First things first, then: ratings don't mean a thing. It's important that we hurdle this issue straightaway, because as i start this writing, i still haven't figured out whether Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska is a four-star album or a three-star album. It's not a five-star album, certainly - which is sad, because most of 'em up until Nebraska have been - but I'm sure I could justify giving it four. Then again, i could totally justify the three, and that's where the meaninglessness of ratings comes in: in a way, I think they should be optional, although I realize that for the practical purposes of a site like this one, that'd be impossible.

But the futility of rating things in quantitative values is fairly evident in a case like this: how do you harness admiration _and_ disappointment in one rating? You don't, of course, short of utilizing half-star values (which is where a three-and-a-half-star rating would be justified - note to Epinions!). And i need to, 'cuz Nebraska is kinda disappointing in the context of a comprehensive artist evaluation, or at least coming on the heels of four five-star albums; but, then again, i get the feeling that if someone less impressive and consistent than Bruce Springsteen, someone like Ryan Adams, had crafted Nebraska, I'd be suitably impressed. And it's not like Nebraska doesn't impress me in the first place - it does.

But i'm a stubborn music fan, threatened and disconcerted by change. Even worse, I'm a hypocrite, and will praise an artist for radically changing if the change is tailored to my personal tastes. So i'm a suspect character, flaky and contradictory, rife with glaring personality flaws.

Kind of like the folks in Nebraska.

**

The rundown for those who don't know, then: Nebraska is, essentially, a collection of demo recordings. They're the preliminary tracks Bruce laid down for a regular Bruce Springsteen album, packaged together as Springsteen's darkest, most disillusioned rumination on the run-down American dream. It's Springsteen's first true "solo" album - the album, literally, is entirely Springsteen, written by Springsteen, performed with Springsteen's voice, guitar, and harmonica. This makes Nebraska positively Dylan-esque in execution; ironically, Bruce's most Dylan-like artistic statement, years after he struggled to escape his early "new Dylan" tag.

Naturally, the acoustic format - not to mention the unpolished nature of the recording - makes for a darker sound, but lyrically, Bruce is at his bleakest here. The famed title track's a first-person account of the Charlie Starkweather killing spree immortalized in Terence Malick's "Badlands," ending on the pivotal, unsettling line "i guess there's just a meanness in this world." It's followed immediately by fan favorite "Atlantic City," a narrative about the south Jersey gambling rackets. Elsewhere, Springsteen's characters include the poor (nothing new), the disenfranchised (again, nothing new), and murderers who became murderers from being poor and disenfranchised (kinda new!).

Lyrically, Nebraska finds Springsteen at one of his many peaks. His knack for flashy wordplay early on in his career got him as much fans as it did criticism - the entire Greetings From Asbury Park album, in fact, is based on the idea that songs sound cooler with rhythmic, multi-syllabic, stream-of-consciousness wordplay, and to a certain extent, it worked for him - but each subsequent album found Springsteen paring down his flagrant lyrical urges, until 1980's double-album The River could be described as almost economical lyrically. Songs like that album's "Hungry Heart," though, revealed something new about Bruce: that he could get just as much across by implication and innuendo. Nebraska's a step forward, then, but it has to be: an album that gets away with some of the lyrics Springsteen gets away with on River - "ooh ooh i gotta crush on you" is an entire chorus - needs to be musically exciting to make the tradeoff worthwhile. The River is, of course, but Nebraska isn't. It's dark, and entirely acoustic, and doesn't have the pop sensibility needed to carry off a frivolous "ooh ooh" or a "whoa-oh oh-oh-oh".

Which is why Springsteen doesn't use either lyrical approach on Nebraska. There's no Greetings From Asbury Park-style abstract rhyme overdose, but then it doesn't take the simplified, show-don't-tell approach of River. The Nebraska songs are all narratives - they're story songs. And as such Springsteen adopts the narrative voice of a folk artist, simply presenting the characters and their circumstances and letting you draw the conclusions. Mind you, his descriptions alone are rewarding enough to make Nebraska a good listen - i could sample lyrics all day long, but this one from "Reason to Believe" i find particularly striking:

"seen a man standin' over a dead dog lyin' by the highway in a ditch
he's lookin' down kinda puzzled pokin' that dog with a stick
got his car door flung open he's standin' out on highway 31
like if he stood there long enough that dog'd get up and run
struck me kinda funny seem kinda funny sir to me
still at the end of every hard day, people find some reason to believe...."

His characters are drawn vividly, situations spelled out explicitly. In the album's two most pointed examples of storytelling, "Johnny 99" finds its title character overwhelmed by life's circumstances, driven to murder, and forced to stand trial, while "Highway Patrolman," told by the titular upstanding citizen, follows our narrator's fierce loyalty to screwup brother Frankie. These songs could all form the basis for a series of mini-movies; "Highway Patrolman" was even famously adapted for the screen by Sean Penn, as 1991's "The Indian Runner".

Where Nebraska doesn't excite, then, is its musical vibes. One wonders instinctively, of course, if the musical vibes were supposed to stimulate, and clearly they weren't, at least not in the same way as Bruce's best work with the E Street Band. The album kind of runs together, really, separated only by its stories; lyrically it's an anthology, but musically the songs are all chapters in the same book. It's the same acoustic guitar, haggard and world-weary voice, occasional harmonica wheeze format all the way through, and yeah, it gets old. The best tracks to listen to are the tracks that could have been played full-band: "Johnny 99," while heartbreaking, is full-tilt rockabilly; "Open All Night" chugs Chuck Berry-style; "State Trooper" is minimalistic, even for this album, and chilling; and "Atlantic City" is catchy enough to be reworked into an E Street Band anthem in concert - which it has - without getting lost in the translation. Everything else has the lyrical vibe - these stories are all magical, vivid, and almost concrete enough to touch - but they skimp musically. "Mansion on the Hill" and "My Father's House" are boring enough to fall asleep to; "Nebraska"'s melody is so unpleasant one wonders if that wasn't on purpose; and "Highway Patrolman," maybe the best story here, is blessed with the most unremarkable melodic structure of the whole lot. Sad.

**

Naturally, I was gonna give this album four stars the whole time; let it be known, though, that Nebraska is not an album you'll be able to - or want to - listen to any old time. It's moody, dark, and largely unpleasant; still, Bruce ends on that faint glimmer of hope he seems to always hold out for: "still at the end of every hard-earned day, people find some reason to believe." Nebraska is a masterful feat of storytelling, and of music as literature; what it's not is a feat of music as music, and if you're interested, the trade-off is worth it.


GROWIN' UP SPRINGSTEEN REVIEWS:
- Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ
- The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
- Born To Run
- Darkness on the Edge of Town
- The River
- Nebraska
- Born in the U.S.A.
- Tunnel of Love
- Human Touch





Recommended: Yes