Music - Richard Cook charts the survival of the US protest song

Where have all the protest singers gone? Gone to rap records, every one. Or almost every one: there's still the increasingly weather-beaten Bruce Springsteen to give us the working man's blues, in his unreconstructed rock'n'roll shoes. On Live in New York City (Columbia), Springsteen and his faithful, reformed-one-more-time E Street Band plug their way through 17 anthems from his heroic songbook, and add a couple of new tracks that show us the two sides of this great protester's faith. One, "Land of Hope and Dreams", spins a central image in blues and gospel writing - the train going to the promised land - into a typical Springsteen benediction: "Leave behind your sorrows/Let this day be the last/Tomorrow there'll be sunshine/And all this darkness past." But he immediately blows away any sense of redemption by calling up "American Skin (41 Shots)" as the next song on the record. The title and the text refer to the slaying of an unarmed suspect by American policemen, and to the number of bullets that was required to effect the tragedy: "You can get killed just for living in your American skin."

Springsteen has long wrestled with the problems of being enormously successful while acting as some kind of Voice of America. Only rarely does he fall into the bad poetry that marks out so many songwriters who have "something to say", but, like them, he can't quite solve the difficulty of being eloquently simple on complex issues. In his first songs, he didn't even try for simplicity: the music on those early Seventies records surrounded a breathless flood of words and images, the gabbling of a man who was in love with lyrics that confounded common speech, even as they approximated the elegance of street talk. As he got older, the torrent subsided and the words began to be pared away. Springsteen could still create the teeming epics of before, but he did so with an economy of gesture which, at its best, was as sublime as rock songwriting gets.

Next to the generally celebratory feel of the rest of the record, "American Skin (41 Shots)" might have been a poisonous interlude. As the song gathers pace from its somnolent introduction, the Madison Square Garden audience falls into a handclap, only to be silenced when Springsteen snaps: "We need some quiet." Even then, the singer misses the chance to make it more troubling. The E Street Band, who make a lot of noise even when they are playing quietly, turn up the dials soon enough, and the song is transformed from a cold scalpel into a blunt instrument. Perhaps there's no other way to play to a stadium audience: if he'd only played the music of his introspective, near-solo records Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen would have been just another folkie with a grudge against the world. The anger of "American Skin (41 Shots)" might seem to beg for the cannon-fire delivery that he opted for, but, by setting it in the midst of his other material, Springsteen ultimately nullifies its particularity.

Rock politicians have never had an easy time of it: once they have written their manifesto, they really do have to stick with it. Springsteen's alternative national anthem, "Born in the USA", is on this record, and although he has rung numerous changes on it over the past 15 years (here it is saddled with some Indian-sounding flamenco guitar and another new melody line), it still sounds triumphalist, even though the lyrics are as sour as rye whiskey. Springsteen's spiritual godfather, Bob Dylan, who turned 60 last month, sidestepped the problem by leaving his protest days behind him as quickly as possible. Once he had gone electric, Dylan set his soapbox aside in favour of a peculiar brand of surrealism. Springsteen, who relies on a blue-collar battleground for every line of his songs, doesn't have that option.

At least the protest singer has a ready supply of fresh material to go with his old favourites: in an imperfect world, there is always something new to beef about. But, like his fans, Springsteen is growing old, and perhaps fatigued. The most disappointing thing about the record is how wearisome his vocals often are: years of bawling at big audiences have taken their toll, and much of the time his voice sounds congested and tired. The E Street Band probably sounded great at the shows themselves, but with four guitars, a sax, two keyboards, a bass and drums, they often run over these songs like a tank. There's a lot of sound and fury here; and, while that may signify something, it is increasingly difficult to say what it is, beyond the general air of dissatisfaction that is protest's oxygen. But with a Republican back in the White House, maybe Springsteen is even now girding his loins for another term. No mandate necessary, as long as you can strum the chords to "The Times They Are a-Changin'".

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