Shades of Springsteen : Politics, Love, Sports, and Masculinity

One of the secrets to Bruce Springsteen’s enduring popularity over the past fifty years is the way fans feel a deep personal connection to his work. Yet even as the connection often stays grounded in details from his New Jersey upbringing, Springsteen’s music references a rich array of personalities from John Steinbeck to Amadou Diallo and beyond, inspiring fans to seek out and connect with a whole world’s worth of art, literature, and life stories. In this unique blend of memoir and musical analysis, John Massaro reflects on his experiences as a lifelong fan of The Boss and one of the first professors to design a college course on Springsteen’s work. Focusing on five of the Jersey rocker’s main themes—love, masculinity, sports, politics, and the power of music—he shows how they are represented in Springsteen’s lyrics and shares stories from his own life that powerfully resonate with those lyrics. Meanwhile, paying tribute to Springsteen’s inclusive vision, he draws connections among figures as seemingly disparate as James Joyce, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thomas Aquinas, Bobby Darin, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. __Shades of Springsteen__ offers a deeply personal take on the musical and cultural legacies of an American icon. "Although never having met Bruce Springsteen, connecting with the poet/rock star has been a seminal event in John Massaro's life. In Shades of Springsteen: Politics, Love, Sports, and Masculinity Massaro, SUNY Distinguished Teacher Professor of Politics, draws upon his years of research in preparing a college level course on Springsteen. He documents a truly mutual connection linking two related stories: Springsteen's and his own. That connection-shades of Springsteen, if you will-opened Massaro not only to Springsteen but also to a wider enriching world. Massaro fleshes out the connection by focusing on what Springsteen's lyrics can tell us about music, politics, love, sports, and masculinity. In this unique and far-ranging book, Massaro artfully and convincingly connects Springsteen's oeuvre to his own life but also to the lives of a diverse collection of other intriguing characters, fictional and real, including Richard Nixon, Alexander Hamilton, George Carlin, The Great Gatsby, Caravaggio, Mao Tse-tung, Carl Jung, J. Edgar Hoover, Mohamed Atta, J.D. Salinger and Holden Caulfield"-- Provided by publisher In this unique blend of memoir and musical analysis, John Massaro focuses on five of Springsteen's main themes: love, masculinity, sports, politics, and the power of music. He draws exciting connections between the Jersey rocker's lyrics, his own life stories, and historical, literary, and musical figures ranging from James Joyce to Lin-Manuel Miranda.