Come on and take your best shot (12/5/14)

I've said this before but sometimes these things need repeating; occasionally you'll have moments when only one song makes any sense.

In the aftermath of 9/11 literally the only song I could listen to was Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited'; its sense of dread and doom and impending apocalypse chimed perfectly with the mood of the times. It didn't help, it didn't comfort, it offered no hope but it fitted.

Of late, as Liverpool's unbelievable, ridiculous title charge gained momentum and the world told us that it couldn't last, that it had to fail, I've fallen back on Springsteen's 'Wrecking Ball' (no relation to the Miley Cyrus number)

The song was written for and about the closure and demolition of New Jersey's Giants Stadium, home to the NFL's New York Giants and New York Jets, and it speaks of defiance and desire and love for your sport and the venues that hold your dreams. It says that we are bigger than the forces that try to pull us down and that whatever happens our dreams will always stand. It may have started as a literal hymn to one particular building but as it's moved its way around the world with a band that invariably  plays its gigs in sports stadiums, it's become something universal, something all encompassing, a symbol, a metaphor.

The song has become - as so much of Springsteen's late period work has become - about the ageing process, about mortality, about the memories that we leave behind when we go. It's about what happens when 'all our little victories turn into parking lots'. It may have been written from the point of view of giving the stadium a human voice of its own but it reminds us that every game we play, every time we attend whatever venue we call home, everybody that has preceded us is still there, that 'all our steel and stories will drift to rust and our youth and beauty will turn to dust' but we remain and we remain defiant. Hard times may test us, politically, economically, socially or in the name of sports but we stand.

The song understands what it is to be a fan, how important what we do is to us and realises that every one of us is part of the history of whatever it is we love. It genuinely breaks my heart at times.

So, when people question, when an answer is needed, when defiance and resolve is called for, the only answer that makes any sense is this; "Come on and take your best shot, let me see what you got, bring on your wrecking ball.'

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