Ridiculous Review of Magic
Happened upon a so-called review of Springsteen's Magic on Billboard.
It contained this unbelievable sentence:
"Gypsy Biker" is a wide-open epic-in-waiting about, well, roads.
Did the reviewer even listen to this song, or, indeed any part of this album?
Here are some excerpted lyrics from "Gypsy Biker":
The speculators made their money
On the blood you shed
...To the dead it don't matter much
'Bout who's wrong or right
You asked me that question I didn't get it right
You slipped into your darkness
Now all that remains
Is my love for you brother
Lying still and unchanged
To them that threw you away
You ain't nothin' but gone
Our Gypsy biker is comin' homefrom brucespringsteen.net
I don't know... but maybe, just maybe, these lyrics could be someone lamenting the loss of someone who... let's see... maybe died in the war? Just because it has "biker" in the title, doesn't make it a road song.
Another review, this one from the Houston Chronicle says,
Magic's lyrics mostly bypass political ideology and instead ponder the vagaries of love and the reckless freedom of youth.
WTF? Again, did the reviewer even listen to this album? Consider this album's most apolitical moment, "Girls in their Summer Clothes," It's about as breezy as things get, and it is, in good part, about aging: the girls in their summer clothes, "they pass me by." But the apolitical songs are in fine political company on an album which likens politicians to devil-trickster magicians offering distractions even as they steal freedoms.
I realize that people write things on deadlines, etc., but geez. Magic is, among other things, a potently political album. Yes, as a whole, Magic is also personal — but it's often the personal business of characters battered by their collisions with the political appetite to use and discard. Politics and policy on this album are sketched in much the same way that Springsteen charted the collision of individual lives and corporate depredations in his late 70s and early 80s work.
