Bruce vs. Otis

A confession: I cannot stand Bruce Springsteen.

I can’t say I’ve never liked him. There was a time when I would have listed Born to Run near the top of my list of all-time favorite albums. I was nearing my high school graduation, the weather was getting warmer, and I fell under the spell of Bruce’s odes to summer evenings spent with barefoot girls and classic American cars. His tracks struck me as rambling epics, which I guess were appropriate for a moment which, at least at the time, I perceived as pretty epic.

Soon after I graduated I moved onto other music, though I never consciously parted ways with Bruce. Yet a few months later, when I tried to return to the Boss, I couldn’t make it through a single song. The lyrics made me cringe. What had before been epic and meaningful was suddenly self-indulgent and cliché. And so I left Bruce never to return. He was too cheesy for me, and I was onto better, more sophisticated things.

Fair enough, right? Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics are cheesy. But I don’t hate all cheesy lyrics. I love classic soul music, for example. I could listen to Sam Cooke or Otis Redding all day. Yet it would be hard to deny that the lyrics of songs like “Cupid” and even “Dock of the Bay” are pretty cliché. Is “sitting on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away” really any less cheesy of an image than a “barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge, drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain”? Maybe, but it's debatable.

So why is it that I hate Bruce and love Otis? To some extent, it’s just a matter of taste, and as the Romans said, there’s no accounting for taste. But taste aside; I think one of the major reasons is that Bruce is just trying so damn hard to be a blue-collar American poet that it’s more disappointing when it comes out so bland. He uses too many words, tries to paint a scene too vividly, such that it comes out an illustration rather than a painting. Otis’s depth is in the tones of his voice, so when he sings he makes those simple, short phrases sound as beautiful, as powerful, and sometimes as pained, as they could ever sound. And that makes for a marvelous listening experience.

Here are two tracks from Otis:

These Arms of Mine (YSI) (filesavr)

Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song) (YSI) (filesavr)