Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 437 songs to go!
For this entry I learned “Adam Raised A Cain” by Bruce Springsteen. This marks the fourth time that Springsteen has appeared in this series, following “Bobby Jean” (DU#1), “The River” (DU#24), and “Backstreets” (DU#40). With a commanding 10% share of the Leaderboard, Springsteen is effectively the patriarch of the Drumming Upstream family, which makes it all the more ironic that this entry’s song is a vengeful blues rocker aimed squarely at Springsteen’s own father. What happens when the daddy of dad rock takes on dads themselves? Find out below!
Side A
“Adam Raised A Cain”
By Bruce Springsteen
Darkness On The Edge Of Town
Released on June 2nd, 1978
Liked on February 29th, 2016
In 2019, just as Abraham had once bound Isaac for sacrifice, rock critic Rob Mitchum took the old saw about killing your darlings to heart and strapped his child to an operating table. 12 years earlier Mitchum had helped popularize the term “dad rock” in a review of Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky for Pitchfork, wielding the phrase to brand the alt-country band as washed up1. Not only had the term gotten under the skin of Wilco songwriter Jeff Tweedy, who called the description “unflattering and hurtful”, it had also, according to Mitchum, inspired a mountain of pop culture writing that slapped the prefix “dad” onto anything that could pin down. Mitchum, by then long removed from his days at Pitchfork and now a father himself, took to the digital pages of Esquire to examine what he had wrought on rock discourse.
The term dad rock means something different depending on, to paraphrase Arnold Schwarzenegger, who your dad is and what he does. In its most common usage however it typically refers to rock music from the middle of the 20th century, as opposed to rock music from the early days of the 21st. Even within this broadly accepted definition there’s room for different points of reference. In his dissection of the genre tag in Esquire, Mitchum notes that he picked it up from Chris Ott, Pitchfork’s Lucifer, cast out and damned to the fiery pits of Vimeo. Ott in turn nicked the term from British rock critics writing about bands from the early 1990s preoccupied with reviving the sounds of the 1960s British invasion. For Mitchum, whether defending the band or roasting them, calling Wilco dad rock meant that they sounded too much like American rock bands from the 1970s. In other words, mine to be clear, they sounded too much like Bruce Springsteen.
At least, that’s what the term dad rock means to me. Long before my peers convinced me to give Springsteen’s music an earnest try, I had filed The Boss under “stuff my dad likes” and dismissed him. I had heard enough Springsteen on long family drives, where The E Street Band’s horn section blasted loud enough to drown out the nü-metal CDs on my walkman, to write him off as hopelessly old school. I liked my fair share of 70s hard rock as a teen, but, despite a being contemporary of your Zeppelin’s Led and Sabbath’s Black2, Springsteen sounded even older than them. His music was too folksy, too self-consciously classic and reverent to the soda shop jukebox tunes of my parents’ childhood to fit with the raucous conception I had of “real” rock music. Or maybe I just hadn’t developed a taste for horn sections yet.
Had I heard “Adam Raised A Cain” sooner I might have had a different perspective. The second track on Side A of 1978’s Darkness On The Edge Of Town, “Adam Raised A Cain” is the first sign that Springsteen’s fourth album will live up to its title. Released three years after Born to Run launched Springsteen into real deal rock stardom and emphatically closed the early stages of his career, Darkness is the debut of Springsteen as we know him today. The songs and the lyric sheets are shorter, drained of the verbal and musical bloat of his early work. Instead the language and arrangements are lean, economic, and discomfortingly blunt. Darkness trades in starry-eyed romanticism for an unsparring look at what exactly Springsteen thought he was born to run from. And, perhaps most pertinent to today’s subject, it featured way, way more guitar.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Lamniformes Cuneiform to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.