Music

Various Artists

Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska (Sub Pop)

By John Floyd 

Like a zombie in a shopping mall, impervious to the bullets fired at its heart by the desperate and weary, the tribute album continues to stomp across the landmarks of rock, pop, and soul, destroying all in its soulless, heartless path to destruction. The latest victim is Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen's landmark set from 1982, a bruised and battered collection of home-recorded songs that sliced through the piety and patriotic bullshit of Reaganomics with the literate passion of Woody Guthrie and the forlorn doom of the most brutal Delta blues. Released just two years after his commercial breakthrough with "Hungry Heart" and The River, the intimate, mostly acoustic Nebraska was both an epoch for Springsteen (he'd never written better character studies) and a harbinger of the politically charged roots-rock movement of the mid-Eighties.

The thirteen artists gathered to recreate the record on Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, however, obviously haven't a clue as to what made the album at once worthy of a tribute and entirely beyond their reach. Springsteen's songs -- mostly tales of dashed hopes, broken dreams, and the United States turning on its own -- were built on frameworks pulled from the simple progressions of traditional folk and honky-tonk, and intensified by his defeated but often angry vocals. The interpretations here amount to so much boring mush.

Chrissie Hynde turns the title track into one long exhausting yawn, sucking all of the drama out of Springsteen's bio of mass murderer Charles Starkweather. Ani DiFranco does the same on the quintessentially blue-collar "Used Cars," while Son Volt turn the rockabilly rave-up "Open All Night" into a mournful ballad. Most everyone else -- an assemblage of crit-faves from Los Lobos and Ben Harper to Aimee Mann, Deana Carter, and the unabashedly cornpone Hank Williams III -- simply botch the material; clearly no one knows what to do with these seemingly simple songs of tragic life and heartache. Three songs written by Springsteen during the time of the Nebraska sessions flesh out this insufferable, exasperating bomb of an album, among them a disposable "Downbound Train" by the Mavericks' Raul Malo and a feeble Johnny Cash taking an embarrassing painful stab at "I'm On Fire." (Someone please make this man retire.)

If there's a reason to waste even a few minutes with Badlands, arguably the worst tribute album of all time and the most tedious, numbing release since Radiohead's last batch of studio barf, it's Dar Williams's daring lovely "Highway Patrolman." Beyond the gender-bending of the lyric (the song is narrated by the deputized brother of a criminal hellion), Williams manages to crawl into the lyric and do what these tributes so seldom can: make it her own. Sadly that's not enough to right this train wreck.