Hon's marking of Born in the USA as having the worst album cover ever got me thinking about Bruce Springsteen again. I'm not really a fan, but I think his contradictory codings are really interesting, not least the utterly mistaken recuperation of "Born in the USA" by the American right wing. And then there's the whole gaggle of loaded issues around "classic rock", "authenticity" of performance and masculinity. Springsteen's position in the scheme of things is a tragically ironic one -- he tries to say moving things, which always come out as self-deifying and grandiose gestures of the Ordinary. It's this tyranny of the gesture, the weakness for the anthemic, that allowed "Born in the USA" to be evacuated of content and taken for its polar opposite (in the way William Blake's bitterly ironic lament over the progress of industrial capitalism somehow became "Jerusalem", the battle hymn of the British Empire).
Springsteen obviously loves the girl groups of the '60s, and his songs are crammed with gorgeous, ringing Spectorisms. But the whole post-Dylan edifice of the masculine singer-songwriter weighs these pop aspects down, making them thick and lumpy. The sublime sound of the Ronettes gets filtered through the lens of... a Regular Guy. (This specific set of influences and filters mark other late Boomer MOR artists like Billy Joel.) But wearing a Regular Guy fictionsuit isn't an open and shut case; everything that can't fit in it boils underneath, and so the very act of putting it on can still look weird. Look what happened to David Bowie: his suits and ties of the '80s were originally in the same vein as the unnerving sharpness of New Wave and mod culture, but then he got lost in a terrifying dialectic of interpretation, in which these markers were increasingly read as safe, family-friendly entertainment. The music followed.
But before this disaster, Bowie understood the perverse context of the Regular Guy; witness his wonderfully camp cover of Springsteen's "It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City" (available here for a short time), in which he draws out the nuances that can't get chiseled in the granite of Springsteen's official story. With such an arch delivery, "I felt his hot breath on my neck as I dove into the heat" takes on all sorts of new vibes. What's amazing is that it's really not that different from the original. (Of course, the most ironic thing about Regular Guy iconography is the often central position it occupies outside heterosexuality, as in the exaggerated, hyper-performative masculinities of Western-metropolitan gay "clone" culture in the 1970s. As Bowie says in "Boys Keep Swinging", "When you're a boy / You can wear a uniform / When you're a boy / Other boys check you out".)
