"I got my finger on the trigger" are the first words you hear on Bruce Springsteen's new album, Devils & Dust. They bespeak a promise that's been implicit throughout Springsteen's career; they summon up a pose he has customarily struck. They also imply the sort of violent, alienating move -- a lethal shot, a symbolic act of murder -- that he has too seldom been willing to make.
Those words come from the title song, a song that promises what the ensuing album won't deliver, except in pieces: music of rumbling danger and thickening drama; narratives whose vague, slurred lines make fleeting connections and then disperse. "Devils & Dust" seems to be about possessing power yet feeling powerless -- about how a loaded gun will not kill a worried man's nightmares, nor having God on his side stop the corpses around him from rotting. "A field of blood and stones," he saw last night in his dream, just before "the smell began to rise." Maybe the song is not about power or powerlessness, but it's certainly about fear (its pulsating cellos and wailing harmonica make that much clear).
"Long Time Comin'" is the album's other high point. It, too, is a subtle accumulation of integrated elements, the music not pieced together but rising of its own momentum, a gathering tide. Finally it threatens to sweep the singer away, along with all his heroic rhyme -- but Springsteen, challenged, rises to the intensity, his voice fighting for control of the runaway track. Though the lyrics comprise a typical Springsteen blue-collar special, the music has the kind of feeling and forward thrust that will always sound fresh, however familiar.
Then there's the rest of the album: familiar, yes; fresh, no. A few songs ("Leah," "All the Way Home") are pretty but wispy, while others ("Silver Palomino," "Jesus Was an Only Son") are touching, immaculately crafted, and dull as only a serious-minded Springsteen can make them. The star's liberal bona fides are renewed with "Black Cowboys," about a ghetto youth learning some racial history and heading West, which seems a do-gooder synthesis of John Sayles' Lone Star and Spike Lee's Clockers. Sonically, the album kicks and snaps -- Brendan O'Brien's production is pristine and immediate -- but it's basically a digitized version of the old Born in the U.S.A. sound.
I may be alone in considering Bruce Springsteen a minor artist -- not an original but an inspired derivative -- and then again I may not be. A lack of surprise is a mark of the minor artist, and how long has it been since anyone felt they didn't know what to expect from him? Too long now. It's not that Springsteen isn't capable of stunning people. Recordings of his legendary early live shows -- the kind of three-hour marathons that inspired Jon Landau, writing in Boston's Real Paper in 1974, to say that he'd seen rock 'n' roll's future and its name was Bruce Springsteen -- are proof that he was not a hype when he came along.
He ripped a big hole in rock history in 1975 with the towering amalgam of Born to Run, which sounded like Phil Spector producing a Beat poet's rewrites of classic teenage death songs -- that was certainly a first. In 1982 came Nebraska, a set of quietly terrified narratives carried on a sound that felt like a chilling draft in an empty house, following you from room to room. Depending on who you were, you could hear it as sociopolitical prophecy (a stunned, hushed omen of the Reagan decade) or as an objective sifting of rotten American topsoil (deadpan reportage from a dying heartland). Either way, Nebraska was truly hopeless, and for a rock hero, that's always a dangerous move.
Over time these albums have emerged as Springsteen's true testaments, the pillars girding all the good and mediocre music he's made elsewhere, the two paradigms he's been reshuffling ever since: raucous, roots-derived rock alternating with low-key, acoustic tragedy, the bard of the streets and the poet of the people.
Which means that he has made his way by following paths already laid. Springsteen, like The Band or Jackson Browne, is not an innovator but a classicist, elevating the familiar to its highest form -- and that's been both his power and his shortfall. As a musician he's too earnest, too conscious of himself as an upholder of both folk-poet and rock-hero tradition, not to mention too protective of his own best intentions and liberal sensitivities. Though he has no end of poetic ambition, he has never shown the creative avarice or eccentricity to create a real stinkbomb of an album, a crashing, steaming failure of the kind that, say, Neil Young's career is speckled with.
No, the worst Springsteen will ever be is boring. But he's been that often enough. Even his most devoted fans must sense that there is no real danger to him; no demon threatens to jump out of his throat or from behind his head to startle or surprise, to stun or scare his audience (let alone the artist himself). What he has largely done -- and make no mistake, it's a lot -- is to locate musical grooves and modes of lyrical speech that are recognizable to anyone, and to tool them to great formal balance and proficiency without ever removing them from their generic housings and banging them around. Springsteen is a loving, sensitive mechanic, and nothing will ever break under his care.
Time to step back for a moment. What began as a record review has come to resemble a categorical attack. I've loved Springsteen in the past, and still like him. What I want is to feel involved with him, troubled and exhilarated by him, as I haven't since Born in the U.S.A. came out in 1984. Since that mega-selling superstar move -- long on serviceable homilies, digestible despair, and arena-ready production values -- he's broken my skin only a few times.
There was that live version of Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped" from the 1985 USA for Africa album; 1987's "Tunnel of Love," a truly scary pop-rock thrill ride, to which Nils Lofgren contributed one of the all-time great guitar solos, and Springsteen an extended metaphor worthy of Smokey Robinson; and "American Skin," his controversial response to the 1999 shooting of the unarmed Amadou Diallo by New York City cops, with its sad, slow, devastating repetition -- "41 shots / 41 shots / 41 shots," over and over -- leading to the rage of a climactic breakout.
Disappointment comes only when there are hopes and expectations. Every so often Springsteen will produce a song that shows he can go deeper than the heroic populism, proletarian miniaturism, and musical craft he's known for -- but it will be mired in an album that shows his hesitancy to go deep and stay deep.
When one heard, a few years ago, that Springsteen was creating a song cycle about September 11, one instantly had a notion of what it would sound like, what its parts would be: simple suffering, submerged anguish, dazed wondering, a resolved fist, renewed hope. The rockers would roar and the ballads would contemplate. What else could mere songs do with this tragedy? What else could Springsteen do with it?
The Rising appeared in 2002 to a universal yawn. It wasn't a bad album by any means, but essentially the yawn was well-earned. Between a strong, up-tempo opener ("Lonesome Day") and a bracing union of Middle Eastern rhythm and all-American stadium rock ("Worlds Apart"), The Rising settled for being noisy wallpaper laboriously applied by someone who sounded like Jon Bon Jovi's smart older brother. "Countin' on a Miracle" was "Livin' on a Prayer" without the big hair, and it defined an album that didn't cast offense or aspersion in any direction, an album whose sense of civic conscience was not its deliverance but its deadweight.
The same goes for Devils & Dust, even though it lacks the 9-11 theme to center (or smother?) it. Craziness, color, recklessness, astonishment, not just outrage but outrageousness -- that's what I want from Bruce Springsteen, as I want them from any artist. Or, to rephrase it: more devils, less dust. You might say I'm asking the wrong things of the wrong person, and you'd be right -- but you wouldn't have been back when Born to Run came out, or Nebraska. Springsteen needn't dye his hair yellow, or release an album of Dadaist verse shouted over industrial noise. Craziness comes in all colors, hot pink or olive drab, and an artist can astonish us by the simplest, most unassuming of means. That's what artists do.
Maybe staggering surprises await us in the third act of Springsteen's career. Meanwhile, I drag myself through Devils & Dust as I dragged myself through The Rising, wondering again if I truly prefer these sterile solemnities to other products on the pop shelf that aren't quite so tasteful, quite so "good" for me -- Britney Spears' skanky come-ons, say, or the dance-floor lamentations of Pet Shop Boys.
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
