Word: springsteens
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...Princeton, Spitzer entered the Wood-row Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He got good grades and listened to Bruce Springsteen (he just went to Albany with an ex-classmate to see the Boss for the fourth time). He was elected president of the student body in his sophomore year. Colleagues remember his taking on the university administration over divestiture from South Africa and (a student classic) higher wages for campus service workers...
Nobody embodied the mainstream-niche schism better than Bruce Springsteen and Eminem. (They also showed that mainstream and niche are about sensibility, not sales. Eminem's CD actually moved 5.5 million more copies than Springsteen's, according to SoundScan.) The typical victim in the Twin Towers was a man under 50, from New Jersey or New York, blue collar or not many generations removed from it--in other words, Springsteen's born subject matter. With 2002's tribute album The Rising, Springsteen became the mainstream's Maya Angelou of 9/11: the event's unofficial poet laureate, the articulator...
...Springsteen has made provocative albums before, channeling the grievances and yearnings of Vietnam vets and drifters. But with The Rising, released near the Sept. 11 anniversary, he stuck to what we could all agree on: a feeling of sadness and a yearning for hope. Maybe because of the latter, The Rising's music can be oddly cheery--Empty Sky and Lonesome Day are awfully toe tapping for songs of mourning--as Springsteen keeps circling back to one central image: the clear blue sky over the Eastern seaboard on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The Rising is poignant, even wrenching...
...acknowledge: that a poor white kid has more in common with poor black kids than with more-well-off white kids--that is, that class still matters in America. His obnoxiousness aside, Eminem is the first music superstar to make class in America a major subject since, well, Bruce Springsteen. Meet the new Boss...
...music, the White Stripes, the Vines (who wowed critics but didn't come close to selling a million records) et al. were not nearly so successful as real relics such as James Taylor, Santana, Springsteen and even Elvis Presley, whose remixed A Little Less Conversation shook its pelvis up the singles charts 25 years after the King's death. This phenomenon was as much a matter of technology as psychology: with the spread of CD burning and online music piracy among kids, middle-aged folks are essentially the only people who buy music anymore...