Struggling to decide whether to have The Rising or Girls in Summer Clothes on my Best Songs of the Aughts List. Will prolly choose The Rising. But incredible that a 112 year-old guy has two songs in the running.
"The Rising" is a solid choice as a Gospel-music-for-the-secular-humanist tune, appropriate for a decade where the God-fearing on both sides of the Abrhamic divide told the rest of us to bend over and take it. As a flip-side to it, "My City of Ruins" is an even more traditional merging of folk and Gospel, and it made a wildly powerful appearance during the WTC benefit and had huge echoes during the Katrina debacle.
While Bruce killed it during the last five years of the decade, making dudes half his age look foolish, he remains the sole artist who has offered a viable, mainstream artistic response to 9/11. Delillo and a few good Off-Broadway plays don't count.
Gotta go with one of these first two. GITSC is top-50 but it coulda been written in 1988 for all we know. As Little Steven says, "Every time I see Bruce, he always has at least two new records, hidden somewhere in some pocket of his. Half the stuff he's recorded we'll never hear."
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"The Rising" is a solid choice as a Gospel-music-for-the-secular-humanist tune, appropriate for a decade where the God-fearing on both sides of the Abrhamic divide told the rest of us to bend over and take it. As a flip-side to it, "My City of Ruins" is an even more traditional merging of folk and Gospel, and it made a wildly powerful appearance during the WTC benefit and had huge echoes during the Katrina debacle.
While Bruce killed it during the last five years of the decade, making dudes half his age look foolish, he remains the sole artist who has offered a viable, mainstream artistic response to 9/11. Delillo and a few good Off-Broadway plays don't count.
Gotta go with one of these first two. GITSC is top-50 but it coulda been written in 1988 for all we know. As Little Steven says, "Every time I see Bruce, he always has at least two new records, hidden somewhere in some pocket of his. Half the stuff he's recorded we'll never hear."
agreed.
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