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Bridge and tunnel boys : Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the metropolitan sound of the American century

Title: Bridge and tunnel boys : Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the metropolitan sound of the American century / Jim Cullen.
Author: Cullen, Jim, 1962-
Publication: New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2024]

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	JME 24-8	Performing Arts Research Collections - Music

Details

Description

xiii, 273 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen are among the most well-known and beloved figures in American popular music in the past half-century. The two, friends over many decades, have often been compared. But in this study, cultural historian Jim Cullen systematically traces the uncanny parallels in their lives. Here are two people who were born in the same year--one east of New York City on Long Island, the other west of New York City in suburban New Jersey. Both signed to the same record label. Both released early albums on that label that were hailed yet underperformed in record stores. Both had breakout records in the late seventies, and both ascended to empyrean heights in the mid-eighties. Both married models (and divorced them). And both remained icons well into the 21st century, lionized for their live shows. But there's more here than a set of striking coincidences: Joel and Springsteen are also products of a distinctive New York metropolitan sound-whose hallmark is racial and ethnic integration-that cohered around 1900 and of which both are modern exemplars. Their careers are case studies in how a popular art form unfolded at the tail end of the American century-decades of uncertainty and revival, doubt and hope"--

Subject

Genre/Form

Biographies.
Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-252) and index.

Contents

New York state of mind -- Hard times, boom years -- Points of departure -- Arrivals -- Through glass, darkly -- Right time -- Family feuds -- Homing.

Call Number

JME 24-8

ISBN

9781978835221
1978835221
9781978835238 (canceled/invalid)
9781978835245 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2023007691

OCLC

1372548831

Author

Cullen, Jim, 1962- author.

Title

Bridge and tunnel boys : Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the metropolitan sound of the American century / Jim Cullen.

Publisher

New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2024]

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-252) and index.

Chronological Term

1971-1990

Research Call Number

JME 24-8

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