Artist of the Year: Bruce Springsteen : Rolling Stone

For the Third Consecutive Year, and for the sixth time in nine years, Rolling Stone's readers have voted Bruce Springsteen Artist of the Year — an extraordinary index of how deeply Springsteen has penetrated American culture and the souls of his fans. After all, Springsteen was virtually invisible through most of 1986. He made a single live appearance, at a benefit concert in California for handicapped children, and gave no interviews. His last album of new songs, Bom in the U.S.A., was released nearly three years ago.

Still, as everyone knows, the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live/1975-85 boxed set dominated record sales, radio play and the lives of rock cognoscenti for the last two Artist of the Year months of 1986. From any other living artist, such a set would have seemed close to the ultimate cynical gesture: an expensive multialbum collection of greatest hits, recorded live and released around Christmas time for maximum commercial impact; a set that contained only one new song and a smattering of predictable covers (a Motown tune, a Stax/Volt song, a folk chestnut, a feeling singer-songwriter finale); the perfect way to follow up and cash in on the biggest-selling record of his career.

But from Springsteen it was a masterful triumph — not merely the performance album anticipated from the earliest "you gotta see him live" days of his recording career and foreshadowed in hundreds of cherished bootlegs, but the celebration of his attaining the heights his ambition always demanded that he strive for. This Artist of the Year award is his fans' confirmation that Springsteen deserves this stature — it's a lifetime-achievement award, really, a resounding thank-you.

But Springsteen's career, let alone his lifetime, isn't nearly over, and the question that shadows the success of Live/1975-85 is "Where does he go from here?" With characteristic go-for-broke determination, his unfailing instinct for upping the ante at every crucial turn, Springsteen has brought himself face to face with this question. The scope of Live/1975-85, which starts with the national breakout of the Born to Run tour and ends with Born in the U.S.A.'s national conquest, defines a full ten-year period as the era of Bruce Springsteen ? and simultaneously declares an end to that era. The slate swept clean, anything less than a dramatic new beginning would be worse than anticlimactic. It would be a failure to meet his own challenge, the betrayal of his promise to himself.

Meeting the challenge and delivering on the promise, however, are complicated by the enormous, and enormously divergent, expectations Springsteen's audience has of him. Like every artist who has attained success on such a massive scale — Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson represent other vivid examples — Springsteen embodies a plethora of contradictions. In the public's eye, he is both easygoing and fiercely aspiring, both an ordinary working-class guy and a multimillionaire. He inspires millions of fans to feel an intense personal relationship with him, but he is, in fact, insulated and remote. He is rarely seen in public, virtually never speaks to the media and releases albums infrequently. He is both a rebel and a patriot, claimed by the political left and right. He is life-size and larger than life.