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Bruce Springsteen: Wrecking Ball

Columbia

If the Occupy movement needs a soundtrack, then Bruce Springsteen’s 17th studio album will do just fine. Wrecking Ball is his most politically charged set of songs to date, coming from a place of anger and indignation, echoing the fears and despondency of people, and thick with anthemic proclamations of inequality and injustice.

But Bruce being Bruce, Wrecking Ball isn’t empty, fist-pumping protest; even while it rails against the wrongs, it points toward a not-far-away sliver of light where hopefulness and redemption beckon. “They destroyed our families, factories and they took our homes,” he sings in “Death to My Hometown,” and in “Shackled and Drawn,” he cries, “Up on banker’s hill the party’s going strong/ Down here below we’re shackled and drawn.” But if “the road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone,” as he declares in “We Take Care of Our Own”—the leadoff track and first single—then that’s only because we have yet to muster the mercy that it takes to aid one another, which is a resolution as powerful and provocative as the litany of righteous complaints at the core of the record.

Springsteen may be among the 1 percent himself, but he shares the wrath and frustration of the have-nots, the fed-up and the pissed-off. It’s not a new role for him— few post-Woody Guthrie songwriters have aligned themselves as closely as he has with the working stiff—but his sentiments on the subject have never been quite so naked. Amid the oppression and the depression—indeed one of Wrecking Ball’s most emotionally charged songs is “This Depression,” set to a somnolent pace and glazed with Tom Morello’s keening guitar—is an upbeat recording populated with optimistic hoedowns, pounding rockers and martial Celtic stomps. Wrecking Ball is not an E Street Band album (the late Clarence Clemons does appear on two tracks and Springsteen pays tribute to the Big Man in the liner notes) but much of it bears the bravado, determination and camaraderie of the mainstay outfit’s most lasting work.

“We Are Alive” is the title of the final song on Wrecking Ball, “and though our bodies lie alone here in the dark,” Springsteen sings to a vigorous bluegrass backing, “our souls and spirits rise.” We don’t give up, he’s imploring— we know who’s doing what to us and we’ll continue to fight the good fight, but we won’t give up. There’s that one thing we’ve got going for us that the bastards don’t, even though they still breathe: We are alive.