BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN volunteers for heavy duty with his newest album, “The Rising” (Columbia Records). He pays tribute to the rescue workers who marched into the World Trade Center buildings as they tore and burned and snowed down onto lower Manhattan. He looks to capture the sorrow and shock of waking up to a world as different as the physically altered New York skyline. In another song, the Boss describes the distance between our world and one “‘neath Allah’s blessed rain.” September 11 is everywhere–and nowhere–on this album.

Springsteen has long played the socially conscious rocker. Most famously, on “Born in the U.S.A.,” he spoke for veterans returning to the cold embrace of the country that sent them to Vietnam. Later he recorded the doleful title track for the AIDS movie “Philadelphia,” and, more recently, he mourned the horrific shooting of Amadou Diallo by New York City’s Police Department. All this controversy, however, masks a very controversy-phobic person. For example, Springsteen claimed in “41 shots” not to be criticizing the cops, a difficult position to hold since no one writes songs about accidental shootings, but a position one might try to hold were he afraid of losing his blue-collar creds. This desire to remain in everyone’s good standing doesn’t serve Springsteen well in approaching the power of September 11. And it makes for great frustration on the listener’s part. After all, if Springsteen could be critical of the United States in 1984, why can’t he be critical of her enemies today?