[wideawake]

Springsteen's music is basically an attempt to reconnect early 60s rhythm & blues and early 60s rock & roll in a rootsy, bar band kind of way - while trying to inject early 60s folk and early 60s union/socialist rhetoric into the mix.

His goal seems to be "authenticity" - which he tries to achieve through careful artifice.

His first album was released around the same time as American Graffiti - a time of maudlin nostalgia.

Lucas and Springsteen were both twenty-somethings mourning their lost teenage years and blaming Vietnam for the fact that time passes.

[Borges]

In the early to mid 1970s there was a frantic attempt among rock critics to find a ‘New Dylan’. The old saying is true...if Springsteen didn’t exist critics would have had to invent him. The fact is that he had a very limited emotional and songwriting range.