mens tshirt bruce and the e street shuffle

An E Street band show has always been something otherworldly. In response to the Big Man's death last year, Bruce spends a lot of the show steeped in the band's history. It's also the first E Street tour without Clarence Clemons-the band's longtime sax player, main onstage foil for Springsteen, and his close friend. The nature of Wrecking Ball begs for Springsteen to return to the moments of folk tradition and protest music in his back catalogue. It becomes clear at Newark that there are actually two competing narratives in the recent show: Wrecking Ball, and the story of the E Street Band itself. Instead, Wrecking Ball claims to be the hard-hitting, socially conscious Springsteen-which it is, lyrically-while it musically returns to romanticism. The weird thing about Wrecking Ball has to do with context, that it arrives at a moment where the realist Springsteen would seem to have the most work to do, when his fans might expect the grittiness of Nebraska or Darkness, or, hell, even Devils and Dust, in order to honestly reflect the social conditions of the times. But this isn't Nebraska, an album so haunting and simple in its stripped-back acoustic approach that its American Dream ghost stories practically bleed through the empty spaces in the instrumentation. And, yeah, Wrecking Ball engages with all of the post-recession frustrations people would expect Bruce to explore-thematically. It professes to be his next big realist statement, with Springsteen himself tying it back to the 1982's sparse Nebraska. Wrecking Ball is the album that completely disrupts the divide of his career. But there's something different about Wrecking Ball, a tension between myth and realism, and not a populist myth written onto Springsteen like in the past, but a set of fantasies that are coming from him. This isn't unfamiliar territory for Springsteen, who's long been known for his empathy with the struggles of common people and his effort to give them a voice. Wrecking Ball is Bruce's first since the recession, its premise the fact that things don't really feel all that different now than they did in the heart of it.

And Bruce Springsteen is a thing of legend. It's the kind of devotion to things of legend. It's the rabid fanbase Bruce has become known for, the sort of crowd where when someone says, 'This is my fourth show,' they mean this leg. Somehow, it's the first time he's ever played the city, but it's hardly a crowd of newcomers. A few weeks ago, Springsteen and the E Street Band closed out the first leg of their tour supporting the new Wrecking Ball at Newark's Prudential Center. For anyone concerned with Bruce Springsteen, that place is the live show. To understand the myths, you need to go to the place of worship.

Mens tshirt bruce and the e street shuffle