Bruce sings like he’s trying to pass a bowling ball.
The only thing more annoying is when he tries to sing with a phoney Southern drawl.
Why would he even pretend a southern drawl when he claims he’s so proud to be from NJ?
Springsteen should be the poster boy for CULTURAL APPROPRIATION. If it weren’t for Muddy Waters,Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, Leadbelly and other bluesmen from the past he’d be just another Jersey White trash crashing Chevelles on the Garden State Pkwy
“Bruce sings like he’s trying to pass a bowling ball.”
I like some of his music. Born to Run comes to mind.
But your comment is spot on.
I was a big fan when he was just starting out and playing in high school gyms and tiny beach bars. He was so energetic, enthusiastic and joyful onstage. Went backstage and met him, called him on the phone, etc. Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle were jazz fusion, some were art songs like Joni Mitchell's, and some had real depth, especially due to Clemons and Sancious, both magnificent in live performance.
But when the Born in the USA tour came around, he had hit the large-venue big time, and had six speakers, each the size of a sportscar, stacked three deep on either side of the stage; and the metal-adjacent slamming, repetitious lyrics, hammering pace and bone-crushing volume literally made me sick—I had to leave the concert before it was over. I've never walked out on another event in my life except a really bad early Raquel Welch movie in 1969, and a Methodist sermon on Valentine's Day in 1995 when the pastor went woke and talked about love by telling us about being sexually abused in childhood by a farm hand in his parent's barn. It takes a lot to make me leave.
Even then, I maintained a passing interest until 1997, when Bruce attempted to sing "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" at the Kennedy Center Honors in front of honoree Bob Dylan. Weird and odd and grating and iconoclastic as Dylan's singing might be, that ghastly rendition by Springsteen was even worse than the nervous hash Patti Smith made of "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" in front of the Nobel Prize audience when Dylan sent her instead of himself to Stockholm to accept the Nobel.
But I digress.
Hearing Bruce murder a song as demonstrably opposite to bel canto as a Dylan song can be, and not sound half as good? That was the end for me.
And not a moment too soon, in view of his coming out as a whiny little ingrate liberal bitch and chronic depressive in the years to follow. This nation and his adoring fans have made the man celebrated and rich beyond his wildest early dreams. He was too young to go to Vietnam and too old for Desert Storm, and he came onto the scene in one of the most prosperous and upbeat times of the past century. But he's depressssssssed. "Oh, pooooor meeee!" He's probably suffering from Impostor Syndrome, secretly aware that he doesn't really rate all the fuss.