I'll never be a critic/The new Springsteen album

A brief preface: Angela has found out I'm posting another pictureless entry, and warned me that pictures are what make blogs fun. There are no pictures below, but I promise that soon-- in the very near future-- there will be pictures posted on this blog of people, in some place, very possibly having the time of their life. That being said...

I recently realized that if I was a professional critic, I would be Peter Travers. Which means I wouldn’t be much of a critic at all. Travers, the film critic for Rolling Stone magazine, likes everything. I’m serious. If you read any of his movie reviews over the holidays, it seems like Pete sat around and tried to concoct unique ways of saying, “I love this movie.” Granted, the 08’ holiday season yielded some above-average films, but I guess many moviegoers and other critics expect a good critic to…well…criticize.

Check out Peter Traver’s take on…
Slumdog Millionaire: “What I feel for this movie isn't just admiration, it's mad love.”
Milk: “If there's a better movie around this year…I sure as hell haven't seen it.
Frost/Nixon: “It shouldn't work at all. But it does work, spectacularly, as a matter of fact.”

I think the last one is hilarious, like he really wants to criticize, but just can't bring himself to do it. Anyway. I’m making fun of Travers, but truthfully, I like him. The guy loves movies, and I imagine he sits down ready to enjoy the film, rather than searching for an opening to destroy it. That’s sort of how I am—I honestly want to like whatever media I’m engaging, which probably slows my inclination to acknowledge (or even notice) flaws/dislikes.

All that being said: The Boss—one of the last bastions of relevant (I’m using that word to discredit new music by Jackson Browne/Rick Springfield/Bob Dylan/John Mellencamp), classic American rock—released his new album Working on a Dream on Tuesday.
It’s got many of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of other Springsteen albums (Not counting those from 1990-1999, which even Springsteen refers to as “lost years”), but I’ll just skip over those and begin w/ a traversesque bottom line: Working on a Dream is brilliant, everything you could want it to be, and rocks all the way from the eight-minute-plus “Outlaw Pete” to the poignant “The Wrestler” bonus track, although technically the album ends on “The Last Carnival”, a poignant song about late band-member Danny Fedirici ,who died of cancer last year.

Working on a Dream is an updated Born to Run and an elevated Magic. It’s Bruce and the E Street Band celebrating what they’re good at—rock music with tinges of country, folk, and classic, and unafraid to ramble on with instrumentals and choruses as long as they please. To kick an abused adjective while it's down—the album is epic.

All those wonderful things being said…you know when an acquaintance is being a bit self-righteous, and you say “Don’t preach at me!” But then that same acquaintance is a pastor, so they’re allowed to talk like that? That’s how I am with Springsteen. I’ll cut the guy endless amounts of lyrical slack, because while what he’s saying sometimes come off as a bit awkward (The way he twists end-words in “Outlaw Pete” just to make some lines rhyme is painful.), he’s been doing his thing for over forty years and can write whatever the hell he wants. At least he's back to writing his old subject matter-- troubled, working class characters, who can't seem to decide whether life is something to be lived or survived. Their dilemmas are our pleasure.