From The OC Register:
Democracies talk, tyrannies act
By MARK STEYN

"I'm proud of my university today," Stina Reksten, a 28-year-old Columbia graduate student from Norway, told the New York Times. "I don't want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom."

Isn't it always? But enough about Iran, let's talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to "academic freedom." True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. "They can have any fascist they want there," said professor Zimbardo, "but this seems egregious." But, hey, don't worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld's presence at the Hoover Institution.

At some point during this past week, it was decided that the relevant Ahmadinejad comparison was to Nikita Krushchev. The Soviet leader toured America in 1960, was taken to a turkey farm, paid a visit to Frank Sinatra and Co. on the set of "Can-Can" and pronounced the movie "decadent." And yet the republic survived. As one of my most distinguished fellow columnists, Peggy Noonan, put it in the Wall Street Journal, Krushchev's visit reminded the world that "we are the confident nation." And, as several e-mailers observed, warming to Noonan's theme, back then hysterical right-wing ninnies didn't get their panties in a twist just because a man dedicated to the destruction of our way of life was in town for a couple of days.

Whether or not this was a more "confident" nation in 1960, it's certainly a more post-modern nation now. I don't know whether Stina Reksten, as a 28-year old Norwegian, can be held up as an exemplar of American youth, but she certainly seems to have mastered the lingo: We've invited the president of Iran to speak but let's not confuse "the very dire human-rights situation" – or his nuclear program, or his Holocaust denial, or his role in the seizing of the U.S. Embassy hostages, or his government's role in the deaths of American troops and Iraqi civilians – with the more important business of applauding ourselves for our celebration of "academic freedom."

So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive. If dissent means refusing to let the Bush administration bully you into wearing a flag lapel pin, why, then Katie Couric (bravely speaking out on this issue just last week) is the new Mandela! If Rumsfeld is a "fascist." then anyone can fight fascism. It's no longer about the secret police kicking your door down and clubbing you to a pulp. Well, OK, it is if you're a Buddhist monk in Burma. But they're a long way away, and it's all a bit complicated and foreign, and let's not "confuse the very dire human rights situation" in Hoogivsastan with an opportunity to celebrate our courage in defending "academic freedom" in America. Ahmadinejad must occasionally have felt he was appearing in a matinee of "A Chance To Hear [Insert Name Of Enemy Head Of State Here]." Could have been Chavez, could have been Mullah Omar, could have been Herr ReichsfuhrerHitler himself, as Columbia's Dean John Coatsworth proudly boasted on television.

Lots of prime ministers and diplomats accepted invitations to meet with Hitler, and generally the meetings went very well – except for one occasion when Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, was greeted by the little chap with the mustache, mistook him for the butler, and handed him his coat. But even that faux pas is a testament to how normal thugs can appear in social situations. Civilized nations like chit-chatting, having tea, holding debates, talking talking talking. Tyrannies like terrorizing people, torturing people, murdering people, doing doing doing. It's easier for the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then for the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

As witness this last week. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, was evidently taken aback by the criticism he got for inviting Ahmadinejad and so found himself backed into what, for a conventional soft-leftie of academe, was a ferocious denunciation of his star guest, dwelling at length on Iran's persecution of minorities, murder of dissidents, sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear ambitions, genocidal threats toward Israel, etc. For a warmup act, Bollinger pretty much frosted up the joint. The Iranian leader sat through the intro with a plastic smile, and then said: "I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment." He offered many illuminating insights: There are, he declared, no homosexuals in Iran. Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Kandahar to see the new production of "Mame"? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions.

And afterwards Bollinger got raves even from the right for "speaking truth to power." But so what? It's like Noel Coward delivering a series of devastating put-downs to Hitler. The Fuhrer's mad as hell but at the end of the afternoon he goes back to killing, and dear Noel goes back to singing "The Stately Homes Of England." Ahmadinejad goes back to doing – to persecuting, to murdering, to terrorizing, to nuclearizing – and Bollinger cuts out his press clippings and puts them on the fridge.

The other day, National Review's Jay Nordlinger was musing about our habit of referring to some benighted part of the world's "humanitarian needs" and wondered when we'd stopped using the term "human needs," which is, after all, what food, water and shelter are. And his readers wrote in to state the obvious: That "humanitarian" label gives top billing not to the distant, Third World victim but the generous Western donor – the "humanitarian" relief effort, the "humanitarian" organizations, the NGOs, the Western charities: It's about us, not them. Bill Clinton's new bestseller on charity is called "Giving" – because it's better to give than to receive, and that's certainly true if the giver is busying himself with some ineffectual feel-good "Save Darfur" fundraiser while the recipient is on the receiving end of the Janjaweed's machetes. The Sudanese government appreciates that, as long as we're allowed to feel good about ourselves and to participate in "humanitarian relief," the killing can go on until there's no one left to kill. Likewise, Ahmadinejad knows that, as along as we're allowed to do what we do best – talk and talk and talk, whether at Columbia or in EU negotiations – his regime can quietly get on with its nuclear program.

These men understand the self-absorption of advanced democracies. The difference between Winston Churchill and Ward Churchill, another famous beneficiary of "academic freedom" who called the 9/11 dead "little Eichmanns," is that for Sir Winston talking was a call to action while for poseurs like professor Churchill it's a substitute for it.

The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen. Sometimes it's not about "freedom of speech," but about freedom. Ask an Iranian homosexual. If you can find one.

From London Daily Mail:
Bruce's still the boss
by ADRIAN THRILLS

28th September 2007

Springsteen's three most recent albums have found him skipping wildly from one extreme to the next. The Rising, all righteous rage and fortifying words, was followed by the bleak Devils And Dust and then the upbeat, feel-good We Shall Overcome.

Keeping his fans on their toes, The Boss takes yet another unexpected turn with Magic, an album that reunites him with old cohorts The E Street Band and, musically at least, finds him rolling back the years to the chrome-plated rock 'n' roll of Born To Run.

Keeping his fans on their toes, The Boss takes yet another unexpected turn with his latest album, Magic

Dishing up the brightest, bounciest tunes they have delivered in ages, Springsteen and his eight-piece group are electrifying. With three guitarists (Bruce, Nils Lofgren and Steve Van Zandt) and two keyboardists, the sound is ebullient on the taut rocker Radio Nowhere, a classic Springsteen opener in the tradition of Badlands or Born In The U.S.A.

You get the feeling Bruce would use two drummers, too, were it not for the ever-reliable thump of Max Weinberg.

The Spector- esque You'll Be Coming Down and the low-slung swing of Livin' In The Future also hark back to Born To Run, and it isn't until track four, the shimmering Your Own Worst Enemy, that there is a change of musical tack.

On an album dominated by coruscating rockers and catchy pop songs, there are few acoustic interludes, the most notable being the dreamy, reflective title track.

But if the musical mood is relentlessly up-tempo, the words are generally of a much darker hue. Lyrically more subtle than is the norm in Boss-land, Magic encompasses everything from the Book Of Revelation to "the barbershop on South Street".

Springsteen doesn't mention Iraq directly, but Gypsy Biker is one of several savage attacks on US foreign policy.

Despite this underlying sense of unease, Magic is Bruce at his crowd-pleasing best.

"Show a little faith, there's magic in the night," he sang on 1975's Thunder Road.

More than three decades on, he still has his own brand of musical sorcery.

From Billboard.com:
First Listen: The Eagles "Long Road Out of Eden"
By Ray Waddell, Nashville

Fans who have waited since 1979 for a new studio album from the Eagles surely won't be disappointed with "Long Road Out of Eden," which arrives Oct. 30. The two-disc set, which will be available exclusively at Wal-Mart in North America, bears the Eagles Recording Co. imprint.

The album features a wealth of Don Henley/Glenn Frey co-writes and a broad palette of musical styles most representative of the band's "Hotel California" and "The Long Run" eras, a mix of lengthy set pieces and more Cali-rock, radio-oriented gems. The set, which opens with the gentle but foreboding harmony-fest "No More Walks in the Wood," is part social commentary, part examination of the human condition and part re-introduction of the band via new and powerful songs.

Disc one primarily serves as the latter. Debut single "How Long," a J.D. Souther original, maintains an easy-rolling "Already Gone" vibe, but gives little indication of the strength of the material to follow. "Busy Being Fabulous" is a mid-tempo twanger featuring the familiar Henley vitriol, and the percussive "What Do I Do with my Heart" boasts an earnest Frey vocal and a gorgeous, swirling bridge.

Joe Walsh is the featured vocalist on the piano-driven, chugging boogie "Guilty of the Crime," followed by Timothy B. Schmit on the sweeping, rhythmic Paul Carrack ballad "I Don't Want To Hear Anymore." Frey's "No More Cloudy Days," a melancholy but ultimately optimistic midtempo, is already familiar to concertgoers, and Frey's "You Are Not Alone" closes out the side.

