{"id":18167,"date":"2020-05-17T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/estreetshuffle.com\/?p=18167"},"modified":"2023-01-01T15:20:14","modified_gmt":"2023-01-01T23:20:14","slug":"roll-of-the-dice-57-channels-and-nothin-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/estreetshuffle.com\/index.php\/2020\/05\/17\/roll-of-the-dice-57-channels-and-nothin-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Roll of the Dice: 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2002, Bruce Springsteen released\u00a0The Rising,\u00a0<\/em>an album of songs that sounded like they were written for that post-9\/11 moment, even though most of them weren’t. “Nothing Man<\/a>” was recorded in 1994; “My City of Ruins” debuted in 2000; even “Lonesome Day<\/a>” probably originated pre-9\/11.<\/p>\n

By that point in his career, Bruce was so skillful at recontextualizing and rearranging old songs to serve new purposes that most listeners never suspected their origins.<\/p>\n

Ten years earlier, though… not so much.<\/p>\n

We speak, of course, of “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On),” a song so dated and derided that Bruce hasn’t touched it since 1993.<\/p>\n

But the thing is: it’s actually a good song. The problem with “57 Channels” isn’t in its lyrics or music, it’s in the way Bruce (and Little Steven, but more on that later) stretched and distorted the song almost beyond recognition to serve a purpose it wasn’t built for.<\/p>\n

Let’s go back to the beginning and take a fresh listen to a song that started out as a lark in a much simpler time.<\/p>\n

“I wrote [57 Channels] as a joke one night sitting in front of the TV,” Bruce admitted in a 1993 Irish radio interview. Hardcore fans already knew that, though, because Bruce debuted the song at his famous Christic Institute performances in November 1990, introducing it as “a song about loneliness, how there can be so much going on and nothing happening.”<\/p>\n