There are some people whose CDs I buy automatically whenever they make one.

Top of the list are obviously Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, but Ry Cooder is also on there, along with Bonny Prince Billy, Alabama 3, Bill Callahan, Jack White, Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, Laura Marling, Beck, and the guy I'm listening to right now, Bruce Springsteen.

Clearly this betrays a fair amount about my relatively Luddite tendencies.

Yes, I still buy CDs. Yes, they still sound better than MP3s.

I spend a lot of time hanging out around recording studios and I'm aware of how much time and effort goes into making music sound as good as possible.

It seems disrespectful, not to say self-defeating, to then listen to degraded sound if there's a better option.
Like chewing gum with the wrapper still on. Like looking at a poster of a Degas when the original is hanging in the Auckland Art Gallery.

The new Springsteen album is impressively angry stuff, fervently living up to its title Wrecking Ball.

Ry Cooder's latest release, Pull Up Some Dirt and Sit Down, was angry and political and took far more specific aim than Springsteen does at targets from Republicans to bankers, but Ry is kinda, well, wry, and lightens his messages with humour. Springsteen is just pissed off. Passionately.

The set opens with ‘We Take Care Of Our Own', riding on a huge riff that could have come from ‘Badlands' or one of the other Darkness at the Edge of Town tunes.

I don't think it's accidental. But the sentiment is pure ‘Born in the USA', the proud cry of the chorus undercut by an outraged litany of betrayals (‘Where's the promise from sea to shining sea?').

After that the most obvious reference point here is Springsteen's protest revival album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.

Strands of big band folk music weave themselves through anthems for the working man: both ‘Easy Money' and ‘Shackled and Drawn' sound like songs from The River played by the Seeger Session ensemble.

There is a cast of thousands on here. This is not the E Street Band. They now have two members down and have lost the Big Man, Clarence Clemons.

He's still present in spirit on two final sax solos and there is a moving tribute in the liner notes from Springsteen which will bring a tear to any fan's eye.

But there are also smaller moments such as ‘Jack of All Trades', almost a waltz, sung with just simple piano and guitar accompaniment.

At first I thought it too simplistic; it's a deceptively simple song. But maybe that's why Springsteen has such a broad following – he can produce complex metaphors like the devastating portrait of Bush-era politics that was the title track of Magic, but he can also create a simple heartfelt song like this that speaks straight to the life of yer average Joe.

I wish I saw a little more of that in New Zealand. I prize Springsteen for his anger in times like these, railing against the injustices of the system.

It's the same system that has robbed thousands of New Zealanders of their life savings through crooked finance companies, that has thrown long-term workers on the scrapheap and plunged us all into a new austerity that the poor are paying for at every turn.

Yet I don't see that same anger, that same need to speak out, from New Zealand songwriters.

Are we too apprehensive here, or just too polite? The most recent successful political Kiwi song I can think of is Dave Dobbyn's ‘Welcome Home', a rebuke to Winston Peters' immigration-bashing policies of the time. That was a smart and mature response from Dobbyn, extending the hand of friendship and exhorting others to do the same in the face of xenophobic opportunism.

But just imagine if someone here produced something as laceratingly powerful as ‘We Take Care of our Own'. What would people make of a song that was scathingly critical of New Zealand, or the New Zealand government, or that nice John Key? Can you imagine it ever actually being played on radio?

Sometimes we feel like a very timid country.
watusi@thesun.co.nz