On Bruce Springsteen's Music in Film and TV [PopMatters]

While millions claim to be fans of Bruce Springsteen, only an extra-dedicated few have taken the plunge and written an entire book devoted to analyzing the nuances of the Boss' extensive discography. In her debut tome Springsteen as Soundtrack: The Sound of the Boss in Film and Television, Caroline Madden explores how Springsteen's music has been used in a variety of film and television projects to underscore political concerns, character motivations, and settings both temporal and place-based--to name but a few elements.

4 comments

4 Comments

Bill Zebub

Sep 17, 2020

An interesting article. Apart from the film talk, there's reference to something I was completely unaware of: "queer imagery in his work." OK, I googled just that, and found this essay that has links to a handful more. Am I the only one who didn't know of this?

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/bruce-springsteen-queerness-essay/

Scott Peterson

Sep 17, 2020

Replying to

You are indeed. It's okay, though: most of us have actually been trying to keep it from you.

Jerseyfornia

Sep 17, 2020

Replying to

That article wasn't what I expected, but I enjoyed it.

I remember Bruce's comment about Melissa Etheridge coming up playing in gay bars and that he liked that some of his influence fell there. Something like that.

Scott Peterson

Sep 17, 2020

Replying to

@Jerseyfornia It wasn't what I was expecting, either. But I remember noticing sometime in the 90s, I think, possibly spurred on by a gay friend of mine who was a fellow hardcore Bruce fan, that while his recurring use of the name "Mary" gets most of the attention, an awful lot of his songs used names that could have been a male or female: Terry in "Backstreets" and "Bobby Jean" being maybe the two most obvious, with "Sandy" up there as well. And as always, for a writer as deliberate as Springsteen, the ambiguity of the gender and relationship in "Backstreets" seems highly telling.