Bruce Springsteen is hitting 60

You know what? Also rock stars get old. They dye their hair and keep singing the old anthems, but time ticks for them too and this week Bruce Springsteen will be hitting 60.

The difference between rock stars and normal people is that rock stars do not retire, they earn way too much to take retirement into consideration. They rather prefer producing overrated records instead: they know too well that there are always some deluded fans willing to buy them. What rock stars, though, have in common with normal people, is the desire to talk about things they don’t know much about and trying hard to be popular. Bruce Springsteen and his fiddle with politics is a typical example.

The guy, as per his own admission, was never much interested in politics and he had never read a proper book until he was in his mid-twenties. In fact, he had spent most of his younger days making music, great rock music if you ask me and millions of people who bought his records.

“The Boss” was so much disinterested in politics that many people even thought that he could even be a bit of a Conservative. I thought it too, after all most of his songs were about getting on with it.

I remember my Leftie friends hated the guy because of the American flags flying everywhere at his concerts and because of him looking as a “white trash” without a clue about the issues of the world, but what they despised more than anything, was that “Born in the USA” song, so damn patriotic.

But that was then, now Bruce Springsteen is the prodigal son of the Liberals. He has been bashing George W Bush in the past five years with so much hatred that from listening to his interviews and songs you must think Dubya must be the reincarnation of the Devil.

Springsteen is entitled to his own opinions, but there is more than just “patriotism” in his passion for politics. In the 80’s he was keeping a bit quiet about politics because those were the Reagan’s years and many of his fans loved the then President of the USA as much as him. With the arrival of the ‘90s though, “The Boss” started to lose followers and in order to keep afloat (aka making money) he needed a way to come back into the spotlight, and what a better way than to receive an ovation from the political Left?

The first pivotal moment was the song “American Skin”, written in 2000, in which Springsteen was condemning the NY police for having killed an innocent immigrant, Amadou Diallo. The song was the kind of bad white cops kill innocent black immigrant and was a condemnation of the “zero tolerance” approach of Rudolf Giuliani and a call against anti-racism. Of course, Springsteen never wrote a song about all the policemen killed while on duty or praised Giuliani’s policies that made New York City much safer. Instead, he preferred to concentrate on a tragic episode in order to make himself a “hero” and get some publicity (aka making more money).

September the 11th was the second and more important pivotal moment. The Boss was always known for his tedious attention to details in producing a new album, but with “The Rising” (the album that followed 9/11) it didn’t take him long to produce it. In less than a year, in fact, the album was ready. America was still shaken by the atrocities that happened in New York and the old blue collar hero (who, by the way, has never worked in a factory) was ready to be back at the right time in the limelight.

From then on, it was all about Bush did this and Bush did that. Listening to Springsteen you would think that America was at risk of becoming a dictatorship run by a dick, a bit like Zimbabwe.

President Bush was not for everybody’s taste but it doesn’t take a genius to realise that if you want to save your citizens from further atrocities you have to take some though decisions, whatever that takes. After all, if the terrorists do not care about out rights why should we care about theirs? Does Springsteen really believe that leaving the terrorists alone, they will be leaving us too? Does he really think the US government is imprisoning random people? A man who spent his life singing songs what does he know about the security of the country? Not a word came from Springsteen since 9/11 about the Islamic threat, not a word about the number of Islamic terrorists’ plots that the CIA has stopped from happening.

Thankfully for Springsteen though, now Obama is the President of the USA and he is already “Working on a Dream”.

I am guessing “The Boss” is having a very happy 60th birthday and I am wishing him so, and at least now, with Bush out of the picture, he will hopefully stop talking about what he doesn’t know.

CD Shops vs Spotify

I used to love CD shops, back in the 90's and early 00’s, when I was younger and CD shops were a cool place to spend time and the only place where you could buy music.

Time used to fly in CD shops, looking for rarities, bargains and sometimes both. CDs were expensive at the time and you couldn’t afford many, so when you decided to buy one, you wanted to buy something worth the money.

But nowadays, things have changed so much that the 90's and early 00’s are ancient history.

I went to HMV recently, only because I had a voucher that I received a year ago and I wanted to spend the last £8 remaining. I ended up spending half an hour undecided between Led Zeppelin, Piazzolla and AC DC. I must say, in the last three years I have been in CDs shops only because I had vouchers given to me for my birthdays.

The problem is that I don't enjoy anymore buying CDs in a shop, especially in megastores. First of all, the CD section is shrinking by the day, and soon you will be able to buy only games and DVDs. Secondly, the music I like, rock and jazz, is dying out and the majority of music in the store I cannot make out what it is. Maybe, it's called getting old I suppose, but anyway, what's the point of making the journey to a shop, getting bombarded by loud music, sandwiched between people and then queuing to buy your purchase, when the Internet can do most of the work for you?

