Why is bruce springsteen so popular

The language of epiphany and rebirth, echoing a religion-conversion narrative, repeats itself even now. Salon's Joan Walsh called the Springsteen show she attended "a thoroughgoing, transcendent exercise in communal grief and joy" and concluded: "If there were a church like this, I'd be there every Sunday.

In his interviews with fans, Cavicchi found the phrases "religious experience" and "spiritual experience" appearing again and again. Some fans will tolerate criticism and accept that there's a leap of faith involved. In his essay collection 31 Songs, Nick Hornby concedes that his favourite ever song, Thunder Road , is "overwrought", "po-faced" and "corny", but argues that it "knows how I feel and who I am, and that, in the end, is one of the consolations of art.

Say he's a ham. Say his lyrics are too obvious — as Hornby notes, "surely the word 'redemption' is to be avoided like the plague when you're writing about redemption".

Smart Springsteen fans won't say "no" but "yes, so what? He gives you license to be ridiculous yourself, however old you are. I think I like this Bruce Springsteen. Not the man I grew up perceiving as an icon of that dreadful, bogus concept "authenticity" and the hoary, blokey mythology of "rock'n'roll", but the pop star who turns people who thought they'd outgrown this into screaming kids, going home to scrawl his name on their exercise book with hearts around it, or write articles that end with exclamation marks.

Slate's Stephen Metcalf talks about "peeling back all the layers of awful heartland authenticity and rediscovering the old Jersey bullshitter underneath". He doesn't mean the cynical, numbing, everyday bullshit we all deal with but a joyous, transcendent, suspension-of-disbelief bullshit that invites you to surrender for a couple of hours.

I may not be right there on the front row but that's the kind of bullshit I can't help but admire. Nonetheless, it seemed Bruce lost a portion of that fan base in the s. However in Bruce Springsteen released the album Born to Run which turned him into one of the biggest rock stars in the world. He was the only rock star to have ever appeared on both the cover of Time and Newsweek magazines in the same week.

His future manager John Landau was quoted as saying he had seen the future of rock and roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen. In the s, from the Born to Run album on, it was impossible to get a Bruce Springsteen concert. That album was followed by the legendary Darkness on the Edge of Town tour in which tickets to see Bruce Springsteen were mail order only.

Bruce Springsteen was becoming more popular with each year passing by. In when he released the two record set album The River, he continued to perform in front of sold-out audiences leaving millions of people wishing they could only just get a ticket. They were written from an artist only in his twenties.

An artist who had yet lived a long life. Yet nothing that he had wrote was very political at all. When Bruce Springsteen released the album Nebraska audiences began to see signs of an artist digging into history and becoming more politically aware. That political awareness and a memory of what it was like growing up in the 60s and seeing his friends and neighbors shipped off to Vietnam resulted in the Born in the U.

Even a U. Nonetheless in , Bruce Springsteen had become bigger than Elvis Presley. From a commercial standpoint, Bruce Springsteen was selling out stadiums around the world. He was the most popular musical artist of the time. Authenticity then rose again, with his album "Western Stars" having the greatest level of authenticity across his entire career up to that point. August 16, By Katie Bohn. Last Updated September 20, There are the tunes obviously. Springsteen can flick up his collar and rock as hard as musicians half his age while also delivering ballads of extraordinary depth and tenderness.

And there is that dogged stage presence. Six decades into his career, by rights, he ought to be burned out, and washed up, and yet, every time he strides from the wings, it's with a swagger that simply can't be faked. Most of all, though, his appeal is surely rooted in a belief in the transformative power of rock and roll.

Springsteen comes not to preach or to offer a shoulder upon which to figuratively sob. But he does want to communicate with his followers at a deeply emotional level — beneath the sweat and the strut, he is prepared to wear his heart, unflinchingly and uncynically, on his sleeve. In an age when so much in the culture feels faked or phoned-in, this arguably makes him unique.

Springsteen is per cent real and, to Irish audiences, that continues to prove irresistible. Here, then, are ten qualities that make Springsteen "The Boss". Springsteen concerts routinely stretch past three and a half hours — and sometimes go on much longer. In rock and roll, as in life, there's an argument one can have too much of a good thing.

On his tour of Ireland, for instance, he reprised, in its entirety, his landmark Darkness On The Edge of Town album, digging out obscurities without it feeling like an indulgence. His performances are epic in an era when rock stars seem increasingly small and irrelevant. And yet, so imbued are they with pain and yearning, blood and sweat, they feel ageless. The urge to slip free of the constraints of small town claustrophobia, the wish that our lives that turned out different, the ennui that comes as you grow older and realise you can never truly go back….

Let's not pretend Springsteen has never had a misstep. Born In The USA, his juggernaut, suffered from terrible eighties production — the synths on Glory Days, for instance, would not have felt out of place on a Level 42 dirge.