The Boss? Really?

I feel a little bit these days like history has been rewritten and no one bothered to adjust my memories of it. Passing through adolescence and growing a musical identity in the 90s, I of course heard of tons of great musical acts from the past, from culturally omnipresent icons like Zep, Floyd, and Hendrix to underground innovators like the Velvet Underground and Joy Division. Nowhere to be found were paeans to the greatness of Bruce Springsteen, whom I thought of vaguely as a lame, just-before-my-time guy who had a lot of commercial success writing blues rock for dads. Now, with not one but two encomia* on the Boss having been produced by my favorite indie-crit sites this week, the man is apparently a cultural touchstone, an ever-flowing font of populist inspiration.

I realize that every indie band and its blog-writing brother, from the Arcade Fire to the Killers to the Hold Steady, is now aping Springsteen to such an extent that even I who have listened to very little of the man's work can easily detect the influence. I even like one of those bands (the Arcade Fire) a lot, though their first album, which lacks the Springsteen flavor, is much better and their second album's best track was written long before they moved into his neighborhood. But everyone's acting like revering the Boss is nothing new or surprising at all, whereas I don't remember anything being mentioned about him in indie circles before last year. Normally, when an act gets critically rehabilitated, you expect to see every article on the subject include some sentence to the effect of "Long neglected by trendy hipster snobs, Band X's [innovative/masterful] brand of [raw energy/melodic genius/epic songwriting] is finally getting its due and inspiring a new generation of acolytes."

So am I just missing something? Has everyone but me always been loving the Boss ? I admit that I'm reluctant to spend the effort to steal his music and become acquainted with it, largely because the one song of his that I know well enough to kind of sing, "Born in the USA," is absolutely god awful. Something about the track's lovely mixture of a chintzy/cloying synth riff, a super-dated snare pounding unimaginatively on every offbeat, and a middle-aged guy shouting tunelessly at the top of his lungs just doesn't suck me in. I guess the lyrics are all ironic and stuff, and that's cool, but man...I don't think that even words composed by the quilled pen of Shakespeare himself could save that music. Does Springsteen's other stuff not suck?

*Yes, I found that word in a thesaurus. It's just like a eulogy, but without the implication that the person being praised is now dead! Thanks, Roget.