Darkness on the Edge of Life

My favorite album has remained constant since 1978 and likely will stay on top until I go down under (that doesn't mean a trip to Australia). Or perhaps not. One can only hope it'll change. Why hope for a change? Well, in a very real way this choice is a barometer of my growth as an individual. Or rather, in this case, a lack thereof.

I'm talking about my 'favorite album' and not 'favorite collections of songs,' so that counts out greatest hits and other compilations like The Jam's Snap!, Elvis Presley's Golden Records and Sun Sessions, Beach Boys' Endless Summer, Psychedelic Furs' All This and Nothing and Elvis Costello's Girls, Girls, Girls.

There are lots of #2s for me, many of which are #1 on a given day:

• Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils and Dust
  
• The Clash's London Calling and Sandinista!
• Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom, Get Happy!!, Armed Forces, This Year's Model, Trust and My Aim is True, and Spike - Elvis wins the consistency prize - he has the most albums on my favorites list.
  
• Velvet Underground's Velvet Underground and Nico
• Ramones' Self-titled debut
• B-52's Self-titled debut
• Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy
• John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band
  
• Billy Joel's 52nd Street and Turnstiles
• The Beatles' Rubber Soul, Help!, With The Beatles and Revolver
• Beach Boy's Pet Sounds
  
• The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, Let it Bleed and Exile on Main Street
• Elvis Presley's From Elvis in Memphis
  
• Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing it all Back Home, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan  and Blood on the Tracks
• Patti Smith's Horses
  
• Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks
• Gang of Four's Entertainment
  
• Kristin Hersh's Murder, Misery and then Goodnight
• X's Los Angeles
• U2's October and War
• Graham Parker's Squeezing out Sparks
• Nirvana's Nevermind and MTV Unplugged in New York
• Pearl Jam's Ten
  
• Green Day's American Idiot
• Steve Forbert's Alive on Arrival
• Throwing Muses' Red Heaven
• The Stooges' Raw Power
• Violent Femmes' Hallowed Ground
• Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and Songs of Leonard Cohen
  

But my number #1 has always been Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town.

It might seem a strange choice for me.

"Geez," you could say, "you seem to be a pretty cynical guy with a decidedly dark sense of humor. There nothing funny going on here. It's deadly, even stridently, serious. And no cynicism to be found. You don't seem to have any religious faith, something that seems to permeate each of these songs. What gives? Dylan, Costello, Stones, Green Day, and most of the others, they make sense. But Springsteen? Darkness?"

True, there's not a shred of humor on this record. It might be one of the most bleak albums ever made, unceasingly so. Yet it is filled with optimism and faith. There is plenty of religious imagery. It's core to the people whose stories are being told. In the end, though, that's just imagery and metaphor. This faith - these songs - are all about a fundamental belief in yourself. Faith in you. Faith held even in the most horrifying situations, and through the most numbingly mundane.

And there is not an ounce of sentiment on this album. Nothing to escape the dark heart of humanity. The words are basic, overly redundant, devoid of the purple prose Bruce was known for up to that point and fell back to again afterward. Some of the songs are almost unlistenable taken by themselves - they build on Lennon's Plastic Ono Band Primal Scream foundation, ratcheting it up several notches with blood curdling contortions - yet they fit into this world perfectly. Conversely, many of the tunes are my favorites even outside the context of the whole: Racing in the Street, Badlands, Adam Raised a Cane, Candy. All would be in my personal top forty.

Darkness is not a 'concept' album. Yet it is. A series of small moments, events that occur in small towns and cities across America. Rich and poor and middle class, they're all affected by the dissolution of hope and dreams and faith in yourself and in others. The bonds and chains of family.

It was released in the hey day of the first punk explosion and shares a lot with the best of that lot (especially the Clash, though they focused on the political element of faith perhaps more than they did the personal).

I look at Darkness as the first of a quartet of albums Springsteen recorded in this same vein, the others being Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust. These albums share a similar core, a common conceit, but it is not a musical one; rather, it is thematic, and it is attitude. Sure, it might be fair to say Bruce covers this same turf on everything he's recorded. There's at least some truth to that. But the hard, unflinching, bleak, bare, milk-all-the-sentimentality-out-of-it attitude exists for me only on these Springsteen records, and not many others, of any artist. It lives for me on Darkness most of all. (Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and the Velvet Underground and Nico live in this world for me as well. There were seeds of it on Born to Run in Thunder Road and Backstreets but I love that album for wholly different reasons.)

In the end, all of what I've written here is just a big load of pretentious bullshit.

None of this explains why I've been coming back to this record time and time again since 1978. Why I invariably play the thing from beginning to end each time. Why it's never just background music when I do. The whole thing can be explained by two verses on the record. They come from different characters and different songs at wildly different tempos and moods. One from the point of view of the protagonist's loved one (in this case, his girlfriend) and the other describing the protagonist himself (first person). They perhaps sum up two different, warring, sides of my being better than anything else I've found in art. The first pokes at my core, borne of my upbringing, and the second is aspirational, what I've been striving to get to ever since:

1. Racing in the Street: She sits on the porch of her daddy's house, but all her pretty dreams are torn. She stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.
2. Badlands: For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive, I wanna find one face that ain't looking through me, I want to find one place, I want to spit in the face of these badlands.

The protagonist of each song on Darkness is always striving to live life, not satisfied merely to exist. Even in the face of devastation. Even when all of the others around him have given up.

I want to identify with those protagonists but I know I can't, not really. In the same way Jules wants to believe he's the Shepherd at the end of Pulp Fiction but knows he's still the 'Tyranny of Evil Men.' But I'm trying, Ringo, real hard, to be the Shepherd. Maybe if and when I finally make it, this record will fall by the wayside.

Until then, "Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland. Got a head-on collision smashing in my guts, man. I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand."