Transatlantic Musical Crossover: Miguel Bosé in the U.S.A. and Bruce Springsteen in Spain

What is it about?

Singer-songwriters Miguel Bosé and Bruce Springsteen are examined through the market structures, musical tastes, and celebrity cultures that made them successful on both sides of the Atlantic. Bosé traversed the Madrid Movida of the 1970s and ‘80s to his transatlantic twenty-first-century comeback, part of a new international Latin pop genre. For Springsteen, the Spanish music market is receptive to his projected identity of antiheroic bravado. Bosé and Springsteen constitute cultural capital for social groups on the opposite side of the Atlantic because they adopt identities and musical idioms already rooted in the new habitus. The class-inflected dimensions of musical tastes theorized by Pierre Bourdieu, as well as the waves of globalization posited by Gören Therborn, are applied to Bosé’s and Springsteen’s recordings, videos, concert tours, and celebrity personas.

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