Springsteen at the Super Bowl

Bruce Springsteen has promised a “12-minute party” during his Super Bowl halftime set this Sunday, which means among other things that he won’t be performing any song he’s written in the past quarter-century or more. Actually, the Boss was cagey about his playlist, telling the media, “Who decides? The Boss decides. People suggest, hint. They cajole.” Listeners of the world, unite!

Here’s a guy who went from making love in the dirt with Crazy Janey out behind the dynamo off of the backstreets near Thunder Road during the freaking Ford and Carter years to bitching and moaning about unemployment and factory shutdowns during the booming 1990s, when his entire musical universe was populated by hobos walking along highways with hats in hand and mumbling about unions, Pinkertons, and the WPA. Like most self-absorbed rock stars, the turning point came early, the moment he started writing songs about how hard it was to be…a rock star.

So why Springsteen? Is Gary Glitter still stuck in Thailand? Is Buddy Holly not returning the NFL’s phone calls? For Bruce, it’s all about the benjamins: “We have a new album coming out…We have our mercenary reasons, of course.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but did Janet Jackson’s nipple really condemn us to a lifetime of Super Sunday misery? I’m starting to think that conservative commentator Michael Novak’s insane notion of putting on “a ten-year sequence of halftime shows that tell the great story of the Founding of our nation” would be an improvement over the past few year’s worth of spectacles. Novak looked upon Janet Jackson’s breasticle and despaired:

Why can’t the NFL support the Herculean struggles of besieged families, and overworked schools, against the horrid drudge of a sick popular culture, and help parents and teachers to fire the imaginations of our children with ennobling images of greatness and achievement? Why does the NFL put our families through the sludge of an exhausted, desperate pagan culture that is going nowhere, and celebrates losers and freaks? Our families have enough enemies to fight through. Must they also fight the NFL?

I don’t agree with Novak’s take on Nipplegate (which was, like Jesus to the Doobie Brothers, just alright with me), but I will say this much in anticipation of the composer of “Mary, Queen of Arkansas” performing this weekend: I grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which contains both Springsteen’s hometown (Freehold) and his early haunt (Asbury Park), so I can’t stand him in the same way that only a New Yorker can really, really hate the Yankees. I think that even his biggest fans will admit that his output over the past 25 years or so would make even Beethoven nostalgic for the first few albums. Springsteen is in that elite group of rock stars who have objectively sucked two, three, or even four times longer than they were ever any good (are you listening Sting, David Bowie, R.E.M., Patti Smith?). That, and in the video for “Glory Days,” he had the worst fake baseball throwing arm since Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees. Which is saying something.

Watching Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl–and before him, rock mummies like Tom Petty and Rolling Stones–let’s just say I’d rather go straight to the Bodies exhibition, where at least no one is pretending that the corpses on display aren’t actually dead.

Once rock stars start dancing in the dark, it’s a short step to singing about Tom Joad. And like the past Super Bowl halftime-show performer Paul McCartney (who unveiled a neutron bomb of a tune called “Freedom” during his post-9/11 star turn and furthered the argument that Ringo was the most-talented Beatle) and Elton John, Springsteen went from writing catchy, hook-filled songs to penning turgid, monotonous monstrosities lacking musical or lyrical depth and nuance.