Because I was hatched in 1960, not 1950, I've been able to experience rock as a (''mere') product from the gitgo. Grow up surrounded by Beatles and Stones and Motown, and that stuff's bound to sound not so magnificent to you—'Satisfaction' to me is mainly just a catchy song I've heard on the radio a lot. Personally, I'm convinced the early '60s and early 70s, both hucksterdominated periods of supposed stasis, were the high points of rock 'n' roll: this is entertainment made for monetary means, and lots of so-called 'teen exploitation music' weathers the years in better shape than the purported classics. 'Cause rock succeeds when blockheads on the make, ones who don't mind looking like they're on the make, contemptive bastards who'll serve up any redundant rubbish their audience will swallow, inadvertently let their humanness leak out. And the rock that expresses the most usually doesn't have the slightest idea what it's trying to accomplish, or why.

Intellectual sophistication, poetic artifice, 'flair for language,' all that Cole Porter nonsense, is what rock reacted against. So, as far as I'm concerned, what Bruce Springsteen does has very little to do with rock 'n' roll. He plays art-rock. Like Rick Wakeman (or, okay, Pete Townshend—same dif) before him, his muse can't be separated from his ego; he's too palpably concerned with how he'll be documented in the history books. Rock doesn't work that way. If postconscious rock has visionaries, they're guys like James Brown, Marvin Gaye, George Clinton, probably Stevie Wonder, possibly Neil Young—guys who don't spend their whole careers trying to prove it, guys who never seem vainglorious, no matter how much ground they're breaking. And, needless to say, they break lots more Springsteen.