Bruce Sringsteen names the 11 songs that define the true meaning of music: “Inspired”
Music is far more than pretty melodies that paint colour onto silence, not that they’d need to be more than that to make them worthwhile. Bruce Springsteen thinks that truly great pieces of music reach something close to a semblance of the meaning of life. Only someone who hasn’t basked in ‘Born to Run’, 11 pints deep into a wedding, would argue that he’s being pretentious with that remark.
As his hero Bob Dylan once wrote, “Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic.” And, in turn, Bruce Springsteen wrote, “Bob Dylan is the father of my country.“
From the get-go, the blue-collar Boss was moved by the power of pop music and its ability to illuminate society. “Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home were not only great records, but they were the first time I can remember being exposed to a truthful vision of the place I lived. The darkness and light were all there, the veil of illusion and deception ripped aside,“ Springsteen wrote in his memoir, also titled Born to Run.
Appraising Dylan’s mighty appetite, at such a young age, to put justice at the core of his songs, Springsteen concluded, “He put his boot on the stultifying politeness and daily routine that covered corruption and decay. The world he described was all on view, in my little town, and spread out over the television that beamed into our isolated homes, but it went uncommented on and silently tolerated. He inspired me and gave me hope.” Nobody had come close to doing that until then.
Thereafter, the young New Jersey songwriter looked to emulate his hero and create a potent world of music where four chords and the truth were at the crux of creativity. Of course, this didn’t mean being political per se, but bolstering his songs with a literary depth that had something to say about the world beyond basic platitudes became his outlook. He typified that with epics like ‘Atlantic City‘ that gaze clear-eyed at the illusory ways of the American Dream.
He’s far from being alone in attempting to unearth the depths of music, and he’s aware that it takes all strokes. “The purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips,” Springsteen said when delivering a keynote address at SXSW regarding the meaning of modern music in 2012.
”There is no right way, no pure way, of doing. There is just doing,” the electric star who loves Suicide just as much as he loves Stravinsky said with considered pride.
As far as he is concerned, the songs that achieve this mystic “purity of human expression” include everything from Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ to the beautiful Charlie Rich love song on the bread-line, ‘Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs’. Springsteen listened to the former every night while he was making Born to Run, hoping to tap into its depth and complex arrangement, in a bid to imbue his own songs with a smattering of its wonder.
He achieved this with aplomb but is quick to cite that he’s just “an average guy with a slightly above average gift.” And all future songwriters following in his footsteps should remember to “treat [music] like it’s all that we have, and then remember: it’s only rock and roll.”
That strange paradox of paramountcy and punk abounds in other entries that talked about with religiosity, like Public Enemy’s classic ‘Fight the Power’. Speaking about the track, he commented, that they were the only act since Elvis Presley that the world (or maybe the alternative world) seemed to agree on.
So, while he was well aware that the 11 tracks put forth were firmly just his opinion, these are th anthems that, at the very least, showed the Boss the true meaning of music. Which he imparted to the future with the following advice: “So, rumble, young musicians, rumble. Open your ears and open your hearts. Don’t take yourself too seriously, and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have ironclad confidence, but doubt – it keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town, and, you suck!”
Somehow, the 11 songs below seized that duality with rarified aplomb. Have any followed since?
Bruce Springsteen and 11 songs that show the meaning of music:
- ‘This Land is Your Land’ – Woody Guthrie
- ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’ – The Animals
- ‘This Diamond Ring’ – Gary Lewis and the Playboys
- ‘Crying’ – Roy Orbison
- ‘Be My Baby’ – The Ronnettes
- ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ – Bob Dylan
- ‘Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs’ – Charlie Rich
- ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It’ – Hank Williams
- ‘Soul Man’ – Sam and Dave
- ‘I Wanna Rock And Roll All Nite’ – Kiss
- ‘Fight the Power’ – Public Enemy
