Thoughts on Springsteen's Wrecking Ball

I was stuck in the Detroit airport having missed my connection, and I finally had time to give Wrecking Ball, the new Springsteen album, a listen (long after everyone gave up asking me what I thought about it). Here are my cranky and poorly-edited thoughts from an uncomfortable seat in the C Terminal of DTW.

One of the things that made the great Bruce records great was Springsteen’s ability to evoke and inhabit an extraordinary array of characters. In the classic albums, who can forget the guy waiting for Mary (and destiny itself) in “Thunder Road” or those restless souls driving toward adulthood in Darkness on the Edge of Town?  I’m still haunted by the young men contemplating a life of claustrophobic resignation in “Jackson Cage” or the guy who gets Mary

Elizabeth Warren at UC Berkeley

I found this lecture to contain the whole other--more private--side of what I was trying to explore in Stayin' Alive. While I sought to trace the collapse of the working-class idea in civic life, she gets into the new demands on the family wage economy in subtle and detailed ways. Few changes were more important in the seventies. If I could write a second volume to this book, it would cover the issues Warren explores here. Absolutely worth a view.