a Theodore Dreiser novel and “The Godfather Part III” in mind with this story about Abel Morales (Isaac), a suave, fast-rising but fundamentally decent Latino entrepreneur who has carved out a niche in the heating-oil business through hard work and shrewd salesmanship, only to discover that in the crime-ridden New York of 1981, those are not enough. Abel’s trucks are being hijacked by an unknown enemy, and his drivers left brutalized or pistol-whipped on the weedy margins of the city’s bridges and highways. Meanwhile, Abel has overextended himself in an ambitious real estate deal with a Hasidic landowner, and soon discovers that no banks will touch him because he’s facing investigation and possible indictment on unclear charges. He’s likely to lose everything he’s worked for his entire life if he can’t figure out who’s trying to destroy him and make it stop.
As you learned if you saw “Margin Call,” Chandor has a Karl Marx-like understanding of how capitalism functions on a granular level, and renders even the most picayune details of Abel’s struggle to survive grimly fascinating. But perhaps the most important struggle is within Abel himself, a Corleone-in-reverse who continues to claim that he’d rather go broke than go dirty, despite the mounting evidence that it’s a little late for that sort of scruple. Abel’s ballsy, disillusioned wife, Anna, certainly has a few things to say to him about his innocent and deluded faith in the American dream. This is yet another convincing performance from Chastain, even if hideous spectacles and severely teased hair are not enough to make her look the part of a hard-boiled Italian-American girl who has risen from the bungalows of Brooklyn. It’s Anna who runs the finances and keeps the books; it’s Anna who realizes that Standard Heating Oil is at war with a competitor (if not several) who must be forced to reveal himself; and if the D.A.’s investigation finds actual crimes inside the company, it will have been Anna who committed them.
All this is rendered, as I said already, in memorable and exemplary fashion. And it’s all just a little more boring than it ought to be. If Isaac and Chastain both get awards nominations, they will deserve them, and the cast also features Albert Brooks as Abel’s lawyer, Alessandro Nivola as a suave and sinister Mafioso competitor and David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King Jr. in “Selma”) as the half-apologetic D.A. hoping to bring Abel down. Chandor has accumulated most of the ingredients of a great film, and partly assembled them, without ever finding that third or fourth gear that would allow these characters and their story to transcend the grimy, claustrophobic, overdetermined universe that surrounds them. “A Most Violent Year” has both a car chase and a foot chase; it refers to classic crime films by Sidney Lumet or William Friedkin, but can’t duplicate their sense of momentum or urgency. But it also isn’t abstract or contemplative enough to break free of those expectations and function successfully as an art-house mood piece.
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