The Boss was born to run

The Boss apparently WAS born to run…

Run far, far away from the exclusive sales deal his management team signed with Wal-Mart on a “Greatest Hits” album that hit store shelves earlier this month. The New York Times shares this:

On Jan. 13 a $10 collection of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s “Greatest Hits” — 11 songs from a 1995 hits anthology, as well as “Radio Nowhere” from “Magic” — went on sale exclusively at Wal-Mart. Since Wal-Mart has been accused of anti-union practices by Human Rights Watch, among others, and has paid large fines for violating labor laws, the announcement prompted online criticisms like the one from asroma on the fan site backstreets.com: “Bruce is doing biz with Wal-Mart? Kind of goes against everything he stands for.”

Springsteen certainly isn’t the first to sign such an exclusive sales deal - AC/DC released its new Black Ice album late last year exclusively through Wal-Mart, a decision that racked up huge number for the slightly aged rockers. In fact, Black Ice nearly went platinum in just one week.

Still, fans of The Boss understandably have a high opinion of the legend and those things that he stands for (hello..."Born in the U.S.A.” anyone?), so let’s give Mr. Springsteen some credit for acknowledging the fact that he went into business with the Devil - or a giant multi-national corporation rife with labor law violations, discrimination, an allergy to American-made products, etc., etc.

Mr. Springsteen said the decision was made too hastily. “We were in the middle of doing a lot of things, it kind of came down and, really, we didn’t vet it the way we usually do,” he said. “We just dropped the ball on it.” Instead of offering the exclusive collection to Wal-Mart, “given its labor history, it was something that if we’d thought about it a little longer, we’d have done something different.” He added, “It was a mistake. Our batting average is usually very good, but we missed that one. Fans will call you on that stuff, as it should be.”

So forgive him, check out his new album Working on a Dream (NOT a Wal-Mart exclusive), enjoy Bruce this Super Bowl Sunday, and go Cardinals.

The Rock Laureate [New York Times]

AT 9 o’clock on a recent morning Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band were already half an hour into a rehearsal at the rock club Terminal 5 in Manhattan. As N.F.L. executives and a television production team watched, they were tightening their miniset of four songs — dropping verses, streamlining segues — to fit their 12-minute slot as the halftime entertainment Sunday at Super Bowl XLIII, expected to reach tens of millions of viewers.

“My take on the Super Bowl?” Mr. Springsteen said after rehearsal. “Fundamentally it’s a 12-minute party.”

Few musicians anywhere consummate symbolic occasions and mass events better than Mr. Springsteen. He’s used to working on a stadium scale, and for decades his concerts have been nonstop singalongs that perfectly embody the yearning for community in his lyrics. In an era when pop hits can be as ephemeral as a deleted MP3 file, Mr. Springsteen has spent much of his career laboring to write durable songs about American dreams, from “Born to Run” to “Promised Land.”

While his latest seven-album contract with Columbia Records is worth a reported $110 million, he still comes across as a working-class guy from New Jersey, invoking a compassionate populism as he sings about jobs, families and everyday life and savors the company of his longtime buddies in the E Street Band. He has the gravitas to lead off an inaugural concert and the gusto to rock the Super Bowl. In between he released a new studio album, “Working on a Dream.”

Mr. Springsteen still reaches for big, symbolic statements and gets called on to make them. “Those moments are opportunities for a very heightened kind of communication,” he said.

Two weeks ago, in another nationwide telecast, he took up his longtime role as a voice of America at “We Are One,” the all-star opening ceremony and concert for President Obama’s inauguration, before hundreds of thousands of people at the Lincoln Memorial and millions on television and online. Mr. Springsteen and a choir sang “The Rising,” a song about sacrifice and redemption on Sept. 11.

At a New York City Obama fund-raiser in October that Mr. Springsteen attended, Mr. Obama said, “The reason I’m running for president is because I can’t be Bruce Springsteen.” Mr. Springsteen played “The Rising” at campaign events in battleground states, including a rally in Cleveland two days before the election.

“Once you start doing that kind of writing, it feeds off itself,” Mr. Springsteen said. “You write ‘The Rising’ for this, it gets picked up and used for that, so you end up here. If someone had told me in 2001 that ‘you’re going to sing this song at the inaugural concert for the first African-American president,’ I’d have said, ‘Huh?’ ” He laughed.

“But eight years go by, and that’s where you find yourself. You’re in there, you’re swimming in the current of history and your music is doing the same thing.”

He continued: “A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea: What is it? What does it mean? ‘Promised Land,’ ‘Badlands,’ I’ve seen people singing those songs back to me all over the world. I’d seen that country on a grass-roots level through the ’80s, since I was a teenager. And I met people who were always working toward the country being that kind of place. But on a national level it always seemed very far away.

Check out the rest of the Times article here.

Posted by Corey Himrod on Friday, January 30, 2009

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