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Bruce Springsteen - Lucky Town and Human Touch

1/20/2014

What happens when the whimsical, sprite-like 1970s Bruce Springsteen becomes older, heavier, richer, and more into big-screen TVs? The Boss. Never was the Boss more fascist than March 31, 1992, when he released Lucky Town and Human Touch simultaneously. Well into his second decade of stardom, he divorced his wife, kicked his lovable misfit E Street Band to the curb, and moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles to hook up with some "ace session musicians" and record soulless, clinical, reverb-heavy rock. Look at those shades! On the albums, a sad-robot Boss clamors for "human touch" and captures a miserable, technology-centered lifestyle with the incantation "57 Channels and Nothing On."

As if all that wasn't fascist enough, he had to smother his name all over the 1992 charts with two separate albums of bloat. Let some other people have a chance, Boss!

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Queen - Jazz

1/12/2014

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The gold standard. The system crushes the individual.

Mindless repetition of shapes, icons, and slogans. From the claustrophobia-inducing center -- where "JAZZ," in pink, the stand-in for humanity, is evidently trying to escape -- one encounters choking circles, one after another. If you are somehow able to escape the inner rings, you soon confront another, different set of rings. There is no end, no escape, as the rings gradually become infinitesimally close together.

The album's title is cruelly ironic. Jazz is the freest, most organic 20th-century musical form. Its language is abstract and improvisational; its images are colorful. With its computer-generated black and white circles, this is the furthest thing from jazz.

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What is fascist music?

In Dave Marsh's 1979 review of Queen's Jazz, he wrote, "Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band." No other word so neatly expresses supremacy of the powerful and devaluation of the individual.

Music expresses desires. When artists are young and poor, it is credible that they could have yawning chasms of desires that are not being fulfilled. As they age, particularly if they are successful, they are increasingly performing from a position of wealth and power. So to hear them demand love, money, respect, or fame is dissonant. These guys won. At the pinnacle of their power, they are still greedy for more, boxing out desperate young strivers in the process. That's fascism.

I rather enjoy fascist music. It'll be the soundtrack to our lives when the machines take over, so we might as well develop an appreciation now.

FASCIST MUSIC

Bruce Springsteen - Lucky Town and Human Touch

Queen - Jazz

What is fascist music?

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