If I have to buy a CD I would rather buy it online. On the HMV website, for example, I can listen to 30 seconds of most of the songs, and there and then I can decide to buy the album or not. The price is also generally cheaper than at the store. There are also other websites, like Kazaa (is it still around?) or some others like E-mule where you can download music for free.

However, I recently discovered the best website of all, called Spotify. This site is free and you can access thousands of tracks apart from Beatles, Pink Floyd and some others who have not signed up (yet).

I personally love jazz and at Spotify I can find lots of albums that would cost me a fortune at the shop. That's the thing about jazz, in a shop it's expensive because not many people listen to it but online instead it is, together with classical music, the easiest music to get, maybe because most of the artists are dead or maybe their copyrights did not include any Internet clauses.

With Spotify, like everything else in life, there are downsides too, but only two that I can think of. The first one is advertisement, but the ads are every four songs or so, and they last just ten seconds.

The other downside is that you cannot download music from Spotify into your Mp3 or Ipod.

I am personally rather suspicious of the idea of free things and at the beginning I thought the ads were during the actual songs, similar to when I was a kid and the radio hosts used to talk over the songs to discourage you from recording from the radio and at the same time persuading you to buy the cassette or the CD.

The benefits are, however, more substantial than the downsides and what I like the most about Spotify is, apart from the selection of music, the fact that you don't need to download the music into your computer! You are practically borrowing a CD shop every time you log in and then giving it back.

As far as I am concerned, CD shops do not do for me anymore but, I must say, I still like the very small ones or the ones I visit while I am abroad. I like the feeling of looking through random titles instead of going to a shop where everything you know is where it is supposed to be.

By the way, at the end of my shopping I bought AC DC, maybe because they are not on Spotify... yet.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a man?

Another summer is gone, oh dear, well, at least here in good old England we did have a summer at last. Climate change is finally working but, blimey, it will take a while before matching Brazil or Thailand!

Anyway, summer is all about sport.

England has won the Ashes, apparently. I don’t know anything about cricket, or what some kind of ashes have to do with a sport competition, but it seems like the trophy was a cool thing to bring home. In tennis, Roger Federer has won Wimbledon (again) and Andy Murray still hasn’t managed to win a bloody Grand Slam title. However, the main sporting attraction of the summer was a sportswoman (or sportsman) under the name of Caster Semenya.

Well, as you probably know, Caster Semenya has won the Women's 800 metres of the World Championship of Athletics by a mile. Nothing wrong with that, if it wasn’t that, well… she looks A LOT like a man… I mean much more than Ann Widdecombe does! And she talks like a man, with a pitch of voice that she could be performing as a decent tenor. I could get hold only of an interview of her/him (what the hell) in the web, but the way she/he looks, talks and moves is unquestionably manly, and many people I talked to seem to agree.

The questioning about Semenya’s real gender has been growing for a while, and increasingly so since her stunning victory in the final that IAAF (the International Association of Athletics Federations) has forced Semenya to take a gender test. By that, I don’t mean just checking what she looks like naked, but a thorough examination of her body, internally as well as externally.

The story has obviously created, since the start, a lot of controversy. Not only the issue is rather intriguing, but political and racial ingredients are playing part in the story, and many commentators and members of the public are willing to read into the story other “conspiracy” meanings.

There is, in fact, the customary talking of “raaaacism” by some usual forever-guilty white liberals and from some over-sensitive members of black community who believe all this talking of Semenya’s gender issue has to do with the fact that she is black. Bloody hell, this has nothing to do with race but with gender! In athletics, differences between man and women are huge. I was myself an 800 metres runner back in the ‘90s and with my record (1’ 57” 6) I could have been easily running in the Women's Olympic Final, but as a man I could barely manage to reach the semi-final of a regional event.

The other issue is that the athlete is South African, and this story has apparently been created to discredit a black person from a country guilty in the past of apartheid. Should we then all pretend nothing is happening until we will find a white woman with the same conditions?

Last, let’s not forget, South Africa is hosting the next World Cup of football, and the country is trying to keep a good appearance on the international stage, and a sex scandal, as every US President wannabe knows, is not welcomed.

But now, finally, the test is coming through, and it seems like Semenya is a hermaphrodite after all, in other words not a woman and not a man, but more a man than she and all her supporters and “raaaacist” idiots wanted us to think.

Now what the IAAF is going to do? Strip Semenya of the gold medal? And who is she going to run the next race with… Lily Savage?