On Only The Strong Survive, And Tricks

Roses in the Rain #11

Bruce Springsteen and the Fake Video Band

NOTE: I debated writing this because Caryn Rose has already said much of it far better than I can in her review of Only The Strong Survive. I highly recommend it. I wrote this anyway, because a nerd’s gonna nerd.

There’s a very thin line between authenticity and illusion. 

Bruce Springsteen lives on that line. He has written and performed so much incredible music that feels both personal and profoundly universal. Yet as he explained in his Broadway show, there’s always a little bit of magic involved in what he does, and I don’t mean the kind with the pointy-eared wizards.

“Now I come from a boardwalk town where everything is tinged with just a bit of fraud,” he said. “So am I. I wasn't any race-car-driving rebel, I wasn't any corner street punk. I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park. But I held four clean aces. I had youth, I had a decade of hardcore bar band experience already behind me. I had a great group of musicians and friends who really knew my playing style, and I had a magic trick.”

What happens when you suddenly know how the trick works? You can still watch in awe of the craft. You can even get carried away and forget for a second everything you know, somehow believing that this one time, out of all the many times, you’ve seen the inexplicable. 

But when the magician starts to slip, when it takes him a few tries to pick the right card, or you can see the rabbit climbing into the hat right before he pulls it out—then it’s not an illusion anymore, and it’s definitely not authentic. 

It’s just a show. It’s Vegas. 

The worst thing I can say about Springsteen’s new album, Only The Strong Survive, is that it’s inauthentic. At the same time, the illusion doesn’t hold up, either. 

It could have been so, so much more. Soul music especially trades on authenticity, and there are moments when it works, where everything locks together in a way that feels real, and your heart lifts a little. Naturally, all of these songs are unimpeachable, so if you listen and find yourself humming “Nightshift” in the shower, thank Walter Orange, Dennis Lambert and Franne Golde of the Commodores. 

But when it’s not working, it’s not so much that it’s bad, or unlistenable. It’s just fake. And of all the many many things I have believed Bruce Springsteen to be over the years, that was never ever one of them. 

In the weeks leading up to the record’s release, the scuttlebutt in the dark corners of the internet where the real Bossheads lurk was that this was an album where the instrumentation was provided primarily by producer Ron Aniello. There’s precedent; Aniello has provided backing on tracks from every album he’s produced for Springsteen, starting with 2012’s Wrecking Ball. This is the first time Springsteen has built an entire album around Aniello’s instrumentation and arrangement, and it may be the record’s fatal flaw. 

On the album’s third single, “Don’t Play That Song,” we start with a classic “rowdy crowd created in the studio with whoever was standing around” bit, then Bruce says, “Let’s get the band in.” He’s not talking to a band; he’s talking to Aniello about bringing up the backing track, which consists mostly of instruments recorded piecemeal by Aniello himself. 

When that “band” comes in, I defy you to convince me that it doesn’t sound like what you’d hear coming from a karaoke machine on any Thursday night in any small-town bar in any city in the entire United States. There are real strings and real horns, I think, I am almost positive, but somehow they sound like synths? Like, someone took these real sounds from real musicians and made them sound less real. 

A man is not a band and a band is not a man. I’ve made my own amateur recordings in Garageband, playing bass and guitar and keys with my trusty Casio and relying on pre-recorded drum tracks. You can approximate the sound of a band, but you will never have the organic interaction that happens when musicians play together. You’ll never get a single idea that didn’t originate from the same brain. The music goes someplace and noplace at the same time. 

Right now, Bruce Springsteen is comfortable with inauthenticity in a way that he has never been before, and he doesn’t seem to care enough to maintain his illusion. (I think that was a big part of how he fumbled the Ticket Situation, but I digress.) 

Sure, there’s something inauthentic about making a quarter disappear and then pulling it out of my nose. But a good magician doesn’t just execute the sleight of hand; he creates a little bit of actual magic with his patter, his posture, his entire persona. Suddenly, when I watch Springsteen’s tricks, I can see where he hides the quarter behind his index and middle fingers, and he knows I can see it, and he doesn’t seem to care.