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By David Gates
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After such pieces of jingo cheerleading as Neil Young's "Let's Roll" and Paul McCartney's "Freedom," the idea of rock-and-rollers "responding" to September 11 seems like opportunistic kitsch. But if anybody could lend it credibility, it would be the rock populist Bruce Springsteen, who's spent 30 years channeling Woody Guthrie by way of Phil Spector. The office workers, firefighters and cops who died at the World Trade Center--many from his native New Jersey--were his people, the regular folks he writes about, sometimes with grating righteousness, sometimes with heart on fire.
On his new album, "The Rising," he has the good sense and good taste never to get specific about The Events. These songs of death and transcendence, love and loss, are at worst elliptical, at best universal. "You're Missing" could be a broken-home country song like "Four Walls"; what seems the least subtly allusive song, "My City of Ruins," was written before September 11. But with the "empty sky," the "blood on the streets" and the "dust on my shoes," you can't help but know just what he's talking around.
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Now, if only it were a great record. Springsteen hadn't cut an album of new songs with his E Street Band since 1987; the band sounds like the same well-oiled machine with that saving touch of grit. Unhappily, the songs sound the same too: the doo-wop chord changes, the simple melodic hooks blared out in unison. The few surprises--a looped drum track, a Pakistani qwwali ensemble--are trendy decorations; there's not much you didn't hear back when it was fresher.
We get wonderful bits of Dylanesque mysticism ("Eleven angels of mercy / Sighin' over that black hole in the sun") and non sequitur ("Red sheets snappin' on the line / With this ring will you be mine?"), and Springsteen's own woeful wit ("I'm half a party in a one-dog town"). But he settles for too many lazy choruses ("Come on, rise up! / Come on, rise up!") repeated too many times, too many doo-doo-doos and li-li-li's. Maybe he's writing down to all those regular folks. Still, shouldn't a working guy take more pride in his craft? And don't his people deserve better?
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