and as he's widened his canvas, his magic has diminished. With Adams, though, it's the bigger the better. His songs couldn't possibly be more effective in a club than in a hockey arena, and you know that's not true with the Boss.

Even John Cougar Mellencamp relinquished his average-guy credentials with Scarecrow, a praiseworthy achievement that elevated him to the ranks of the special. He may be more popular than ever, but he can no longer get away with simply rocking the house down – he's got to get more special every time out.

Bryan Adams faced the same problem once his hook-laden last album, 1984's Reckless, took him to the top of the arena heap. No longer could he merely be Everyman – writing 1985's "Tears Are Not Enough" (the Canadian "We Are the World") and singing with Tina Turner (who is anything but Everywoman) were enough to blow that cover. So like Mellen-camp and Bob Seger before him, Adams came to the point where he had to move from speaking to the masses to speaking for them. If he didn't, he risked stagnating as a good-time rocker with every Tom, Dick and Bon Jovi poised to supplant him.

So with Into the Fire, his fifth album, Adams follows Mellencamp and Seger up the mountain but fails to come within sight of the peak. Though Into the Fire is Adams's all-around strongest work, it doesn't rival Scarecrow or Seger's Beautiful Loser. Where Seger offered some kind of hope to a lost and rootless generation and Mellencamp pretty well captured the mood of the nation, Adams shows that he has a will to speak but nothing in particular to say.

Ostensibly – and predictably – inspired by Adams's participation in the Live Aid and Amnesty International benefit shows, the themes of the album seem to revolve around various personal and political struggles for freedom. That's hardly a new area to explore, and a scan of the song titles ("Heat of the Night," "Only the Strong Survive," "Into the Fire" and so on) shows that the best Adams and co-writer Jim Vallance could come up with was a series of clichés.

The lyrics rarely rise above such catch-phrase assemblages as these lines from "Only the Strong Survive": "'Cause you gotta understand that there ain't no second chance/No one gets outa here alive – only the strong survive." Worse are the vague pro-Native American mess