WORKING MAN’S BLUES
There’s a new furrowed-brow earnestness now emerging in American rock ’n’ roll, a grainy neorealism that depicts workaday lives in ways that were once the exclusive province of country music, a neorealism which is attempting to chart the widening gap between what we’d hoped for (romantically, socially, economically) and what we’re currently experiencing.
WORKING MAN’S BLUES
RECORDS
BOB SEGER AND THE SILVER BULLET BAND The Distance (Capitol)
by Mitchell Cohen
There’s a new furrowed-brow earnestness now emerging in American rock ’n’ roll, a grainy neorealism that depicts workaday lives in ways that were once the exclusive province of country music, a neorealism which is attempting to chart the widening gap between what we’d hoped for (romantically, socially, economically) and what we’re currently experiencing. Rock for the new recession, rock that wonders how things got off the tracks. Springsteen’s Nebraska is the most blatant example, but traces of that melancholy befuddlement can be heard in varying degrees on Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly (from the perspective of the promises of the New Frontier), Tom Petty’s Long After Dark (“One Story Town,” “Wasted Life”), Steve Van Zandt’s Men Without Women (the horns on the LP are a call ro reclaim a lost spirit), Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain (for all I know; ndthing could make me listen to it, but I have seen the “Altentowri” video), and Bob Seger’s The Distance. This is a strange (although not unprecendented) posture for rock tojind itself jn—grim and defiant, ironic and embittered.