Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen returns to the stripped-down arrangements and hardened tales of disenfranchised Americans that marked his 1982 landmark album, Nebraska, on this critically-acclaimed but poor- selling record from 1995. In 2000, Rage Against the Machine covered the title track on Renegades. Tom Joad is one of the records that Boss fans swear by.

Bruce Springsteen's best music has always been about the refusal to accept life's meanest
fates or most painful limitations. Springsteen charges his audience to remain brave, despite
all the disillusion, defeat, injustice and fear that invariably dog the pursuit of ones hopes.
For more than twenty years now, Springsteen's music has worked as a cry of courage, an
emboldening reassurance that life, no matter how closefisted it many seem, is w... More >

His gift for social realist literature exceeds his gift for political music ("The Ghost of Tom Joad," "Across the Border") (Grade - *)