02.01.09
Sunday Evening Nausea
Don’t you get it, too? That dread of the next day, which is either back to school or back to work? When I was a kid, the trigger to that nausea was the ticking of the stopwatch in the intro to 60 Minutes, which my family swore by, as I recall. An almost Pavlovian reaction to this day. But I don’t watch that program in my own home anymore.
Anyway, I’m watching the Super Bowl halftime show right now and just wanted to note that Bruce Springsteen is someone I have never enjoyed. I regard his popularity as a decades-old burden imposed on the rest of the country by the East Coast music media machine. I do not relate to his story and I find his songwriting unsubtle and bright. I don’t care how ignorant I am about it, either. With the exception of his one masterpiece (Nebraska), there’s no darkness in his music. His music is Souzaphone. It is written for performance before thousands of blue-collar yankees mouthbreathers. It is… baseball. Nineteen-Seventies, shelled-out inner-city ugliness and decay. He’s the soundtrack for all of that, but in major keys only.
