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Rating: Why pretend when you can be serious...?
Others take to the stage amidst smoke, mystery, tricks, and cloaks to garner more charisma and symptomatic mystery. Not them. They come on stage greeting and smiling. They strap on their guitars, sling their gear around their shoulders, or simply sit down and start playing.
Others use endless prerecorded electronic sequences. Not them. They play everything live and a song is never the same twice.
Others have avalanches of recorded choruses. They all sing, some excellently, some okay, some just so-so. But the result is there. Always.
Others throw at you their hour-and-a-half concert as if it were gold. They never play less than three hours.
Others follow setlists meticulously crafted at the table, often by the big producers supporting them, according to the puppet-master logic of "here we make them hug, here we make them jump"... Not them. Not him. He walks among the audience and collects papers with people's requests. Our requests. And people ask for and want the song they love, tied to beautiful or melancholy moments, even if it's a "B-side" or an out-take that no one would ever play live. And there you have it, "None But The Brave". Others, in love with the early eighties, want songs never played in concert since then or almost, and here, thanks to the notes, are "Hungry Heart", "Bobby Jean" and "I'm On Fire".
In a word, others act pretentious. Not them.
They are the E Street Band, led by the genius that is Springsteen, the man who gave new meaning to rock, songwriting, and folk, treading the tracks of tradition with discipline and humility, never straying but going far, far ahead of everyone. And the fact has something objective: who has that voice, who writes like that, who commands the stage in that way? Who, in one person, encapsulates such unique traits, so many virtues? Not Dylan. Not the still talented lesser ones (among the thousand Adams, Cougar, Cohn). Not Van Morrison. Not James Taylor. Not Paul Simon. We could go on indefinitely. Springsteen has always taken his craft as a songwriter very seriously, simultaneously with great humility. Almost no one has so far been able, after 25 years of career and success, to conceive a small masterpiece like "The Ghost of Tom Joad", and certainly no one is capable, after more than 35, of producing an album like "Magic" and a world tour that has visited Italy twice in the last year. None but the Boss.
It's pointless: there will always be those who say that the latest melancholy, voiceless, and possibly deceased singer-songwriter is better than the Boss. But it is difficult for critics (all or almost), musicians (all, at least those I know, and they are not few), and a flood of people worldwide to be wrong. It's much better to enjoy one of the few great geniuses still active in that wonderful, dry, and dying field that is so-called light music, which with Springsteen has indeed little lightness. Also, with good grace to the wealthy in the Meazza neighborhood, capable of inducing Taliban and hypocritical decisions like the forced closure at 11:30 PM. The Boss, justly unconcerned, finished the concert already late... But not content, he returned to the stage for a final, amused and amusing "Twist and Shout".
Yes: because the E Street on stage is still having fun, and a lot. For a simple reason: they understood what only the wise know: why pretend when you can be serious?
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