The American Conservative
By selling his song collection for half a billion dollars, has the Boss thrown everything else away?
"Forget Omicron—Bruce Springsteen made an already-tumultuous year much worse.
"In mid-December, anonymous sources leaked that Springsteen had sold his entire song catalogue to Sony Music Entertainment for $500 million, the biggest deal of its kind in music history. It dwarfs the reported $300 million Universal paid for Bob Dylan’s song-writing catalogue in December 2020.
"The sale gives Sony ownership of 300 songs spanning 20 studio albums and 23 live recordings, including the intellectual property rights. Beyond reporting those basic details, most media seem to be burying their heads in the sand about the deeper implications of our beloved Boss—a man who made his career singing in defense of the working-class American—finally giving in to The Man." . . .
[Dominic] Green recorded rock star Alice Cooper’s observation that asking a rock star about politics is like asking the garbage man about nuclear physics. That hasn’t stopped Springsteen from taking part in Renegades, a recent podcast featuring him and President Obama. Writer and musician Kit Wilson noted the fly in the ointment of the original idea: having “two attractive, highly successful, almost maddeningly cool men” talking “about being outsiders, all the while trading chummy stories about exclusive parties at the White House and backslapping each other.” . . .
Bruce on Broadway - and out of touch - The Spectator World . . ."While Springsteen contended with the contradictions of success, America’s white working and middle classes tumbled into unemployment and opioid addiction. Springsteen, once the laureate of the thwarted desires and escapist leisure of ‘the working life’, has struggled to narrate its decline. Instead, as album titles like Tom Joad’s Dream suggest, he has retreated into FDR-era fantasy, mixing sub-Steinbeck acoustic plaints about the lot of undocumented fruit pickers with bombastic rockers like ‘We Take Care Of Our Own’, a queasily populist mix of bitterness and patriotism.
" ‘There’s nothing ideological about it,’ Springsteen says of his acoustic run. But the origins of Springsteen on Broadway could not be more partisan. In the last days of the Obama presidency, when nearly 70% of Americans thought the country was ‘heading in the wrong direction’, Springsteen gave a private show to some two hundred Obama staffers in the Rose Room of the White House. Springsteen enjoyed that evening so much that he decided to share it with the rest the country. He’s like a bandleader wanting to record his orchestra because they went down so well on the Titanic.
"Alice Cooper has said that asking a rock star about politics is like ‘asking the garbage man’ about ‘nuclear physics’. Still, as Springsteen limbered up for the Great White Way, he offered belated thoughts about the decline of American communities. ‘The consequences of de-industrialization in the Seventies and Eighties,’ he told the Times, ‘were never really addressed by either Republicans or Democrats.’
"Not that this stopped Bruce from endorsing Bill Clinton, the architect of the Great Offshoring. Or Al Gore and John Kerry, who promised to continue it, while placing further environmental restrictions on American industry. In 2012, Bruce even campaigned with Barack Obama, whose Trans-Pacific Partnership would have offshored the last jobs in working-class America.
"Springsteen is no ordinary talent, and no ordinary person, even if he insists on dressing down and speaking dumb. The Democratic Party is no longer the party of the ordinary man and woman, either." . . .
