several academic books about pop culture<\/a>, discussed the connection between the two that formed the thesis of his latest book.<\/p>\nThese are edited excerpts from the conversation.<\/em><\/p>\nWhat does the rise of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen in the 1970s say about the era they were living in?<\/strong><\/p>\nThey lived in what you might call the golden age of the American dream. <\/em>This was the period when the American dream was most realizable on a mass basis. As products of suburbia, they were sort of in the cockpit of this.<\/p>\nOne of the things I found interesting when I started to look into their lives was that they were actually products of downward mobility. Their immediate families had suffered reverses in the generation before they were born. And then, of course, they caught the wind of this massive economic and social current in the aftermath of World War II.<\/p>\n
\n
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Mr. Cullen, a historian, has written several academic books about pop culture.<\/span>Credit…<\/span>Frances F. Denny for The New York Times<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhat were the conditions in the music industry that helped make someone like Joel or Springsteen such a success?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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The record business had been immensely profitable in the years prior to these guys making it. And so there was just a lot of money floating around to invest in new acts in a way that there really hadn\u2019t been before or after this.<\/p>\n
Another is that the business was designed at that point to reward the thing that these two guys did really well, which was to perform live. This was an era when touring supported records \u2014 rather than the age we live in, which is the other way around.<\/em><\/p>\nThe last thing I would say is that the industry was much more tolerant of failure than it had been before or since. So both of these guys could literally afford to make a couple of records that stiffed before they built up enough of a head of steam to really take off commercially.<\/p>\n
People might argue that when we talk about the rise of the suburbs, we\u2019re really talking about the rise of a white middle class.<\/strong> <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
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I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any question that these guys were beneficiaries of their racial identity. Broadly, their relative affluence gave them a leg up. That\u2019s inarguable.<\/p>\n
I will say that both of these people had a very strong vision of integration as sort of the aesthetic basis of their work.<\/p>\n
Are there modern-day equivalents to Joel and Springsteen?<\/strong><\/p>\nOne of the ways in which they were also really beneficiaries of their time is that they were products of what I\u2019ll call generally an age of broadcasting. And I mean that not just in terms of television, but especially in terms of radio. There was a kind of shared national audience.<\/p>\n
I did a book on \u201cAll in the Family,\u201d a television show [in the 1970s] that got 50 million viewers a week. The finale of \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d people got excited because it got 10 million viewers. It\u2019s just a different world. So it\u2019s not easy for anybody to continue to do what Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen did. Not because Springsteen or Joel were sort of Promethean artists, but because they were beneficiaries of a media infrastructure that was very rewarding to them.<\/em><\/p>\nHaving said all that, I do think that there are figures who approach what they did. Beyonc\u00e9 comes to mind as someone who\u2019s built a very large, broad audience over a long period of time and inspires a level of commitment and engagement that I think is comparable. The obvious other example is Taylor Swift, who in commercial terms, has probably exceeded them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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