David Brooks on Springsteen: The Power of the Particular

[XemaSab]

They say you’ve never really seen a Bruce Springsteen concert until you’ve seen one in Europe, so some friends and I threw financial sanity to the winds and went to follow him around Spain and France. In Madrid, for example, we were rewarded with a show that lasted 3 hours and 48 minutes, possibly the longest Springsteen concert on record and one of the best. But what really fascinated me were the crowds.

Springsteen crowds in the U.S. are hitting their AARP years, or deep into them. In Europe, the fans are much younger. The passion among the American devotees is frenzied, bordering on cultish. The intensity of the European audiences is two standard deviations higher. The Europeans produce an outpouring of noise and movement that sometimes overshadows what’s happening onstage.

Here were audiences in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula singing word for word about Highway 9 or Greasy Lake or some other exotic locale on the Jersey Shore. They held up signs requesting songs from the deepest and most distinctly American recesses of Springsteen’s repertoire.

The oddest moment came midconcert when I looked across the football stadium and saw 56,000 enraptured Spaniards, pumping their fists in the air in fervent unison and bellowing at the top of their lungs, “I was born in the U.S.A.! I was born in the U.S.A.!”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/opinion/brooks-the-power-of-the-particular.html?_r=2&hp

[JI7]

1. the music marketed towards younger people in the US is horrible

[freshwest]

2. Awesome. Love It. 'Born in the USA' was a good anti-war song...

Bruce Springsteen - Born in the USA (Live Estadi Olimpic Barcelona 2012)


Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
to go and kill the yellow man
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "son don't you understand now"
Had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there he's all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now
Down in the shadow of penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go

Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A.

A little bit slower rendition than the one I've had in my head all these years, but he's still great. Thanks for the thread.

[They_Live]

3. I don't think that David Brooks understands

What that song is about.

[freshwest]

4. Takes all kinds.

[XemaSab]

5. He may not get that song

but I think he's got some insights about what people like about The Boss, and that Romney and Obama would do well to heed his insights.

[Fumesucker]

6. Brooks is a duplicitous twerp with a (slightly) hidden Republican agenda..

Brooks reliably comes down on the side of the Republicans after making a big show of analyzing everything from a "moderate centrist" perspective..

The polar opposite of "shrill" uncomfortable truth tellers, Bobo Brooks tells comforting lies, well comforting to the 1% anyway.

Matt Taibbi pretty well disassembles Brooks in this piece...

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/04/10/brooks-let-them-eat-work/

I had to read this thing twice before it registered that Brooks was actually saying that he was rooting for the rich against the poor. If he keeps this up, he’s going to make his way into the Guinness Book for having extended his tongue at least a foot and a half farther up the ass of the Times’s Upper East Side readership than any previous pundit in journalistic history. But then you come to this last line of his, in which he claims that “for the first time in history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people,” and you find yourself almost speechless.

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.

[Blue_Tires]

8. Charles Pierce takes down Brooks regularly, too

[magical thyme]

9. thank you for this link

Here I always thought Brooks was just kindofa dumbass, but essentially nice, schmuck and useful idiot.

Wow. Simply fucking wow!!!!! The rich are more industrious than the poor?!?! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!

Playing golf, going to conferences for 4 hour mornings in perennially beautiful, beachfront meccas, sitting in meetings.... is WORK?!?!

WHAT A PRICK. WHAT A MOTHERFUCKING, DESPICABLE LOW-LIFE SCUM HE IS. Amazing. Simply amazing...

thank dog I no longer watch stupid sunday morning political shows. I might destroy my little teevee...

[Ghost of Tom Joad]

7. Interesting, must be nice to have the money to follow Springsteen around Europe but

he should have done a little more research on Springsteen and how and why the 'Darkness' album came about.