But the showstoppers are "Fast Company," which has a "Those Shoes" feel and some killer horns, the call-to-action ballad "Do Something," with steel guitar and loads of harmony, and "Waiting in the Weeds," an acoustic-based ballad featuring a brilliant Henley lyric, vibrant imagery, haunting instrumentation and well-crafted vocal arrangements.

Disc two begins with the 10-plus minute epic title cut, an apocalyptic cautionary tale that blends desert imagery, spiritual overtones and wry observations on consumerism.

The Frey instrumental "I Dreamed There Was No War" (which recalls, oddly, "Battle Hymn of the Republic") is followed the spooky, paranoid rocker "Somebody." Next up is another American body-blow in "Frail Grasp on the Big Picture," an adventurous funk-rock powerhouse with biting takes on religion, journalism ("dead and gone," according to the Eagles), sex, money and politics.

Walsh's "Last Good Time in Town" is an infectious (even danceable) romp, while Frey's warm vocals drive home the pure romance of the acoustic waltz "I Love to Watch a Woman Dance. But soon it's back to biting with the pulsing rocker "Business As Usual." The vaguely Beatles-esque "Center of the Universe" offers observant perspective on enduring love, and Frey wraps the set with the bittersweet "It's Your World Now."

"I thought I'd be above it all by now, in some country garden in the shade," Henley sings on "Center of the Universe." As this album demonstrates, the Eagles are clearly not ready to kick back in the shade.

From The New York Times:
The Italian Job
By JAMES HOLLAND

THE DAY OF BATTLE
The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944.
Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy.
By Rick Atkinson.
Illustrated. 791 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $35.

In the 62 years since its end, thousands of books have been written about World War II, yet a new in-depth work on the major battles and campaigns is always to be welcomed. In an age when travel is easier than it has ever been, and technology increasingly helpful to the historical sleuth, it is possible — with the solace of a half-decent publisher’s advance — to visit battlefields and archives around the world, and then to produce a book containing genuinely new material and perspectives.

Rick Atkinson proved what a determined and assiduous researcher could achieve in “An Army at Dawn,” his best-selling account of the North Africa campaign, and he has been no less thorough in “The Day of Battle,” the second part of a projected “liberation” trilogy. But while there is new material here — like information about the deaths of Allied servicemen from American mustard gas at Bari — it is his ability to ferret out astonishing amounts of detail and marshal it into a highly readable whole that gives Atkinson the edge over most writers in this field.

Anyone who devoured “An Army at Dawn” with relish will be delighted with his account of the Sicilian and Italian campaign. All the same ingredients are here, from sharp one-liners (“Camaraderie and good fun,” he says of the resumption of negotiations at the Trident conference in Washington, “promptly popped like soap bubbles”) to brilliantly observed character portraits.

Take, for example, his description of Dwight Eisenhower on the eve of the Sicily landings, chain-smoking damp cigarettes in the sticky, humid underground command headquarters on Malta, desperately trying to pass time after sending the invasion fleet into the Mediterranean in potentially catastrophic stormy conditions. The minutiae of events combined with telling character observation enables Atkinson to write about Eisenhower — and others, like Generals Patton, Clark and Truscott — in a way that makes readers feel they knew these men personally.

Opening with a fine account of the Trident conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and their chiefs of staff, Atkinson notes that the Italian campaign was really all about Allied strategy, or rather diverging views on strategy between America and Britain. The United States believed nothing should hinder its original aim of invading northwest Europe at the earliest possible date. Britain felt just as strongly that Italy should also be invaded after a successful conquest of Sicily.

A compromise of sorts was achieved. Following Sicily, Eisenhower, as supreme commander in the Mediterranean, was to plan whatever operation was most likely to knock Italy out of the war and contain the maximum number of German forces.This, the Americans eventually conceded, was the invasion of Italy, even though Italian surrender terms had been agreed before the British crossed into the boot of the peninsula. Inevitably, problems soon materialized. The terrain hugely favored the defender, Hitler decided to fight for every yard north of Naples, the winter conditions were far harsher than anyone had anticipated and the Americans’ hearts were not really in the invasion anyway.

As in any war where miscalculations have been made at the top, it is the frontline troops and unfortunate civilians in the way who suffer the most, and Atkinson has an admirable sympathy and understanding of both. Among the most powerful passages in the book are his descriptions of the hellhole that Naples became and the desperate fight for San Pietro. The sounds, smells, violence and idiocy of war are all here. “Perhaps only a battlefield before the battle is quieter than the same field after the shooting stops,” he writes of the aftermath of the Salerno landings. “The former is silent with anticipation, the latter with a pure absence of noise.”

With these descriptions of the dirty business of war on the ground, along with his accounts of matters of higher politics and strategy, Atkinson is at his best. Although he is perhaps overly hard on General Alexander, he is, for the most part, evenhanded in his treatment of the senior Allied commanders, whose characters and decisions take up so much of the book. Clark, for example, receives a justifiably more generous assessment than has often been the case.

Yet, while Atkinson discusses all the big debating points — the Rapido crossing, Anzio, Cassino, Rome and so on — he tends to do so in terms of generals blaming one another for the various setbacks. There is not enough analysis of the issues and circumstances dictating those often difficult command decisions. For instance, a fuller explanation of how and why the terrain was so treacherous for the attacker would have been useful. The shortage of shipping — which meant the Allies could not take advantage of Italy’s one redeeming feature, namely its 5,000-mile coastline — was not Alexander’s or Clark’s fault. The other big problem facing Alexander and his generals in the early months in Italy was the slow buildup of troops and matériel. This was caused primarily by American insistence that formation of the 15th Air Force in Italy take priority over troops on the ground, thus using up much of the limited transport available. In fact, one of the prime reasons the American chiefs were finally persuaded to support the invasion of Italy was the promise of airfields from which the strategic bombing of Germany and the German war effort could be increased.

All Allied men and matériel had to cross the sea; the Germans, on the other hand, were already in place and could supply the front by land, hence with greater speed. Not until May 1944 did Alexander have the three-to-one advantage in troops he felt he needed for victory. These factors are not really examined. Indeed, the enormous contribution of the Allied air forces is greatly underplayed.

This leads to a further concern. There were, for the most part, fractionally more British frontline troops than American ones in both Sicily and Southern Italy. For example, four British divisions and three brigades landed on Sicily compared with just three United States divisions, while at the start of the final battle for Rome in May 1944, British troops numbered 253,859, and American 231,306. Yet, this book is unashamedly a celebration of the American experience in these campaigns, not that of the Allies as a whole. And since Atkinson has a formidable and well-deserved reputation, most readers will believe his interpretation of events. He should have made his almost total focus on the United States Army clear from the outset, especially as “The Day of Battle” is part of such a grandly titled trilogy. “The American Army and the War in Sicily and Italy” would have been a more appropriate subtitle for this book. It is also questionable whether, in the 21st century and with the current troubles in Iraq and elsewhere, continuing to view history almost entirely through the prism of the United States is serving Americans well.

Despite these quibbles, there are few to match Atkinson’s writing style. “The Day of Battle” is a very fine book indeed. “Here the dreamless dead would lie,” Atkinson writes in a very moving passage about the aftermath of the bloody Rapido, “leached to bone by the passing seasons, and waiting, as all the dead would wait, for doomsday’s horn.” Even the great Ernie Pyle would have liked to have written that one.

James Holland is the author of “Together We Stand: America, Britain and the Forging of an Alliance.”

Books of The Times
In Middle Leg of the Race, the Prize Was Italy
By WILLIAM GRIMES

THE DAY OF BATTLE
The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
By Rick Atkinson

Illustrated. Henry Holt. 791 pages. $35.

After chasing Erwin Rommel and the German Army out of North Africa in May 1943, American and British commanders were left with a difficult question. What to do? Operation Overlord, the planned invasion of France, could not be undertaken until the spring of 1944, and in any case, there were not enough ships to transport the Allied forces in Africa to Britain. With the Russians clamoring for the Allies to open a second front, leaving vast forces idle was not an option. And so the Allies looked across the Mediterranean to “the soft underbelly of Europe,” in Winston Churchill’s famous phrase. Italy would be next.

In “The Day of Battle,” Rick Atkinson picks up where he left off in “An Army at Dawn,” his history of the North African campaign, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. A planned third volume, on the Normandy invasion and the war in Europe, will complete “The Liberation Trilogy,” which is shaping up as a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle.

For American troops, Italy was “the middle leg of the race,” Mr. Atkinson writes. It would turn out to be a marathon, run under the most grueling conditions, for a prize whose value historians still debate. Italy was, in the broader scheme of things, a sideshow. To the extent that the Allies had a coherent strategy, it was to wage a war of attrition and tie down as many German forces as possible, to support Operation Overlord, the D-Day invasion.

