From Suburban Shores

A third and final adapted excerpt from my new book. Hope you like it!

Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen are not the most successful popular musicians of all time. They’re not even the most successful musicians of their time (their contemporaries Michael Jackson and Elton John have sold more records). But each has sales in the neighborhood of 150 million, has scored dozens of hit songs on various Billboard charts, and both have been staples of radio playlists for half a century. In this timespan they have been household names, and have enjoyed the esteem of their peers—and, in some cases, like Johnny Cash (Springsteen) and Frank Sinatra (Joel), their elders as well. Their lives and work have been richly chronicled across multiple media, and there is now a substantial critical literature on each. Both have been the subject of academic symposia and the subject of scholarly articles with titles like “Our Butch Mother, Bruce Springsteen,” and Springsteen fandom has become a subject of ethnographic study in its own right, most recently among women.  Springsteen himself is now the author of a number of books, including his 2016 memoir Born to Run; Joel, who planned a memoir of his own, instead cooperated with the publication of longtime Rolling Stone writer Fred Schruers’s authorized biography in 2014.

Which is why one might legitimately wonder about the efficacy of this study. One could also note, given the climate of elite opinion in the 2020s, that Springsteen and Joel have a number of strikes against them: white, male, Baby Boom. (The only time Springsteen had a primarily black audience was when he did a show in Ivory Coast in 1988, which he remembers fondly, as he does sharing the stage with Jay-Z in a benefit concert for Barack Obama twenty years later.) Such aging stars have sucked up a lot of cultural oxygen for a long time now, and one can fairly decide to focus one’s attention elsewhere. But the appeal of both extends beyond their assigned demographics. Both have significant followings among a diverse array of women, and both have managed to attain a measure of finite intergenerational appeal. Sarfraz Manzoor’s Springsteen-saturated 2007 memoir of his Pakistani childhood in Britain, Greetings from Bury Park, became the basis of the 2019 movie Blinded by the Light.  Journalist Fareed Zakaria realized a longtime dream of interviewing Joel, a longtime idol since his youth in India, for a 2022 CNN documentary. In her 2021 hit single “Déjà Vu,” Olivia Rodrigo grimly imagines a former partner to whom she taught the lyrics of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” singing the song to a new paramour. The two sang a duet of the song together in 2022.

Both men have managed to retain an element of cultural currency well into their seventies. Joel has not released a studio album since 1993, but remains a favorite on the concert circuit. Since 2014 he has had a monthly residency at New York’s Madison Square Garden that has consistently sold out. He commutes to these shows from his Long Island home by helicopter, earning in excess of a million dollars a night. Springsteen also remains a high-profile performer globally (he’s more popular in Europe than the United States), and has been a remarkably prolific recording artist. In 2020, he became the first pop star to have a top-five album over six decades. Admittedly, many of those records struggle to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in contrast to the tens of millions of his biggest hits. But his consistency is truly remarkable.

This book tries to do two things. The first is to carefully document an almost uncanny, and illuminating, set of parallels in Springsteen and Joel’s lives. Here are two men born within a few months of each other on opposite sides of, and about the same distance from, Manhattan. Both were signed to the same record label; both released their first albums on that label the same year. Despite high hopes, both underperformed expectations in the years following their debuts, and both were in danger of losing their careers by the mid-1970s. Both managed to spring back with breakthrough albums in the latter half of that decade. Both peaked in their dominance of the pop charts in the mid-1980s, when both married models (whom both later divorced). Both faded as pop stars in the early 1990s, though they retained their followings and augmented them into the twenty-first century. Both are remembered as icons of their era.

That’s intrinsically interesting, but not quite sufficient. For it raises the question of what Springsteen and Joel were icons of, and why that matters now. The answer, as this introduction has tried to lay out as concisely and explicitly as possible, is that both were embodiments of a certain kind of metropolitan culture that emerged and flourished in the late twentieth century, a culture that experienced a final flowering in the latter days of the American empire. Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen were representative figures of the metropolitan rim at the moment when suburbanites became the majority of the U.S. population: they embodied a moment when the margins paradoxically became the center—an efflorescence of cultural democracy. On the other hand, both were beneficiaries of American power whose decline, which they had intimations of, has greatly accelerated in the decades since, to the point where their heirs have come of age in a very different world. Trying to make sense of this—to consider how any given moment or person is a product of change and/or continuity, and which matters more—is at the heart of what it means to engage with the past.  That engagement is finally personal, a process of making meaning at the heart of history. The historian points the way. The reader makes sense of the journey. But only after the kind of sustained encounter this little study intends to provide. Bon Voyage.

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