Word: starkness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...album are about desperate lives along the Mexican-American border. Each is like a short story; several unwind without choruses. On Sinaloa Cowboys, Springsteen sings of two illegal immigrants who fall in with drug traffickers (he manages to rhyme "ravine" and "methamphetamine"). His sound--somewhere between Springsteen's stark Nebraska album and his serenely wrenching hit Streets of Philadelphia--is spare, featuring little instrumentation beyond an acoustic guitar, harmonica and keyboard. In the title song, Springsteen summons the spirit of the hero of John Steinbeck's famous novel about migrant workers, The Grapes of Wrath: "I'm sittin' down here...
Most strikingly, the magazine devotes a disproportionate share of its space to advertisements. The articles act more as breaks from the incessant and unceasing commercialism than vice versa. Such a format stands in stark contrast to that of serious political journals, which place greater emphasis on actually informing the reader about complex political issues than on selling perfume...
...lost touch with his proletarian passions, he's rediscovered them with "The Ghost of Tom Joad," a new collection of songs about desperate lives along the Mexican border. "This album has the power to haunt," says TIME's Christopher John Farley. "Springsteen's sound, which is somewhere between his stark 'Nebraska' album and his serenely wrenching hit 'Streets of Philadelphia, is spare, featuring little instrumentation beyond an acoustic guitar, a harmonica and a keyboard...
...three American diplomats killed last August outside of Sarajevo when the U.S. began its determined effort to bring peace to the Balkans. Relatives of the three were present when the Balkan presidents, put their initials on the thick stack of peace documents. The agreement "certainly does not erase the stark memories of the past or guarantee that the fabric of society will be restored," said Christopher. "Still, it is a victory...
Since history can lead to a sense of negative historical identity, and since historical identity leads to powerful negative emotions which cloud reason, it is sometimes best to leave history where it belongs: in the past. There is a stark difference between searching the past for solutions to contemporary problems, and using the past as an agenda to create a contemporary problem...