To Allied troops on the ground, Italy felt very much like the main event. After taking Sicily in a matter of weeks, but failing, in a disastrous piece of miscalculation by Allied commanders, to stop retreating German forces from hopping across the Strait of Messina to the toe of the Italian boot, they embarked on a punishing campaign against an implacable enemy. Italy, an endless series of mountain ridges, favored the defense. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the architect of Allied misery, took full advantage, occupying high ground, bloodying the enemy and then, at the last possible moment, retreating to yet another mountain citadel to start the process all over again.

Mr. Atkinson presents the war as a clash not only of impersonal forces but also of individual characters and wills, captured deftly through interwoven snippets from letters, diaries, memoirs and face-to-face encounters among the principal actors. His cast of characters is a film director’s dream, with figures like Audie Murphy, Ernie Pyle, Gen. George S. Patton and Gen. Bernard Law Montgomery in the thick of the action.

He excels at describing the furor of battle, and the Italian campaign provides him with abundant raw material. From Salerno to San Pietro to Anzio to Cassino and onward to Rome, Allied forces experienced hell in all its varieties, as they struggled, with appalling losses, to break a seemingly unbreakable foe.

“The Tommies will have to chew their way through us, inch by inch,” a German paratrooper wrote in a letter home, “and we will surely make hard chewing for them.”

At times the Italian campaign degenerated into a war of position, reminiscent of World War I, as soldiers went over the top and made impossible frontal assaults, only to be raked by machine gun fire that cut them down like wheat. Ortona and Cassino, by contrast, were little Stalingrads, with house-to-house fighting. Malaria, venereal disease and psychological breakdowns took thousands off the battlefield. Poor leadership, misguided strategy and bickering among Allied generals also took a toll.

Mr. Atkinson, a longtime correspondent and editor for The Washington Post, conveys all of this with sharp-edged immediacy and a keen eye for the monstrous and the absurd. At Salerno, a frightening preview of the Normandy landings, medics operated by flashlight at night, often with both doctor and patient under a blanket. When shells hit, patients under the knife “displayed unusual agility in jumping from operating tables into foxholes,” a battalion history recorded. Mr. Atkinson manages to squeeze in the detail that soldiers liked to massage their sore feet with Barbasol shaving cream.

On occasion combat takes on an infernal beauty, like the amphibious landing illuminated when “a constellation of silver flares hissed overhead, bathing the beaches in cold brilliance,” followed by the “sawmill sound” of German machine guns. “Mortars crumped, and from the high ground to the east and south came the shriek of 88-millimeter shells, green fireballs that whizzed through the dunes at half a mile a second, trailing golden plumes of dust.”

Was Italy worth it? Mr. Atkinson, like many historians, is of two minds. Italy relieved pressure on Russian forces, took a heavy toll on German ones and provided painful lessons to Allies on how (or how not) to stage amphibious landings and how to organize joint operations.

On the other hand, Allied losses were horrendous, and the war would be decided elsewhere, on the eastern and western fronts. Two days after the first Americans entered Rome, D-Day began, and Italy was forgotten.

“How do you like that?” Gen. Mark W. Clark, commander of the forces in Italy, said, hearing the news of Normandy over the radio on June 6. “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”

From Entertainment Weekly:
BRUCE ALMIGHTY
Springsteen has us believing in his Magic
with a thrilling return to vintage E Street

By Chris Willman

Grade: A

''Have a little faith/There's magic in the night,'' Bruce Springsteen sang on 1975's ''Thunder Road.'' And for keeping the faith along the decades of back roads and stylistic detours, fans get their beautiful reward with Magic, his best record since The River in 1980. If such devotees assumed that the new album's title was a nod to rekindling the tattered romanticism of his salad days, they wouldn't be wrong. Magic marks only the second instance in more than two decades that Springsteen has made a studio CD with the E Street Band — and unlike the last reunion, he's not resisting their signature sound. Synths get a breather so Roy Bittan can return to those classic piano arpeggios; stirring key changes are again signaled by Clarence Clemons' sax solos; arena-friendly sing-alongs arrive in quick succession. If you were raised on this stuff, you may experience the giddy sensation that the world has been set aright again.

So why is Springsteen looking so damned surly on the cover? You didn't really expect a guy who devoted his recent career to sober fare like Devils & Dust to completely recalibrate his political serotonin levels, did you? In the tradition of Born in the U.S.A., the celebrative group spirit is also a buffer for his dark materials. Springsteen's sour expression is merely the first hint that his CD's simplistic name is actually a double entendre. When the spooky title track finally arrives, he's playing the part of an enigmatic illusionist who seems a little too eager to ''cut you in half, while you're smilin' ear to ear.'' It turns out Springsteen was also thinking of magic in the sense of smoke and mirrors, as favored by snake-oil salesmen and senators alike. You don't need a semiotics degree to guess that he's getting allegorical about leaders using the War on Terror to pull off some sleight of hand. That becomes clear in songs such as the soldiers' elegy ''Gypsy Biker,'' which includes asides like ''The speculators made their money on the blood you shed.'' Note to self: World not set aright after all, despite reassuring Danny Federici organ fills.

There is no trickery, however, to the naturalness of the band vibe here. On 2002's emotional but musically uneven The Rising, you could sense everyone straining with producer Brendan O'Brien to figure out how to bring the E Street Band into the 21st century — then finally arriving at what felt like a Springsteen ''solo'' album that happened to graft in the old gang. But Magic, also produced by O'Brien, gets it right from the start by mostly ditching recent rootsy flavorings for a compressed wall of sound. Sometimes that wall is gorgeously Spectorian, as with the glockenspiel-and-timpani-adorned pop stunners ''Girls in Their Summer Clothes'' and ''Your Own Worst Enemy,'' which Springsteen delivers in a tender, rasp-free register barely heard since ''Born to Run.'' Sometimes it's a garage wall, as on ''Radio Nowhere,'' which gives axman (and ex- Sopranos hitman) Little Steven a cranky guitar blowout to play, unapologetically, on his garage-rock radio show.

If there's another ''Glory Days'' here — an inevitable concert standby that Bon Jovi will spend the next decade trying to rip off — it's ''Livin' in the Future,'' an insanely jubilant celebration of denial as a coping mechanism. ''None of this has happened yet,'' the gleeful choruses insist as Clemons wails on his horn and everyone joins in a ''na-na-na-na-na'' cheer. This, despite almost apocalyptic verses about how the singer's ''faith's been torn asunder'' by both his girl and his country. That's one of many Magic passages where it's intriguingly, purposely unclear whether Springsteen is describing wartime malaise and social dystopia or simply a bust-up between lovers.

No album could say more about the uncertain national mood of 2007, though that's only part of the set design. Springsteen's topical allusions are unspecific enough that Magic will remain enchanting after we get these American messes straightened out, in 5, 10, 50 years. Still, he does finally bring the war to the fore in the climactic ''Devil's Arcade,'' and an album that began with Bruce yelling ''Is there anybody alive out there?'' ends on real matters of life and death. This big, slow-building ballad finds a young woman visiting her beloved in a military hospital, whispering promises of an idyllic suburban future and finally repeating the line ''the beat of your heart'' over and over, as if that very incantation could keep him tethered to the corporeal world. It's a moment that will break even a hardened rock fan's heart. But by then your resolve might already be melting from the realization that, three and a half decades into his career, Bruce Springsteen is back in the masterpiece business. A

DOWNLOAD THIS: Preview ''Gypsy Biker'' and the other songs from Bruce Springsteen's Magic at the website of N.Y. radio station Q104.3

From the Chicago Tribune:
Springsteen and E Street recapture old 'Magic'

Bruce and band lean into the songs
with no-nonsense vigor. It's about time.
By Greg Kot

On his new album with the E Street Band, "Magic" (Columbia), due out
Tuesday, Bruce Springsteen gets down to business behind a small army
of overdriven guitars.

"This is radio nowhere / Is there anybody alive out there?"

"Radio Nowhere" qualifies as a near-parody of Springsteen-speak with
its references to "the last long American night" and "driving through
the misty rain ... searching for a mystery train." But it's also a
reaffirmation that Springsteen and the E Street Band are still a
pretty good rock band when they want to be. Everything feels just a
little rushed, breathless; even saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who
essentially plays the same solo every time, keeps his contribution
quick and dirty.

"Radio Nowhere" shares a chord progression with Tommy Tutone's 1982
hit "867-5309/Jenny." But it also sets the tone for an album that
sounds every bit as disillusioned as Springsteen's "Darkness on the
Edge of Town" did in 1978. Its characters feel disconnected from home,
family, country, themselves. They wonder what they've become, and why.
"Magic" doesn't resort to war-is-bad administration-bashing. It's a
protest album that evokes rather than preaches.

Central to its tone is that Springsteen and the E Street Band lean
into the songs with no-nonsense vigor. It's about time. The singer and
the E Streeters have been an off-and-on proposition for two decades.
They part ways, get back together and cash in big-time on the road (a
forthcoming tour includes shows Oct. 21-22 at the United Center). But
their prime currency has been nostalgia. They haven't made a great
album together in 23 years. The 2002 Springsteen-E Street reunion
album, "The Rising," embraced Celtic music, gospel and country, and
felt soft.

