The Boss’s SXSW keynote is well worth listening to. It’s really a kind of musical history: he takes you step-by-step through his family tree of influences — Elvis, Roy Orbison, Phil Spector, The Beatles, The Animals, Punk Rock, Soul, Motown, Stax, Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions, James Brown, Dylan, Hank Williams, and finally, Woody Guthrie.
Rather than focus on technology or changes in the music business, he pointed to what doesn’t change: creativity, or “how you’re putting together what you’re doing.”
The purity of human expression and experience is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way, of doing. There is just doing.
He was also totally upfront about his knack for creative thievery. After playing The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place,” he said:
That’s every song I’ve ever written. That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either. That’s “Born To Run,” ”Born in the USA,” everything I’ve done for the past 40 years.
He then went on to show how he borrowed from “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” for “Badlands”:
Listen up youngsters: this is how successful theft is accomplished… It’s the same fucking riff!
And finally, as if he knew how obsessed I’ve been with authenticity lately:
We live in a post-authentic world. Today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history, and at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that still matters.
Awesome talk. Go listen or read these 20 highlights.
Filed under: Bruce Springsteen.
March 2012
9 posts
Bruce Springsteen’s SXSW Keynote: “Listen up youngsters: this is how successful theft is accomplished.” →
npr.org
“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
—Joseph Campbell on having a “bliss station,“ in The Power of Myth (via austinkleon)
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