Bruce Springsteen: 'What was done to my country was un-American' Bring on the "Wrecking Ball"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/17/bruce-springsteen-wrecking-ball?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038At a Paris press conference on Thursday night, Bruce Springsteen was asked whether he was advocating an armed uprising in America. He laughed at the idea, but that the question was even posed at all gives you some idea of the fury of his new album Wrecking Ball. Indeed, it is as angry a cry from the belly of a wounded America as has been heard since the dustbowl and Woody Guthrie, a thundering blow of New Jersey pig iron down on the heads of Wall Street and all who have sold his country down the swanny. Springsteen has gone to the great American canon for ammunition, borrowing from folk, civil war anthems, Irish rebel songs and gospel. The result is a howl of pain and disbelief as visceral as anything he has ever produced, that segues into a search for redemption: "Hold tight to your anger/ And don't fall to your fears Bring on your wrecking ball."
"I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream," Springsteen told the conference, where the album was aired for the first time. It was written, he claimed, not just out of fury but out of patriotism, a patriotism traduced. "What was done to our country was wrong and unpatriotic and un-American and nobody has been held to account," he later told the Guardian. "There is a real patriotism underneath the best of my music but it is a critical, questioning and often angry patriotism."
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Springsteen, 62, says he is not afraid of how the album will be received in election-year America: "The temper has changed. And people on the streets did it. Occupy Wall Street changed the national conversation the Tea Party had set it for a while. The first three years of Obama were under them.
"Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community In Easy Money the guy is going out to kill and rob, just like the robbery spree that has occurred at the top of the pyramid he's imitating the guys on Wall Street. An enormous fault line cracked the American system right open whose repercussion we are only starting to be feel.
The Boss is speaking out and I'm going to buy this album when it comes out Mar 6th
Magoo48
(4,722 posts)whathehell
(29,105 posts)The Boss...A patriot in the best sense of the word.
lovemydog
(11,833 posts)it's had enormous positive impact
pacalo
(24,721 posts)conversation."
zeemike
(18,998 posts)He is a real American patriot...and far from the ones who call themselves tea party patriots
mahannah
(893 posts)"We Take Care of Our Own" is mistaken. I love Springsteen, but he has missed the point here.
What are you talking about?
sarcasmo
(23,968 posts)itsrobert
(14,157 posts)n/t
sarcasmo
(23,968 posts)The Wizard
(12,556 posts)will be the cause of Our downfall. The Boss just puts it music.
tex-wyo-dem
(3,190 posts)Salt of the earth, that guy....speaking truth as always!
And he's right...OWS has tranformed the conversation and opened a lot of eyes...
nwliberalkiwi
(367 posts)Powerful song. I miss the Big Guy!!!
fasttense
(17,301 posts)When laws are ignored for people who commit crimes with money, power and influence, then there are no laws. If laws do not apply equally across the board then laws are useless window dressing, tools of tyrants and thieves.
The Boss has merely put that into music.
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)When I create posts that stipulate the exact mechanisms on how the wealth has been stolen away from the middle class by various schemes, all made part of a legal code somewhere by Big Money, I am taken to task for my "attacks' on legal financial maneuvers.
But when is too much evil too much? If people can defend theft of the financial commons because after all, these tranactions are "legal" then where does the defense end?
The Holocaust was brought about through "legalizing" the outlawing of work for Jewish peole and then the imprisonment and deaths of nine million people. Two thirds of these deaths involved those who were Jewish, and the others were Union Leaders, non-Conforming Catholics, Dissidents, and those who were very out spoken.
There is a point when any people, who while witnessing continual asault on their prosperity, their lives and their right to pursue happiness, must throw off the shackles of convention and of respecting the mere "legalizing of evil" and do something about the evil. And the first step toward that is to realize that making activites "legal" does not in fact make them moral.
Former_DU_Member
(33 posts)pocket.... people who do it with a pen can take everything you ever had or will have. I'll take a mugger over a banker/investor any day.
flying rabbit
(4,648 posts)ever owned
lonestarnot
(77,097 posts)Tee hee. I have a turntable.
Skraxx
(2,986 posts)RT_Fanatic
(224 posts)I'm sure he can beat that pig of a New Jersey governor.
tavalon
(27,985 posts)And buy up all the CDs to burn 'em. That always cracks me up. It boosts sales tremendously and the plastic fumes have got to be killing their lungs.
Thank you, Bruce Springsteen!