On "Magic," the Brendan O'Brien production is still big and polished,
but it's not fussy. Saxophones, keyboards and strings mostly provide
ornamentation. The focus is on Max Weinberg's drums and the guitars of
Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren.

The bolder sound suits the subject matter. The songs are crowded with
outcasts and walking wounded. "Gypsy Biker" oozes the menace of an
Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtrack, with harmonica whining
and guitar strings bending with menace. "The Last to Die" ostensibly
chronicles the flight of two desperadoes with a blood-pumping groove.
But it turns on a question that directly addresses an interminable
desert war: "Who will be the last to die for a mistake?"

"Long Walk Home" blasts a war veteran's feeling of abandonment through
the amplifiers. He returns to the town where he was born only to find
the residents are "all rank strangers to me." The values his father
once imparted have vanished. "Devil's Arcade" chronicles a slow,
lonely decline in an inhospitable place, the string arrangement thick
as desert sand. The singer also puts a fresh spin on his love for
classic rock and soul. "Your Own Worst Enemy" is the kind of string-
swathed ballad that Ben E. King might have coveted. Except it's a cold-
sweat nightmare.

"Girls in Their Summer Clothes" glories in Phil Spector/Beach Boys
romanticism, but it seethes with frustration. When the narrator vows
to "burn this town down," it doesn't sound like he's born to run, but
barging into the blackness with a case of lighter fluid.

Even more disquieting images pack the title song. "I'll cut you in
half while you're smilin' at me," the magician declares. The song
turns into a scene out of "War of the Worlds": Citizens flee their
homes, fire spreads and "somebody's hanging in the trees."

Certain songs don't just echo the past, they openly mimic it. "I'll
Work for Your Love" rejiggers the 1973 romantic declaration "I Came
for You." And "Livin' in the Future" swaggers like the second coming
of the 1975 R&B rave-up "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out." But the comforting
sounds are often deceptive. Election day rolls around on the latter
song, and a menacing stranger arrives with "the barrel of a pistol
spinnin' round."

It makes for an album in which Springsteen and the E Street Band
conjure the ghosts of their hardest-hitting music, 1975-80. But the
singer's lyrics don't look back. They are about right now and a scary,
uncertain future.

g...@gregkot.com

From The New York Times:
In Love With Pop, Uneasy With the World
By A. O. SCOTT

Published: September 30, 2007

Asbury Park, N.J.

IT was the last day of summer, but on the boardwalk here it seemed
more like a perfect morning in early July: the Atlantic Ocean sparkled
under a cloudless sky; the humid air was soothed by a soft, salty
breeze. I looked down the empty beach, past the souvenir shops and
snack bars with their fresh paint and new green awnings, toward the
proud Victorian hulk of the old Casino, and felt that I had walked
into a Bruce Springsteen song. (Oh, I don't know. Maybe "Fourth of
July, Asbury Park." Or is that too obvious?)

The feeling, no less potent for being self-induced, had been with me
all morning. Bright and early, me and my girl - my wife of nearly two
decades, that is - had let the screen door slam, dropped off the kids
at school and set out on the open road, blowing through the E-ZPass
lanes on the Garden State Parkway in our Volvo station wagon. We had
an advance copy of Mr. Springsteen's new album, "Magic," in the CD
slot, and most of his back catalog in reserve on the iPod. And now we
were driving down Kingsley, figuring we'd get a latte. One more chance
to make it real. Tramps like us, baby!

Our purpose was not to fantasize but rather to observe the E Street
Band in rehearsal, and then to hear what the man himself had to say
about the new record, the coming tour and whatever else was on his
mind. "Magic" is, musically, one of the most upbeat, accessible
records he has made, even as its themes and stories make it one of his
most political. Once again he is hitting the road as a presidential
election heats up.

"I like coming out on those years," he would tell me later, when we
sat down to talk in a backstage dressing room after the rehearsal.
"Whatever small little bit we can do, that's a good time to do it."

At an age when most rock 'n' rollers, if they're still alive, have
become either tributes to or parodies of their earlier selves, Mr.
Springsteen seems to have settled into an enviable groove, with new
musical forms to explore and an existing body of work that never seems
to get old, with plenty to say and an audience that hangs on his every
word.

In which - as if it weren't already obvious - I include myself. I've
been listening to Bruce Springsteen for a long time, but I can't
pretend that he provided the soundtrack for my youth. I spent my
teenage years in the thrall of punk rock and its various aftermaths
and came to Springsteen late, past the stage of life when his great
anthems of romance, rebellion and escape might have had their most
direct impact. As a result, I associate his work with the sorrows and
satisfactions of adulthood; it's music to grow up to, not out of.

Mr. Springsteen's best songs, it seems to me, are about compromise and
stoicism; disappointment and faith; work, patience and resignation.
They are also, 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.

Moments that tend, not coincidentally, to crystallize within a certain
kind of popular song. A song, let's say, like "Girls in Their Summer
Clothes," which arrives smack in the middle of "Magic" and which the E
Street Band was in the middle of playing when my wife and I tiptoed
through the doors of the Asbury Park Convention Hall. It was a little
after 10; the band was about an hour into its morning rehearsal,
preparing for a tour of North America and Europe that kicks off on
Tuesday in Hartford.

The Convention Hall is a battered, pocket-size arena where, as a
teenager, Mr. Springsteen saw bands like the Who and the Doors. This
morning it was filled with a shimmery, summery sound, as if we had
traveled back 40 years into the mid-'60s sonic landscape of Phil
Spector, Brian Wilson and the Byrds. Steve van Zandt was strumming a
12-string guitar, and the vocal harmonies, the chiming keyboards,
Clarence Clemons's saxophone and Soozie Tyrell's violin combined to
produce a lush orchestral cushion for Mr. Springsteen's voice, which
swooned through a lyric as unabashedly romantic as the song's title.

"I wanted one thing on the record that was the perfect pop universe,"
Mr. Springsteen said, once the band had wandered off and he had
finished an early lunch of granola with fresh fruit and soy milk. It
was two days before his 58th birthday, and he looked trimmer and
tanner than he had the last time I'd seen him, which was on the
JumboTron video screen at Giants Stadium a few years back. "You know,
that day when it's all right there; it's the world that only exists in
pop songs, and once in a while you stumble on it."

Not that "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" is untouched by melancholy.
Its narrator, after all, stands and watches as the girls of the title
"pass me by." "It's the longing, the unrequited longing for that
perfect world," Mr. Springsteen continued. "Pop is funny. It's a
tease. It's an important one, but it's a tease, and therein resides
its beauty and its joke."

And much of "Magic," on first hearing, seems to unfold in a similar
spirit. There is a brightness of sound and a lightness of touch that
are not quite like anything else Mr. Springsteen has done recently. In
the past five years he has released four albums of original material,
a zigzag through new and familiar styles and idioms. "The
Rising" (2002) brought the E Street Band back into the studio after a
long hiatus (their sound updated by the producer Brendan O'Brien) and
answered the trauma of 9/11 with the defiant, redemptive roar of
solid, down-the-middle rock. With "Devils and Dust" (2005) Mr.
Springsteen picked up the thread of Western stories and acoustic
ballads that stretched back through other non-E Street projects like
"The Ghost of Tom Joad" and "Nebraska" (as well as some parts of "The
River"). "The Seeger Sessions," released last year, was an old-time
old-lefty hootenanny, with a big, unruly jug band rollicking through
spirituals, union songs and Dust Bowl ballads.

All of those discs were infused with Mr. Springsteen's bedrock
populism, but none was quite what you would call a pop record. Pop,
though, is the term he and his band mates use, again and again, to
describe "Magic." Mr. Van Zandt, who has been playing and arguing
about music with Mr. Springsteen for 40 years (scholars cite Nov. 3,
1967, as the date of their first meeting), noted that in the past Mr.
Springsteen's more tuneful, playful compositions tended not to make it
onto albums.

"It was nice on this one to start to be a little bit more inclusive,"
he said in a telephone interview a few days after my visit to Asbury
Park, "with a little bit more of the poppier side of things, without
losing any of the integrity, or any of the high standards. That was a
nice surprise, a nice change of pace to include those things and
integrate them into the album, rather than having them be fun to
record and then cast them aside."

For his part, Mr. Sprinsteen said that in writing the songs for
"Magic," he had experienced "a reinfatuation with pop music." "I went
back to some forms that I either hadn't used previously or hadn't used
a lot, which was actual pop productions," he said. "I wrote a lot of
hooks. That was just the way that the songs started to write
themselves, I think because I felt free enough that I wasn't afraid of
the pop music. In the past I wanted to make sure that my music was
tough enough for the stories I was going to tell."

