Not actually the Jersey state lineMagic, Bruce Springsteen's first album with the E Street Band in five years, has been touted by the Boss's inner circle as a return to pop form: a record unencumbered by the thematic freight of post-9/11 paean The Rising or the stylistic demands of genre exercises Devils and Dust and The Seeger Sessions. It is album about, to the extent its about anything, Springsteen and his following. In his profile in the Sunday Times ("In Love With Pop, Uneasy With the World"), critic A.O. Scott notes that Springsteen's songs are "frequently — even the ones he wrote when he was still in his 20s — about nostalgia, about the desire to recapture those fleeting moments of intensity and possibility we associate with being young." Springsteen's use of nostalgia has since become a self-fulfilling prophesy, his music less apt to soundtrack an afternoon spent looking at "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" then taking your daughter to a soccer game. "[I]t's music to grow up to," as Scott observes, "not out of."
Ben Greenman, writing this week's "Pop Notes" column in The New Yorker, claims that "Springsteen's best albums have always had a thesis: youth is invincibility, the American dream is hollow, divorce can crush you." Magic, by contrast, is "simply a collection of songs." This view is somewhat reductive; what unifies the new album is that, more than any other, it seems aimed squarely at Bruce's fans. That's not to say that it's a sop, a la the execrable "Mary's Place", or a "return to form" - Springsteen, unlike virtually all of his contemporaries, seems never to have left the form in the first place. "Radio Nowhere", Magic's insistent lead single, is not a sour-grapes lament targeted at "the blandness of contemporary music," as Greenman has it. Instead it's a statement about desperation, aging, and finding a way through a rapidly changing world; Springsteen is not Tom Petty or John Mellancamp (who audaciously blamed lack of radio airplay for his last album's anemic sales performance, despite the fact that atrocious single "Our Country" has become indelibly stamped on anyone who's witnessed a televised sporting event in the past year, courtesy of Chevrolet), bemoaning the state of current music as somehow indicative of an ongoing cultural collapse instead of a natural generational shift.
The Baby Boomers are giving way to their children, and Bruce has made them a twilight rock album - not an elegy, or even a last dance, but maybe the last joint under the bleachers or sip of Boone's straight from the bottle. They, like the Boss, "just want to hear some rhythm"; Magic, in a sense, is wish fulfillment. "You'll Be Comin' Down", "Your Own Worst Enemy", and "I'll Work For Your Love" are straight-ahead rockers right in the E Street Band's wheelhouse, "Living in the Future" approximates the poppy bounce of a "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" or "Glory Days", and "Long Walk Home" is "My Hometown" 23 years later. Much has been made of Springsteen's politics recently - he actively campaigned against Bush in 2004 with the "Vote for Change" tour, and political themes have underpinned his last three efforts - and Magic is not totally silent in this regard. "Last to Die", while never explicitly mentioning Iraq is nonetheless unsubtle in its anti-war message, with its oft-repeated chorus of "Who'll be the last to die for a mistake?" "Devil's Arcade" is slightly more veiled in its allusions; snatches of lyrics alert us to a wounded soldier ("In the ward with blue walls, a sea with no name/Where you lie adrift with the heroes/Of the devil's arcade") and a pleading love at his bedside ("A voice says, 'Don't worry, I'm here'/Just whisper the word 'Tomorrow' in my ear").
Magic is by no means flawless; producer Brendan O'Brien helmed The Rising as well, and much of the slick overproduction that plagued that effort is detectable here. The title track is particularly egregious: in addition to a weak lyric ("This is what will be" is the To Be Announced of refrains), extraneous circa-1997 electronic flourishes and chintzy dubbed-in echoes drown an otherwise spare tune in schmaltz. In general the record is a bit thin on ideas, content to let the E Street Band's inherent propulsiveness compensate for the music's underlying conservatism. That it works so well is a testament to the E Streeters' greatness, as well as to the fact that Springsteen's trash - not to say that Magic is the bottom of his barrel, per se - is most other rockers' treasure.
Springsteen, like Bob Dylan, to whom he was initially compared, is a performer whose troops will follow him anywhere, even if he isn't particularly interested in leading them. Unlike Dylan, though, Bruce has never held himself apart from his fans, never sought to create any sense of ironic distance or evade the mantle they handed him. In No Direction Home, the Scorsese documentary patched together from existing footage and new interviews with Bob Dylan and his associates, both '60s Dylan and present day Dylan insist that he's a mere entertainer, a "song and dance man" and not a spokesman; his two most recent efforts, the roots-inflected Love and Theft and Modern Times are clearly moves in that direction, but it's unclear whether or not anybody beyond Dylan and his omnipresent coterie of fawning rock critics were truly entertained (for the record, I very much enjoy Love and Theft). Springsteen on the other hand, has not spent much time deconstructing his own myth; great albums like The River and Born in the U.S.A. simply split the difference, oftentimes within the same song (a friend once pointed out that a significant benchmark in an adolescent's maturation process is when he or she realizes that "Born in the U.S.A" isn't a song about how great America is). Dylan brought chaos from order, cutting through the static in people's heads with an even greater dissonance; Springsteen gave voice to all the unspoken pain, regret, hope, and dreams people carry in their hearts.
At the end of his capsule review, Greenman concludes, with what is meant to be a thud, that Magic mostly "sounds like Springsteen playing Springsteen." He's right - Magic is the sound of Springsteen giving the people, his people, what they want. The key distinction, of course, is that he's also giving them what they need.
