“The River” is Springsteen at his best

By David Bennun

With major musicians who have enjoyed long careers, success is almost invariably founded on a run of great records. There will usually be a few formative pieces that precede it – in hindsight, a kind of artistic throat-clearing. (I can think of only Public Enemy, Joy Division and Pet Shop Boys to whom this doesn’t apply.) Afterwards, “mature” works may pile up and eventually outnumber the classics, but these are usually dispensable. For David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Prince and Stevie Wonder, the core of their oeuvre remains the music they produced in their prime, when everything significant they had to say came out in an unrepeatable burst of creative fire. Their most famous work is also their most representative.

Bruce Springsteen is different. “Born in the USA”, from 1984, remains the most emblematically Springsteenish album he ever produced. In this, it does him a disservice. It is anthemic, but its anthems are strained, urgent and histrionic – the kind of songs people mock, if affectionately, when they yell “Brooooooce!” If I were to choose just one album to represent all that is best about Springsteen, it wouldn’t be that one. Nor would it be his second-most-famous opus, “Born To Run” (1975). It would be the double album that fell between those two more successful records in 1980, and which will be reissued on December 4th: “The River”.