The paradox of "Magic" may be that some of its stories are among the
toughest he has told. The album is sometimes a tease but rarely a
joke. The title track, for instance, comes across as a seductive bit
of carnival patter, something you might have heard on the Asbury Park
boardwalk in the old days. A magician, his voice whispery and
insinuating in a minor key, lures you in with descriptions of his
tricks that grow more sinister with each verse. ("I've got a shiny saw
blade/All I need's a volunteer.") "Trust none of what you hear/And
less of what you see," he warns. And the song's refrain - "This is
what will be" - grows more chilling as you absorb the rest of the
album's nuances and shadows.

You can always trust what you hear on a Bruce Springsteen record
(irony, he notes, is not something he's known for), but in this case
it pays to listen closely, to make note of the darkness, so to speak,
that hovers at the edge of the shiny hooks and harmonies. "I took
these forms and this classic pop language and I threaded it through
with uneasiness," Mr. Springsteen said.

And while the songs on "Magic" characteristically avoid explicit
topical references, there is no mistaking that the source of the
unease is, to a great extent, political. The title track, Mr.
Springsteen explained, is about the manufacture of illusion, about the
Bush administration's stated commitment to creating its own reality.

"This is a record about self-subversion," he told me, about the way
the country has sabotaged and corrupted its ideals and traditions. And
in its own way the album itself is deliberately self-subverting,
troubling its smooth, pleasing surfaces with the blunt acknowledgment
of some rough, unpleasant facts.

"Magic" picks up where "The Rising" left off and takes stock of what
has happened in this country since Sept. 11. Then, the collective
experiences of grief and terror were up front. Now those same emotions
lurk just below the surface, which means that the catharsis of rock
'n' roll uplift is harder to come by. The key words of "The Rising"
were hope, love, strength, faith, and they were grounded in a
collective experience of mourning. There is more loneliness in
"Magic," and, notwithstanding the relaxed pop mood, a lot less
optimism.

The stories told in songs like "Gypsy Biker" and "The Devil's Arcade"
are vignettes of private loss suffered by the lovers and friends of
soldiers whose lives were shattered or ended in Iraq. "The record is a
tallying of cost and of loss," Mr. Springsteen said. "That's the
burden of adulthood, period. But that's the burden of adulthood in
these times, squared."

In conversation, Mr. Springsteen has a lot to say about what has
happened in America over the last six years: "Disheartening and
heartbreaking. Not to mention enraging" is how he sums it up. But his
most direct and powerful statement comes, as you might expect,
onstage. It is not anything he says or sings, but rather a piece of
musical dramaturgy, the apparently simple, technical matter of
shifting from one song to the next.

On the Convention Hall stage, the band handled the new material as
deftly as the chestnuts - after 35 years together, communication is
pretty much effortless - pausing to work out an occasional kink or
adjust the sound mix. But they must have gone over the segue from "The
Rising" to their next number at least a half-dozen times.

"You've got to let that chord sustain. Everybody!" Mr. Springsteen
urged. "It can't die down."

The guitarists had the extra challenge of keeping the sound going
while changing instruments, a series of baton-relay sprints for the
crew whose job was to assist with the switch, until a dissonant organ
ring came in to signal a change of key and the thunderous opening of
"Last to Die." It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Mr.
Springsteen's take on the post-9/11 history of the United States can
be measured in the space between the choruses of those two songs. The
audience is hurled from a rousing exhortation ("Come on up to the
rising") to a grim, familiar question: "Who'll be the last to die for
a mistake?"

"That's why we had to get that very right today," he said later. "You
saw us working on it. That thing has to come down like the world's
falling on you, that first chord. It's got to screech at the end of
'The Rising,' and then it's got to crack, rumble. The whole night is
going to turn on that segue. That's what we're up there for right now,
that 30 seconds."

But the night does not end there. Onstage, "Last to Die" is followed,
as it is on the album, by a song called "Long Walk Home." In the first
verse, the speaker travels to some familiar hometown spots and
experiences an alienation made especially haunting by the language in
which he describes it: "I looked into their faces/They were all rank
strangers to me." That curious, archaic turn of phrase - rank
strangers - evokes an eerie old mountain lament of the same title,
recorded by the Stanley Brothers.

"In that particular song a guy comes back to his town and recognizes
nothing and is recognized by nothing," Mr. Springsteen said. "The
singer in 'Long Walk Home,' that's his experience. His world has
changed. The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought
he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like
strangers. The world that he knew feels totally alien. I think that's
what's happened in this country in the past six years."

And so the song's images of a vanished small town life ("The diner was
shuttered and boarded/With a sign that just said 'gone' ") turn into
metaphors, the last of which is delivered with the clarity and force
that has distinguished Mr. Springsteen's best writing:

My father said "Son, we're

lucky in this town

It's a beautiful place to be born.

It just wraps its arms around you

Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.

You know that flag

flying over the courthouse

Means certain things are set in stone

Who we are, and what we'll do

And what we won't"

It's gonna be a long walk home.

"That's the end of the story we're telling on a nightly basis," Mr.
Springsteen said. "Because that's the way it's supposed to be. And
that's not the way it is right now."

From The Independent UK:
Bruce Springsteen:
Back at his barnstorming best

More than three decades since 'Born to Run' catapulted him to fame,
Bruce Springsteen is back at his barnstorming best. His epic new album
lays bare the fault lines running under contemporary America – and the
tunes are great, too

By Andy Gill

Next Monday sees the release of Bruce Springsteen's new album Magic, a
long-awaited reunion with his old comrades The E Street Band. It
follows a sustained period in which his musical interests have leant
predominantly towards more low-key, folksy settings, with 2005's
Devils and Dust, a sombre series of character studies in the bleak
acoustic manner of Nebraska, succeeded last April by his hootenanny
tribute to the godfather of politicised folk music, The Seeger
Sessions.

Already acclaimed as a return to the ebullient style of those classic
crowd-pleasers Born to Run and Born in the USA, and hailed ahead of
its release as his most significant work in years, it's a great piece
of work, its pumped-up wall of sound and lacquered surfaces disguising
the kind of troubled ruminations on society and morality that have
made Springsteen the pre-eminent political songwriter of his era. Not
that everyone sees it that way, of course. His manager Jon Landau, for
instance - the man who, as a Rolling Stone rock critic, came up with
the now legendary claim: "I have seen rock' & 'roll's future, and its
name is Bruce Springsteen" – has described Magic as "a very bright
record", the primary intention of which is not political. To which one
can but respond in the time-honoured manner of aggrieved NME
letter-writers: "Was he listening to the same record as me?" Songs
such as "Gypsy Biker", " Last to Die", "Devil's Arcade" and "Your Own
Worst Enemy" are not just clearly political, they represent the most
complete and damning denunciation of Bush's foolhardy adventurism in
Iraq yet thrown up by rock music.

But then Springsteen, like any articulate songwriter grappling with
complex issues beyond the pop imperatives of dancing and romancing,
has always been prey to misinterpretation – most spectacularly when
Ronald Reagan's campaign chiefs managed to mis-read "Born in the USA"
as a feelgood patriotic anthem, rather than an indictment of the
country's social decay as seen through the eyes of a Vietnam veteran.
Quite obviously, in that case at least, they absolutely weren't
listening to the same record as the rest of us.

For me, the success of this latest batch of songs resides in the way
Springsteen approaches his subject. Firstly, the big issue is never
mentioned directly, looming intangibly instead, as he depicts the
effects of combatants' death or disability on friends and relatives in
the US – a distancing technique that has the paradoxical effect of
bringing the war closer to home. Secondly, in order to convey the
longer-term ramifications of the conflict, several songs feature
projections into a scarred, uncertain future, rather than into the
romantic past that once dominated his albums. And thirdly, there is –
or there "appears" to be, I should perhaps phrase it in the
circumstances – an underlying theme of illusion and deception running
throughout the album that surely allegorises the ethical
sleight-of-hand that has thrown his country's moral compass out of
alignment. Betrayal is a constant companion in these songs, whether
it's the craven media lambasted in "Radio Nowhere" as Bruce vainly
spins his radio dial searching for "a world with some soul", the "
speculators [who] made their money on the blood you shed" in " Gypsy
Biker", or the "sinkin' sound of somethin' righteous goin' under" as
the groundswell of post-9/11 patriotism is hijacked to perfidious ends
in "Livin' in the Future". As Springsteen warns in the title-track,
"Trust none of what you hear, and less of what you see. "

That advice, however, might well be heeded by those of us – myself
included – who would try to confine Springsteen to their own preferred
interpretation of him. Just as there are many fans – particularly
non-American fans – who like to characterise Bruce as a man of virtue
and probity, one of the last hold-outs for an increasingly tarnished
set of American values, there are doubtless millions of others who'd
prefer to draw a discreet veil over the conscience-tweaking concerns
of The Ghost of Tom Joad, and simply exult in The Boss's capacity for
good-time, boozy rock'*'roll fun. And who is to say they are wrong?

