Bruce Springsteen’s 236-show run at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York City between October 2017 and December 2018 was a marked departure for the artist, for the performance of his music, and for the telling of his “story.” In creating the stage show, based largely on his recently-released autobiography/memoire Born to Run, Springsteen set out, deliberately it seems, to puncture many of the myths about his own stage persona and both the apparently autobiographical protagonists and the American myths represented in many of his songs. Using self-deprecating humor and irony, Springsteen recasts his own background and his relationship to both the local (New Jersey) and the national (America), while telling new stories, perhaps creating new myths, about his place as an artist in American popular music and as an agent in American popular culture and political life in the USA.
About the presenterNick Baxter-Moore
Nick Baxter-Moore is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture & Film at Brock University, St Catharines, Ontario. He is a former chair of the department and former associate dean in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Brock. His teaching and research interests lie in the areas of popular culture theory and research methods, popular music, local popular culture, and borderlands studies.