"The Boss" of the Garden State: Lee Examines Springsteen's Influence on N.J. and the Nation
The Freehold Native's Songs Evolved from Local Tales to Stories of Universal Concern
 As a former journalist, Richard Lee knows that telling stories is a vital way of providing citizens with information. One of Richard Lee’s favorite musical artists, Bruce Springsteen, has been telling stories about New Jersey since the 1970s.
“Even looking at some interviews [Bruce Springsteen] had done, he talks about viewing his life work as providing people with an alternative source of information,” said Lee, a doctoral student at the School of Communication and Information. Lee presented a paper on “The Boss” and his influence in New Jersey at “Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium” the weekend of September 25 in Long Branch, New Jersey. The conference took place just two days after Springsteen’s 60th birthday. Lee, who worked as a music journalist early in his career, has been a casual student of Bruce Springsteen and New Jersey since publishing an op-ed in the New York Times in 1980 urging that “Born to Run” be made New Jersey’s state anthem. (It was not.) Lee (pictured at right holding the framed op-ed) said that for this conference he set out to align major developments in New Jersey public policy with Bruce Springsteen’s music.  He looked at the tax revolt in early 1990s New Jersey, the murder of Megan Kanka by Jesse Timmendequas, and other major news stories coming from the Garden State during the time Bruce Springsteen’s popularity soared and he gained listeners across the country and world.
“You can’t see any connection between those events and his music, so I decided to take another approach,” Lee said. “Maybe the things that were in the news were not the things that really mattered. “Bruce writes about unemployment and trying to make ends meet…these things resonate a lot more with people in New Jersey than news stories with statistics and numbers,” Lee said. And similarly, as Bruce Springsteen’s music has become less “local” – with songs about drag racing through Asbury Park and secluded lover’s lanes – and more “global,” the American landscape has become more uniform, with big-box businesses and chain restaurants stretching from New Jersey to San Francisco. “The nation has become more homogenized,” Lee said. “That’s happened at the same time as Bruce Springsteen moved from writing songs about New Jersey things to more general topics, and it’s another factor that has kept him popular.” Richard Lee is communications director at the Hall Institute of Public Policy in New Jersey. Early in his career he was a music journalist with the Aquarian Weekly in Montclair, the early-1980s New Jersey counterpart to the Village Voice. Lee went on to work at the News-Tribune newspaper in Woodbridge from 1984 to 1990, when he began his career in government, eventually working his way up to Deputy Communications Director in the Office of the Governor in 2002. Links: Bruce Springsteen photo courtesy of Flickr user Sister72.
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