Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuce

There's been a lot of "serious" journalism devoted to Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen lately, be it the silly David Brooks one, or the one about  Rex Ryan  Chris Christie wishing he and Bruce were BFF and, of course, David Remnick's infamously long New Yorker one...which was in turn rebuked by THIS GUY HERE calling him "Howard Zinn with a guitar", which a guest poster over at The Dish basically laughs at:

Wieseltier seems put off that people go to Springsteen concerts and come away hopeful and uplifted, but not raging against the machine. He is terribly upset, citing Marcuse, that the music has not yet inspired a revolution. Springsteen fans labor under a form of false consciousness: their "joy is programmatic; it is mere uplift, another expression of social responsibility." He laments tastes less sophisticated than his own, appalled at the simple pleasures of a rock show. That Springsteen's more political and social songs do not make the arguments he would like, or that certain rock numbers sometimes slip into sentimentality or rather hazy formulations - this means that the music is not serious enough.

To be fair to Wieseltier, he did in fact point out earlier in his article that Springsteen's early albums are better than his latest ones, which is a pretty astute journalistic insight previously held only by three types of people: living, previously living, and living in the future. So.