Certainly not Springsteen himself, who remains a firm believer in the
notion of individuals having "multiple selves". During his VH1
Storytellers show in 2005, he recounted an amusing tale of how a
couple had spied him leaving a New Jersey strip-joint and upbraided
him in the parking lot, telling him he shouldn't be there. "I'm not,"
he responded mischievously. "I am simply an errant figment of one of
Bruce's many selves. I drift in the ether over the highways and byways
of the Garden State, often touching down in image-incongruous but fun
places. Bruce does not even know I am missing. He is at home right
now, doing good deeds!" Which is a lot more fun – and considerably
more polite – than just telling them to mind their own damn business,
the inalienable right of any public figure pestered during their
private time.

For a long time, however, Bruce Springsteen would not have turned any
heads as he exited a strip club. An ineffectual high-school student
sustained by dreams of rock'*'roll stardom, he spent his teenage years
performing in local New Jersey bands like The Castiles, Steel Mill,
Sundance Blues Band and Dr Zoom & The Sonic Boom, groups whose names
indicate the diverse range of musics with which he developed a
familiarity: R&B, rock'*'roll, heavy metal, blues, soul, and whatever
psychedelic delights were indulged by Dr Zoom. By the time he was 23,
he had assembled around him the musicians who would form the core of
The E Street Band, and had developed the facility at writing verbose,
Dylanesque songs that originally attracted the attention of John
Hammond, the legendary talent scout who had discovered Billie Holiday,
Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Leonard Cohen.

As with Dylan before him, it initially seemed as if Springsteen would
be another "Hammond's Folly", as his early albums Greetings from
Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle
struggled to find an audience, and the "new Dylan" millstone seemed
like it might become the headstone on his faltering career. By the
time he came to make his third album, he knew it was his last throw of
the dice, and so pulled out all the stops, his band spending months
painstakingly layering the instrumental parts that might help realise
his vision of a combination of Dylan's wordiness, Roy Orbison's
operatic delivery, and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. Finally, after
Clarence Clemons had spent 16 hours piecing together, fragment by
fragment, the sax solo on " Jungleland", Springsteen declared the
album finished, even though by that time he had grown thoroughly sick
of the way it "ate up everyone's life" . Born to Run was released on
25 August 1975. Two months later, Bruce Springsteen achieved the
unprecedented feat of appearing on the covers of both Time and
Newsweek simultaneously.

Born to Run almost instantly became one of rock's landmark works,
while the years of playing small clubs now paid off handsomely, as
Bruce's band became famous as the most thrilling and cathartic live
act on the circuit. But the vertiginous turnaround in his fortunes
also had a seismic effect on Springsteen's life. As he explained in an
insightful interview by Phil Sutcliffe in Mojo: "Fame... is
interesting because it makes you very present and you have a lot of
impact, but it also separates you and makes you very singular. You're
now having an experience that not many other people you know are
having. Its irony is that it carries its own type of loneliness."

His response to that loneliness was evident on the 1978 follow-up
album Darkness on the Edge of Town. Where Born to Run had been brash
and ebullient, an optimistic celebration of rock'*'roll's liberating
spirit and a romanticised indulgence of its street mythology, new
songs like the title-track and "Racing in the Street" were sombre
pieces, haunted by failure, regret and spurned hope, while the
protagonists of "Factory" and "The Promised Land" were frustrated
working men with " death in their eyes" and violence on their mind. In
the three years since he had been catapulted to stardom, Springsteen
had developed the social conscience that increasingly came to dominate
his work, from sources as diverse as John Ford's film of The Grapes of
Wrath and the writings of historian Henry Steele Commager, which he
claimed was: "The first thing I read that made me feel part of a
historic continuum," and which cemented his ideas about civic duty and
collective responsibility. His 1980 work The River offered a
rapprochement of sorts between the popular party anthems of Born to
Run and the blue-collar anxieties of Darkness on the Edge of Town, but
1982's stark, solo acoustic offering Nebraska blindsided fans with its
bleak, brutal depictions of cops, killers, lifers and losers,
desperate men pushed to their limits and beyond. It didn't sell too
well.

Born in the USA, however, sold by the shedload. The 1984 release, a
return to the bi-facial, party'*'ponder approach of The River, remains
one of rock's most successful albums, shifting over 15 million copies
in America alone. The E Street Band climbed back on the tour bus – now
more likely to be a private jet – and hauled their way around the
world's football stadia for a record-breaking concert schedule, during
which Springsteen met model Julianne Phillips, who would become his
first wife in May 1985. Sadly, it would prove a troubled union, the
singer's unhappiness being reflected in the subsequent Tunnel of Love,
an album replete with misgivings, reproach, and the kind of
unfulfilled hopes that on previous releases would have been ascribed
to downtrodden working men.

Ironically, it was during the subsequent Tunnel of Love Express Tour
in 1988 that Springsteen's affair with backing singer Patti Scialfa
would become public knowledge. He and Phillips divorced in 1990, and
Springsteen married Scialfa the following year. With its low-key
arrangements featuring drum machines and synthesiser, Tunnel of Love
was unlike anything else he had recorded, and though it remains a
critical and fan favourite, the circumstances surrounding it have made
him reluctant to perform its songs live.

Happily, his marriage to Scialfa has proven much more durable,
producing three children, now aged between 13 and 17. As so often when
creative types' demons are subdued, however, Springsteen's work has
since largely lacked the bite and edge that once drove his muse.
Subsequent releases such as Human Touch, Lucky Town and the mostly
acoustic, overly finger-wagging The Ghost of Tom Joad were pale,
anaemic affairs by his standards, and the post-9/11 offering The
Rising, despite selling well in his homeland, seemed an ineffectual,
confused response to the tragedy, short on insight and uncertain in
its reaction to events. Once acutely aware of the tarnish on the great
chrome bumper of the American Dream, in common with many of his
countrymen he now seemed to exhibit a degree of difficulty in
visualising his own country as it appeared from outside its borders.

Thankfully, Springsteen's political gyroscope has since re-levelled,
and he played an important part in the Vote For Change campaign
encouraging the young, poor and minorities to register to vote, and
his song "No Surrender" was adopted as John Kerry's campaign anthem
during his unsuccessful run for president. And in 2006, Springsteen
became absorbed in the project honouring the activist folk-singer Pete
Seeger, for so long America's conscience, recording a selection of
politicised traditional songs associated with Seeger in rumbustious
hootenanny manner. It seemed to some like an acknowledgement of his
true heritage, an acceptance that ultimately, he would have to assume
Seeger's mantle as People's Tribune, and that when that time came, he
would do so willingly.

With Magic, he's getting his troops back in line behind him. It's
Springsteen's most complex, textured work in years, as rich as any in
his catalogue, with songs that both challenge, inform and entertain.
He once observed, in his lyrics anthology Songs, that a song's
emotional centre is dependent on the fellowship the writer feels with
his subject, that when a lyric falls perfectly into place, "your voice
disappears into the voices of those you've chosen to write about". On
Magic this happens time and time again, as he proves himself a master
of the empathy required to bring his characters to life in all their
contradictory, multiple selves.

From The Los Angeles Times:
The wild-eyed innocence may be gone,
but the new album rocks like
classic Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band.

By Ann Powers, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 26, 2007

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

"Magic" (Columbia)

There comes a point in most believers' lives where faith transforms
from an inevitability to a choice. Something alters life's usual
patterns -- a personal tragedy, perhaps, or an intellectual
realization -- and what seemed so true suddenly can't be trusted. This
isn't true just for God-fearing people; any creed is vulnerable to
such a crisis. Getting past it can feel like an accomplishment or a
sneaking betrayal, depending on whether you genuinely renew your
convictions or just decide that credulity is the best way to survive.

Few artists must feel the obligation to keep the faith as heavily as
Bruce Springsteen. For nearly 40 years, he's relentlessly returned to
one great subject: that moment when an ordinary person confronts some
higher power, whether it's love or death or the state patrol, and
makes an ennobling if sometimes fatally wrongheaded commitment to act.

Springsteen's fascination with these personal epiphanies has earned
him a massive cult, and why not? His lyrics blend religious and
secular scenarios to describe the various apocalypses his fans might
encounter in their own lives. Rife with Catholic imagery but attached
to the kind of rousing rock that follows directly from American
revivalist and black church traditions, Springsteen turns his tales
into rituals. Each hearing allows the committed fan to renew her
devotion, not just to the Boss, but to her own path.

What happens, though, when the prophet begins to wonder if it's all a
hollow game? That's when choice comes in. On "Magic," Springsteen's
16th studio album and the latest to reunite him with the E Street Band
-- his gospel choir -- he recommits fully to the uplifting oomph of
his rock 'n' roll formula. But a sadder and wiser willfulness
permeates these 12 tracks. It's present in the music, which removes
all gunk from the formulas Springsteen's been using forever and gets
them shining. And it's deeply embedded in lyrics that examine what
happens after illusions are shattered, and life just goes on.

