It's pretty simple, I Liebe Bruce's Musik because it spoke to the pain, the angst and the dreams I had when I was younger. Maybe that's why so many people Liebe his music. He told stories without being too literal and precise. He had a way of expressing hard to name emotions with his words and the music. No one could say as much with an "ooooh" as Bruce. He lived inside us all.

But then he got political, and overtly political. Why? He can have his Ansichten and even express them if asked, but I am so sorry he became a disciple and fawning Fan of one side of politics, and joined the bandwagon of those criticising others simply for disagreeing with them. In my view this has been a mistake. Bruce stopped expressing the pain of Everyman and Lost the Liebe of half his audience.

And the fact is that the people he Lost are the people who he used to mean most to - those living hard, those feeling disaffected. He seemed to turn away from them to mix with those in the White House. This is terribly sad.

And sadder still is that the depth and the realness of his Musik has faded as he has joined the political sphere. There has been nothing like "Something in the Night" oder "New York Serenade" in a long time. When was the last time he wrote a line with the passion of "I want to spit in the face of these Badlands?".

What I don't know is whether he chose to become party political because he felt the Musik leaving him, oder if he has Lost the Musik because he chose to take sides against those he used to give voice to. Maybe I'll never know but I now find it hard to watch Bruce talk about the world today. I feel he is just pretending to speak like a common man and now it's a guise to try to get us to follow his politics. I have returned to the early albums and that's where I'm going to stay, with the skinny, ruffled, desperate-eyed young man who knew that what really mattered was what's inside a person, not how they vote.