Word: springsteen
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...having the experience two times in my life of doing something that makes New Jersey fashionable. What are the odds on that?' STEVEN VAN ZANDT, on being in both Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and the TV show The Sopranos, which ended its eight-year U.S. run on June...
...special kick is that the Pakistani-born Briton, now 35, manages to stake out his own life, more hopeful than his parents', not by becoming an assimilated Englishman, nor by turning to radical Islam, but by becoming, of all things, a Springsteenite. In the songs of the Catholic Bruce Springsteen, from New Jersey, the keema aloo-loving boy in working-class England finds a way to grasp his parents' dreams while also claiming new dreams of his own. From Springsteen, he breathes in a distinctly American sense of possibility, and the freedom of self-reinvention. Amid the regular guys...
...different inflection. This is a boy who kisses the Koran before wishing for a ZX Spectrum computer, and was so innocent in adolescence that he thought a "blue movie" was one that made you cry. When he and his best friend, a Sikh, head off to their first Springsteen concert, they go armed with the vegetable samosas and chapatis their mothers have cooked for them...
Such writers as Hanif Kureishi have pushed immigrant longing against the liberations of rock 'n' roll before, but never with the sweetness and forgiving candor of Manzoor. The night he discovers Springsteen, thanks to his Sikh buddy, he had spent the evening massaging his father's feet. The effect of "The Boss" is so galvanic that his pal actually shaves off his beard and abandons his ritual turban. But Manzoor himself never has the heart to turn his back on his parents entirely, noting with typical wryness: "By high school my friends were starting to drink and I was starting...
...book goes on, the Springsteen associations are never explored as intensely as they might be, given that songs like Independence Day and My Father's House map out a worldwide atlas of the tangles between father and son. And in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Manzoor gives up a bit on America and its hopefulness, as his hero (on his album of reconciliation, The Rising) seldom does. But by then Manzoor has already showed us how to live as something more than just a Briton, a Muslim or a Pakistani. At a concert in New Jersey once, an American...