The first doubter Springsteen confronts is himself. "Radio Nowhere,"
the album's lead track and first single, depicts the Boss lost on a
lonely highway, wondering if he can connect to anything pop has to
offer now. The song is discouragingly fogeyish if considered from a
topical standpoint: Tom Petty already wrote a protest song about
corporate radio, and Springsteen's refrain, "I just want to feel some
rhythm," seems an odd complaint, considering how much airtime Kanye
West and Beyoncé get these days. But as an opening invocation, "Radio
Nowhere" gains force. Producer Brendan O'Brien compresses the nine-
piece E Street Band's contributions into a single groove, all
seemingly emanating form Nils Lofgren's choogling guitar riff. The
circular structure Springsteen often employs -- in which one phrase
tumbles into another like Jack Kerouac's unfurling scroll -- takes his
words beyond surface meaning. The chanted refrain, which soon
transforms to "I just want to feel your rhythm," signals entry into
that sacred zone where the communal clout of the E Street Band turns
worn rock tropes into revelations.

From that point on, "Magic" unfolds beyond any reference point besides
Springsteen's own body of work -- which makes sense, since it's a

ritual object, with every song designed to fit into the arena shows
where devotees will soon commune.

Elements of old favorites continually surface -- "Livin' in the
Future" resurrects the jumping horns of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,"
there's a whiff of "I Wanna Marry You" around "Girls in Their Summer
Clothes," the descending chorus of "Long Walk Home" reaches back to
"My Hometown." Under O'Brien's relentlessly strict guidance (this is
one clean, tight-sounding record), every E Streeter finds his Zen: the
keyboards build moodily, sax man Clarence Clemons blusters with more
focus than usual, those Lofgren/Steve Van Zandt guitar riffs rip, and
Max Weinberg is a bighearted machine on the drums.

And though the songs on "Magic" tell stories, only one -- the eerie
"Devil's Arcade," in which a lover pleads with the ghost, perhaps
living, of her desert- damaged soldier boy -- aims for the specificity
of earlier ballads such as "Meeting Across the River" or "Sinaloa
Cowboys."

Instead, some revisit very familiar scenarios, like a girl's front
porch or a highway at night, but inject much more ambiguity into the
scenes. Others, like "Your Own Worst Enemy" and the title track,
aren't story songs at all. They're extended metaphors, exploring the
emotional experience of self-questioning in ways that end up feeling
surprisingly personal.

Fans have had decades of fun scouring the Jersey shore for the origins
of Springsteen's characters, but those he gives life to on "Magic"
could exist in many contexts. The manipulative ingénue in "You'll Be
Comin' Down" could be Marilyn or Britney; the lost bohemian warrior of
"Gypsy Biker" might be a war casualty, but by verse three he seems to
have transformed into Terry Magovern, Springsteen's longtime personal
assistant, who died in July (he's also the subject of the hidden track
"Terry's Song").

"Magic" is a record of this moment -- Springsteen makes quiet
reference throughout to what he sees as an errant Bush administration
and, alternately, to a marriage at sometimes shaky midlife -- but it
also aims for timelessness.

It's the way Springsteen injects his American bible stories with the
air of disbelief that makes "Magic" a truly mature and memorable
album. He knows his fans need that rush, that jump outside their own
feelings of disappointment and limitation, that he's given them for so
long. Yet more and more, he seems to realize that disappointment and
limitation are his métier, and that sometimes a giant saxophone fill
and a chorus about hungry hearts can't solve the problem. "Magic"
bares its own devices beautifully, providing a kind of transcendence
that allows for listeners to keep their feet on the ground. Believe in
it, if you choose.

ann.pow...@latimes.com

From The New York Post:
BRUCE & THE E STREET GRAND -
THE BOSS' 'MAGIC' ACT
By DAN AQUILANTE

MUSICAL styles flip fast, but Bruce Springsteen, who turned 58 on Sunday,
didn't reinvent himself - or his sound - for his new album "Magic." The
record - yes, vinyl - is in stores today.

Like a throwback to the '80s, or the best tunes in Springsteen's songbook,
"Magic" tames the wild world we live in through simple yet vivid
story-songs - the kind of gritty American poetry that Woody Guthrie
pioneered.

That said, "Magic" is a kick-ass rock record that finds its inspiration and
musical references on E Street - from the threeguitar attack and bell-like
piano to the considerable sax appeal of Clarence Clemons. It's the Boss'
first album with the E Street Band since 2002's "The Rising." Springsteen
knows how good this record is - he demonstrated it last night with a
rehearsal show in Asbury Park.

He's so pleased with it, in fact, that he moved up the vinyl release from
the CD's official Oct. 2 release date.

While today's specialty drop does little for sales, by releasing the LP
platter before the Recording Academy's Sept. 30 cutoff date, "Magic" becomes
eligible for this year's Grammy consideration.

Bruce has won 15 Grammys over the years, but he's never snagged the top
prize - Album of the Year.

In a lackluster 2007, "Magic" has considerable charm and will be a very
strong contender indeed at Grammy's big 50thanniversary celebration in
February.

He may have to work on an acceptance speech, but that's all he has to work
on. For the record, he and his longtime E Street partners have their sound
honed to a razor's edge.

Opener "Radio Nowhere" starts with a crash of guitars against Max Weinberg's
powerhouse drumming. Bruce's singing is dramatic as he describes sitting at
the wheel, driving through the night, trying to find his way home.

Alone and on the road, he takes comfort in rock 'n' roll.

Springsteen conjures pleading in his voice. There's urgency for sweet music,
and then the Big Man peppers the melody with a searing sax solo. It's
perfect.

"Radio Nowhere" sets the tone of the record, from the classic Springsteen
riffs on the American experience of being on the road, trying to get back
home.

While themes like the fleeting nature of youth and beauty pop up in "You'll
Be Coming Down" and the notion of personal responsibility is at the core of
"Your Own Worst Enemy," the getbackhome nostalgia is a main ingredient in
"Magic." On the breezy "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," Bruce paints a
portrait of small-town life down the Jersey shore; in "Gypsy Biker" there's
a longing for the freedom of a tank of gas and from the ties that bind; in
"I'll Work For Your Love," lust wrestles with Catholic guilt.

It's all simple, yet powerful stuff.

The best song on this excellent record is "Living in the Future." With solid
musical references to the E Street classic "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out," it's a
standout.

Bruce's vocals are bouncy and syncopated when delivering lines like "Woke up
election day/ Sky's gunpowder grey/ Beneath the dirty sun/ I whistle my time
away." With a melody like this - complete with tailgating Clemons sax solo
and the sing-song "Na na na na-nas" - the song's darker side might be
missed.

Throughout the record Springsteen obscures and disguises his politics with
heartland rock and descriptive lyrics. Take the powerful ballad "Long Walk
Home." While this small-town snapshot sounds like he's again trying to
capture lost America he redirects you with the midsong verse: "Your flag
flyin' over the courthouse/ Means certain things are set in stone/ Who we
are, what we'll do and what we won't / It's gonna be a long walk home." Many
of the lyrics here can be taken on a number of levels, from poetry to
protest, but what all of these songs share is a feeling of heart and soul
that demands to be played live. Springsteen and company will get their
chance when they play the Garden Oct. 17 and 18.

----

Bruce Springsteen

"Magic"

[****] (Four stars)

Columbia

From City Journal:
The Jena Dodge

By Heather Mac Donald

Demonstrators and the media avoid the stubborn truths

of black social breakdown.

24 September 2007

Let’s assume the worst about Jena, Louisiana, and the charges of attempted murder brought against five black youths for beating a white student unconscious last December: that the district attorney’s indictments were motivated by rank racism, and that the racial tensions in this town of 3,000 are exclusively the product of white animus against blacks. Does it follow that this latest object of frenzy on the media’s racism beat is emblematic of America’s judicial system or the state of race relations today?

That is certainly what the ever-expanding army of racial victimologists and their media enablers would have you believe. Since the Jena story became international news last week, the media, the advocates, and pandering politicians have erupted in an outpouring of seeming joy at the alleged proof—after so much diligent trolling for evidence—that America remains a racist country. Senator Hillary Clinton told the NAACP: “This case reminds us that the scales of justice are seriously out of balance when it comes to charging, sentencing, and punishing African Americans.” Senator Christopher Dodd declared that Jena reveals that “de facto segregation”—in the spirit of Jim Crow—“is still very real” in many parts of America. Britain’s Observer announced that Jena shows “how lightly sleep the demons of racial prejudice in America’s deep south.” The New York Times has designated Jena “a high profile arena in the debate on racial bias in the judicial system”—a debate that perhaps not everyone was aware that we were having. J. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said: “I think a lot of people recognize that the criminal justice system grinds down people of color every day. Oftentimes, it’s nameless, it’s faceless. . . . People see Jena as the tip of the iceberg and ask: What lies beneath?” Needless to say, the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have vowed with Biblical thunder to avenge the Jena innocents and force America to own up to its mistreatment of blacks.

