Bono, U2, Springsteen and an All-Encompassing “Yes.”

On seeing U2 at The Sphere.

In his upcoming book There Was Nothing You Could Do, which is about how Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” album changed both his career and musical superstardom in general — a book I was honored to be asked to provide a blurb for — author Steven Hyden writes about how Springsteen, when he exploded onto the scene, allowed rock critics a narrative link between Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. “For the (mostly white male boomer) music critics of the eighties, Bruce was a vessel into which they could pour their admiration for those older legends,” Hyden writes. “It was as if they had found the perfect rock star — he could move like Elvis and write like Dylan. The pelvis and the brain had finally been fused into one.” But there’s a pivotal moment, after Springsteen released “Nebraska” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” when Springsteen chooses sides. As Springsteen told the story when he inducted Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the first time he heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” he was in car with his mom. She turned to him: “That guy can’t sing.”

The critic Griel Marcus once wrote there were two sorts of rock stars: Those like Elvis, the sort of performer who “gives an all-encompassing Yes to his audience,” an all-tents monoculture superstar who will do their own thing but also believes in appealing to everyone at all times, and those like Dylan, who are resolutely themselves and would say, as Hyden puts it in the book, “Hell no” to welcoming the wrong kind of fan into their fold. Elvis (and, later, Eddie Vedder, or, for that matter, Taylor Swift) was a “all-encompassing yes” rock star; Dylan (and, later, Kurt Cobain) was a “Hell, no” rock star. (The “Hell no” is Hyden’s appellation, not Marcus’.) After the acclaimed but quiet early post-”Born to Run” albums, Springsteen decided: He was more like Elvis. He did not believe that being a rock star, or making music, or doing anything, was supposed to be exclusive, or purposely difficult. He wanted to reach the masses, to appeal to people in a way that felt universal. “Bruce could see that Bob Dylan was no uniter like Elvis,” Hyden writes…