Baby this town rips the bones from your back

The kinder, gentler, less relevant Bruce Springsteen? Via Gerry Canavan:

Right now, though, the streets aren’t burning. The night isn’t lonely. It isn’t some infested summer in a dead man’s town with nothing but boring stories of glory days. A bright new day is percolating across the land. What will Bruce do for material?

It’s not an invalid argument. Although it may seem counter-intuitive, boom times don’t necessarily produce great art, whereas oppressive regimes often do. And while it’s too soon to call the Obama presidency a boom time, and it might — might — be a stretch to call the last eight years of Bush an oppressive regime, there’s evidence to suggest that happiness maybe isn’t always great for great art.

But, y’know, if the price of getting rid of George W. Bush and turning this country around is a mediocre album or two from Bruce Springsteen, I’ll gladly pay that price.

It’s like what Patton Oswalt says:

I’ll happily give back the 15 minutes of “our president’s a sociopath who can’t speak and believes in angels” material I wrote if we WEREN’T TORTURING PEOPLE ANYMORE. I know everyone thinks Bush was some sort of comedic Everlasting Gobstopper but believe me, history’s going to look at these last eight years and think, “I don’t know if teetering that close to the brink was worth the funny YouTube impressions.”