 
Is Bruce Springsteen the conscience of rock n’ roll? Devils & Dust is Americana ala Springsteen, exhalting the everday with songs of personal struggle and triumph, and bemoaning social mediocrity. Part of his genious is the way he takes large issues and makes them personal. From the dark title tune, Devils & Dust, a cry for sanity in the metaphor of a dream, to All The Way Home, a song of self-emolation and introspection, he is a storyteller in the finest tradition. In the vein of Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie, he captures the heart and imagination of the listener with stories archetypical salt-of-the-earth kind of people. Springsteen weaves a coloful fabric of words, music and texures, mixing tradional folkstyle guitar playing with sythesizers and country fiddles. Songs like Maria’s Bed and Silver Palamino tell very personal stories while Jesus Was An Only Son looks, in very personal terms, at the plight of leadership. Black Cowboys, a tale of the Black experience in America, tells the reflective story of a displaced young Black boy in modern rural America who loves tales of the old west, the Black old west, bringing to light, through the eyes of this young man, a saga of Americana buried in history——the Black Cowboy. Springsteen’s love of folk music hero, Woody Guthrie has long
been evident, with releases like “The Ghost of Tom Joad”
and “Nebraska.” Guthrie held images of the downtrodden and
disenfrachised like a mirror to the American consiouness. Springsteen
aspires to do the same, it seem. He’s done a good job here. The
idea of a conscience of rock n’ roll is an oxymoron; it is music
of the spirit, not of the mind. But if such a thing did exist, Springsteen
would certainly be a contender. - Nadia Smit |
Bruce Springsteen