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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.

The basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities, ages, and generations to make a sonic way of life. Based on five years of deep participatory experience, this multi-modal (text, musical composition, social media, performance) sonic ethnography is centered around a community of noisy people who make rock music within the constraints of urban life in Singapore. The heart and soul of this community is English Language rock and roll music pioneered in Singapore by several members of the 1960s legendary “beats and blues” band, The Straydogs, who continue to engage this community in a sonic way of life.
 
Grounded in debates from sound studies, Ferzacca draws on Bruno Latour’s ideas of the social—continually emergent, constantly in-the-making, “associations of heterogeneous elements” of human and non-human “mediators and intermediaries”—to portray a community entangled in the confounding relations between vernacular and national heritage projects. Music shops, music gear, music genres, sound, urban space, neighborhoods, State presence, performance venues, practice spaces, regional travel, local, national, regional, and sonic histories afford expected and unexpected opportunities for work, play, and meaning, in the contemporary music scene in this Southeast Asian city-state. The emergent quality of this deep sound is fiercely cosmopolitan, yet entirely Singaporean. What emerges is a vernacular heritage drawing upon Singapore’s unique place in Southeast Asian and world history.

As the Iron Curtain fell and Cold War suspicions thickened in the second half of the twentieth century, the quintessentially American genre of rock and roll, seen as a potent symbol and product of an enemy ideology, quickly became a clandestine import in the USSR. The Soviet underground embraced the forbidden sounds, despite official propaganda that called rock stars social parasites and corrupting sluggards. Contrary to the regime’s desires, the genre grew in popularity until it could no longer be ignored. In the Soviet Union’s last decade, a flailing film industry, controlled by and dependent on an increasingly unstable central government, seized on the rock star as a central figure—and the Soviet rock film was born.

In Soviet Rock on Screen, Rita Safariants chronicles the birth, life, death, and resurrection of a genre that rapidly became one of the most readily recognized cultural signifiers of the perestroika era and which continues to reflect and codify Russian culture. During their initial heyday in the 1980s, rock films were influenced by and encouraged the cultural shifts of perestroika and the incipient political storm. Today, Safariants argues, the reemergence and reconfiguration of the genre indicates the extent to which Soviet-era cultural emblems inform Russian national identity and obliquely support the current political repression under Putin.