10 Rock Artists That Ripped Off Other Bands

Over the years, Bruce Springsteen has pretty much invented his own genre from the ground up. From the middle class stories he puts throughout his music to the way he uses his E Street Band as an instrument unto itself, the Everyman attitude from the Boss has become synonymous with what became known as heartland rock. Not many people were feeling that kind of energy in the beginning though.

While albums like Greetings from Asbury Park did fairly well and even garnered some decent reviews, a lot of the press had something different to say about Springsteen's delivery. Across each of his songs, Springsteen would incorporate stories with stark imagery, characters that are down on their luck, and metaphors that took a little more time to process than your average pop single. It was a winning formula for sure, that is if you forget the fact that Bob Dylan had been doing the same thing since the '60s.

Though the critics may have been rapturous at the beginning, the tag of being a new Dylan was never something that set well with Springsteen, not really wanting to be the voice of a generation like his idol was. That all changed with Born to Run, whose cinematic scope and iconic characters gave Springsteen a sound all his own. While it may have been any songwriter's dream to be compared to Dylan, it was a dream that the Boss didn't want to live in for very long.