“Johnny 99” is supposed to inspire empathy, not horror: “You kinda just gotta know what that feels like, somewhere,” Springsteen said of the song.įew songs in rock capture coming-of-age swagger and wonderment like this ode to Springsteen‘s adolescence – that period when he was, as the song goes, “the cosmic kid in full costume dress.” And the music, pushed along by David Sancious’ elegant piano and Vini “Mad Dog” Lopez’s drums, is a heady rush. “I don’t think it was the Nebraska album.” Then he ripped into “Johnny 99” – the pitch-dark tale of a laid-off autoworker who kills a man in a moment of drunken despair, then begs a judge for understanding. “The president was mentioning my name the other day, and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album musta been,” he said in Pittsburgh one night. In September 1984, after Ronald Reagan misappropriated “Born in the U.S.A.” for his re-election campaign, Springsteen took his revenge onstage. Image Credit: Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images “I used a lot of music from the 1800s and the 1930s to show these things are cyclical,” Springsteen explained at the time. Springsteen sings some of his angriest lyrics ever over a Celtic-rock stomp, indicting “the greedy thieves who came around/And ate the flesh of everything they found.” The musical adventurousness fit a theme he wanted to run through Wrecking Ball. “It sounds like an Irish rebel song, but it’s all about what happened four years ago,” Springsteen said to Jon Stewart in 2012 about the fiery third single from Wrecking Ball, a devastating indictment of a society that no longer cares about the working class. Image Credit: Steve Pope/EPA/REX/Shutterstock Lauren Onkey (The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum), Jackson Browne (singer-songwriter, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer), Mikal Gilmore (Contributing editor, Rolling Stone), Christopher Phillips (Editor and publisher, Backstreets magazine), Peter Ames Carlin (Journalist, Springsteen biographer), Brian Hiatt, (Senior writer, Rolling Stone), Rob Sheffield (Contributing editor, Rolling Stone), Bethany Cosentino (Founding member, Best Coast), Alan Light (Journalist and author, The Holy or the Broken), Steven Van Zandt (Actor, guitarist, E Street Band member), Bill Flanagan (Executive vice president, MTV Networks), Edward Norton (Actor-director, two-time Oscar nominee), Warren Zanes (Founding member, the Del Fuegos), David Fricke (Senior writer, Rolling Stone), Tom Morello (Solo artist, Rage Against the Machine guitarist) The panel: Win Butler (Arcade Fire), Andy Greene (Associate editor, Rolling Stone), Dr. Selected with the help of a panel of writers and artists, here are our picks for Springsteen’s 100 greatest songs. Such sustained greatness makes choosing highlights a deeply subjective job, but we’ve given it our best shot. In the 41 years since the release of his debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., Bruce Springsteen has built up a catalog of songs nearly unrivaled in the history of rock, from the streetwise drama of his early work, through to the stadium-shaking heights of Born in the U.S.A., and continuing on to his recent socially and politically impassioned efforts like the new High Hopes.
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