Unquestionably, the attempted murder charges (which were later dropped for four of the defendants, while a sixth assailant was booked as a juvenile) merit scrutiny. If the indictment in fact resulted from discrimination, then the prosecutor would deserve the strongest punishment—debarment at the very least and harsh federal penalties for civil rights violations. And the incident that seems to have led to the group assault on the white student—three students’ hanging of nooses from a school tree where white teens congregated—was a despicable provocation. If adults in Jena condoned such incendiary behavior, then these grown-up enablers truly are throwbacks to a vicious American past, and all citizens should revile them. There is evidence, however, that such adolescent cruelty is not official policy. The school principal told a black student who had inquired about the segregated tree that he could sit there or anywhere else he pleased.

But even if the worst possible interpretation of these events is merited, the massive international attention to this tiny town would seem vastly disproportionate to the cause, unless Jena stands for a more widespread problem. The idea behind the protests and the politicians’ exploitation of them is that just as these five youths were overcharged, the hundreds of thousands of blacks in prison are also the victims of systemic abuse. But for institutional racism, the black prison population would be much smaller.

This is an old complaint, for which no proof has ever been offered, Hillary Clinton’s irresponsible statement notwithstanding. The usual evidence in support of the charge that the criminal laws discriminate against blacks is the far stiffer sentences for selling and possessing crack cocaine compared with powdered cocaine. But that colorblind sentencing regimen, which dates from 1986, was a heartfelt effort to protect the overwhelmingly black victims of crack, not to penalize them. Black liberals such as Congressman Charles Rangel were loudest in sounding the alarm about the effects of crack in the black ghetto. Not even the most deluded racial apologists have ever explicitly suggested that racial bias motivated Congress’s efforts to combat a drug that results in much higher rates of violence among dealers and users, quicker and more onerous addiction, and more emergency room visits than its powdered cousin.

The reason that the black incarceration rate is the highest in the country is that blacks have the highest crime rate—by a long shot. Don’t trust the police, prosecutors, or judges to give a fair picture of black crime? Then go where the bodies are. Los Angeles is representative. In the first seven months of 2007, blacks in Los Angeles were murdered at a rate ten times that of whites and Asians. Who’s killing them? It’s not whites and Asians. While a minor proportion of the assailants of blacks are Hispanic, the vast majority are black themselves. Nationally, blacks commit murder at about eight times the frequency of whites. In New York, any given violent crime is 13 times more likely to have been committed by a black person than by a white person, according to the reports of victims and witnesses. Though they are only 24 percent of the city’s population, blacks committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in New York last year. Whites, who make up 34.5 percent of New Yorkers, committed only 5.3 percent of violent crimes. These ratios are similar across the country. In Los Angeles, blacks committed 41 percent of all robberies in 2001, according to victims’ descriptions, though they constitute only 11 percent of the city’s population. Robbery victims identified whites, who make up 30 percent of the Los Angeles population, just 4 percent of the time.

When attacking the justice system, racial agitators work mightily to change the subject from violence to drugs, using their flimsy argument that crack cocaine penalties are too high. But the vast preponderance of prisoners are in the pen for violence and property crime. In 2003, 52 percent of inmates in state prisons were serving time for violent offenses, 21 percent for property offenses, and only 20 percent for drug offenses. To be sure, black incarceration rates are off the charts. Black men were 41 percent of the more than 2 million men in federal, state, and local prisons at midyear 2006. At the end of 2005, there were 3,145 prison inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared with 1,244 inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 471 inmates per 100,000 white males. Is that because violent and property crime is overpenalized, as race advocates sometimes argue? No. Despite the advocates’ constant complaints about three-strikes laws, the criminal justice system actually underpenalizes crime because of inadequate prison space. Prosecutors cut deals to lessen sentences; sheriffs overseeing local jails regularly devise new schemes for dumping offenders back on the street to make room for the next batch. And in any case, even if penalties for particular offenses were too draconian, the punishments affect all offenders the same.

No one in the Jena stampede dares whisper a word about black crime, because it undercuts the portrait of a victimized race. You can listen to every protest across the country glorifying the “Jena Six” and you will never hear an acknowledgement of the massive social breakdown that is the black crime rate: no mention of the violence in inner-city schools that black students commit overwhelmingly; no mention of the rising homicides in midsize cities that young black males commit when they feel “disrespected.” It is not racism that is putting black men in jail; it’s their own behavior.

What about the broader significance of Jena? Again, assuming for the sake of argument that this minuscule Louisiana town seethes with the crudest bigotry, held uniquely by whites against integration-seeking blacks, is Jena’s supposed state of affairs a microcosm of America? To the contrary: there is not a single elite institution in the country that is not twisting itself into knots in favor of African-Americans. Every minimally selective college is desperately seeking to enroll more black students. Boosting black enrollment requires drastically lowering a college’s admissions criteria to overcome the intractable 200-point SAT gap between black and white high school students, but every college institutes such double standards for the sake of “diversity.” Any black student who graduates from high school with decent grades and respectable SATs will leapfrog over thousands of more qualified white and Asian students right into the Ivy League. Blacks are also the hottest commodity for exclusive private schools that serve as training grounds for the Ivies. Andover, Exeter, Choate, and every other fancy prep and day school practice the same double standards in their eagerness to admit African-American students. After college, law schools, business schools, medical schools, engineering schools, and others accept black students whose test scores would disqualify them if they were white or Asian.

The preferences continue into the professions. Wall Street law firms annually flagellate themselves over their lack of proportional representation of black associates and partners, even though the number of blacks who graduate from law school with grades and bar-exam scores comparable with the firms’ white hires is negligible. The lack of comparably qualified black candidates does not stop the law partnerships from hiring black associates, though. Corporations have saddled themselves with massive “diversity” bureaucracies whose only function is to justify hiring and promoting less qualified African-Americans and Hispanics. Newspapers, TV stations, and advertisers put enormous pressure on themselves to have blacks on their staffs and to show black faces to the world.

In short, the opportunities for blacks to roar ahead in the economy if they stay out of trouble, study, and apply themselves are legion, but the numbers taking advantage of these opportunities are not. California’s state superintendent of public instruction broke a longstanding taboo this August by pointing out that middle-class black students in the state score worse on math and English than poor white and Asian students—a disparity that applies across the country. The usual poverty excuse for black underachievement does not hold up.

The Jena protesters will go home in denial of these truths. In fact, the purpose of such mass celebrations—and that is indeed what they are—is to make sure that attention stays far away from the actual problems holding blacks back. Astronomical rates of black criminality are not the only topic that the Jena rallies have obscured. No one wallowing in Jena promotion has had the courage to speak about an even more important crisis, the breakdown of marriage. The nearly 70 percent national illegitimacy rate for blacks—a number that can approach 90 percent in inner cities—is a cataclysm. Its consequences go far beyond the harm to individual black children—especially boys—who grow up without fathers. The real poison of the marriage crisis is the message it sends to young men about personal responsibility. The first duty in civil society is toward one’s own children; everything else is built around it. But when boys are raised without any expectations that they will have to support their children and marry the mother of those children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson about responsibility. They also are freed from the civilizing force of the marriage requirement, which pressures young men to become attractive mates. With enough support, individuals can overcome the moral perils of the illegitimacy culture, but given the prevalence of black crime and disaffiliation from the working world, it’s clear that not enough young men are finding ways to do so.

The race industry will try to keep Jena in the media and political spotlight for as long as possible, and to reinforce the notion that this episode exemplifies blacks’ situation in America. But if there were many other instances of (arguable) overcharging for black crime, we would have heard about them by now. The orgy of Jena coverage will not just fail to improve the lagging performance of blacks; it will impede such improvement by strengthening the victim mentality. Both whites and blacks are complicit in this sabotage. These ecstatic festivals of racism-bashing are a crippling ritual in the codependency between absolution-seeking whites and angry blacks, a phenomenon that Shelby Steele has powerfully analyzed. The demonstrators exhibit a palpable desire for the moral clarity of the civil rights era, as do the reporters, who have covered their every utterance. “This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,” one student told the New York Times. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves.”

He’s right; there has been nothing like Selma or Montgomery for the current generation, because much of America has accomplished almost an about-face on race since the 1950s. The current martyrs to American bigotry are a far cry from Rosa Parks. Like the “Jena Six,” they tend to have committed acts of violence or other crimes for which they are allegedly being excessively punished. Think of the six high school hooligans from Decatur, Illinois, whom Jesse Jackson tried to beatify in 1999 when their schools expelled them for a violent stadium fight; their backgrounds included robbery, trespassing, truancy, and failing whole school years. We are only belatedly learning that Mychal Bell, the sole member of the “Jena Six” to have been prosecuted for knocking out and kicking Justin Barker, has a previous arrest record that includes battery and property damage. Barker’s injuries led to $14,000 in medical bills, according to a lawyer.

The Jena situation is undoubtedly a bit more complex than the tale that the press has woven of hate-filled whites and peace-loving blacks. But even if it were not, the catharsis that this morality play has offered to its participants is spurious. The real tragedy is the dysfunctional culture that holds back too many blacks from seizing the many opportunities open to them.