Bruce's Blue Collar Couplets - Asides (XI)

'Dancing in the Dark' will always be Bruce Springsteen's greatest song. That it resides towards the close of an album, Born in the USA, that I'm largely indifferent to, is the only downside. And then only because Bruce's worth - along with his blistering live performances - tends to be measured in the albums as a whole. But then that can work conversely too, and individual songs can escape the isolation that often reveals their most glorious colours.    

Laura Barton's wonderful travelling playlist came to an end halfway through my run this morning, and then, aided by the algorithm, shuffled straight into Springsteen's 'Atlantic City'. Isolated, and not following the death row chills of Nebraska's title-track, it revealed something new. Within the yearning of the chorus, I tend to find myself caught up in the forced optimism of that first couplet - 'everything dies, baby, that's a fact / but maybe everything that dies someday comes back' - and I've become too distracted to pay attention to the dazzling blue-collar simplicity of the second couplet.

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City. 

I've never been one to lazily dismiss moon / June rhymes, particularly when they are up to something that is more complex. And here, the work of 'pretty / City' is quite majestic. The day-to-day drudge and hand-to-mouth misery of the song's verses needs an escape. It might be a pipe-dream of an escape, but that's when Bruce is at his best – yes, 'Dancing in the Dark' in a nutshell – romantically scanning an horizon that remains forever out of reach. Indeed, if you didn't know that Atlantic City is a kind of second-rate Las Vegas - and also a shotgun marriage destination - you can certainly sense it in the glorious fall of Bruce's voice as it dips towards the chorus's destination. 

Contrast and details. That's where it's at on Nebraska. And tuned in afresh, I slip the shackles of the algorithm, and listen to the album as a whole. The howls on 'State Trooper', the startling image of a man poking a dead dog at the start of 'Reason To Believe', and, on the Flannery O'Connor inspired title track, a barely perceptible glockenspiel that rises up to haunt the end of a death-row lament.