BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN PRAISES KANYE

The Boss.

Bruce Springsteen recently gave an interview with NPR and discussed his appreciation for hip-hop and Kanye West. Evidently, The Boss been doin’ the education.

Well, you were talking earlier about how you and Brendan have worked with beats or I know on some of the songs [the credits read] “loops by Bruce Springsteen.” This shows an influence perhaps of hip-hop or at least of the technology of hip-hop and I wonder if at some point in your listening, because I know that you listen to everything and one of the things I treasured about your South By Southwest talk that you gave was how you erase genre and you said, “We should embrace everything that sounds right to our ears,” and I wondered if hip-hop was something at some point that kind of, the light went on for you and you got it or how does that work in relationship to you?                                       Well it was so present, you know. At one moment particularly you had “White Lines” and this was stuff that was talking about what was going on in the streets and in the inner cities with people who were struggling. And that was something that, I mean, I had my own context for that, you know, that I wrote about it in my own way. But it was the music that came along and gave voice to those things outside of what was then considered a protest music context, you know, and did so really beautifully. And so, you know, I’m not well-versed in it but I have listened over the years. You know, Public Enemy, Notorious B.I.G., I listened to Tupac, I listen to Kanye West. Kanye West is incredible, you know. I mean, the record-making facility, you know, there’s a lot of hours in those records and they’re …

He’s a perfectionist like you.                                                                  I mean some of these, there’s like, just the production. And I saw him on television, he did the song called “Blood on the Leaves” on the Later…With Jools Holland — it was fantastic, you know. He’s a very, I still find him very interesting. I’m not necessarily driving [to] it in my car, you know. I probably fall back on the stuff that I listened to as a kid or something if I’m driving around. But I do listen. I listen to a lot because there’s a lot of information in it and it’s just fascinating record-making.