The urban sprawl of metropolitan New York that made it a cultural driver of American society deeply influenced these artists and writers. Most of them were outer-borough or city-adjacent figures with ethnic origins that didn’t fit into the Black-white racial binary of the American South that was the cradle of so much American music. Many had Jewish or Italian roots, which, in mid-20th century United States, made them racially ambiguous. The Brill Building writers also routinely incorporated Latin elements and accents into their songs, elements sometimes treated with disdain by both elitist record company executives in the 1950s as well as those who prized “pristine” folk music on college campuses and coffeehouses in the early 1960s.
This sprawling New York landscape with its culturally diverse roots shaped Joel and Springsteen as the two teenagers—who had lived remarkably similar lives—forged careers in the late 1960s. Both men grew up on the metropolitan periphery: Joel in Hicksville, Long Island, and Springsteen in Freehold, N.J. They were born into worlds where potato farms were still common features of the local landscape, rapidly replaced by the new crop of cheaply produced mass housing. Commuter-based transportation put the city in reach but just beyond effortless access, making it both alluring and remote. But amid this growing affluence, both were also products of downward mobility, with Joel abandoned by his corporate executive father and Springsteen’s grandfather, a lawyer, going to prison. Both decided in high school that music would be their vocation, and both struggled to realize their ambitions in a milieu where college was an expectation that they rejected.
In 1973, Springsteen and Joel signed with Columbia Records and released their first albums for the label. Within months, the music industry labeled both commercial disappointments. In the next few years, they also both had serious conflicts with their managers that imperiled their careers. In the late 1970s, however, Joel and Springsteen achieved breakthroughs, and by the 1980s—the age of MTV—both were superstars.
The New York suburban culture that they grew up in helped define both men’s work. Frank Sinatra’s Hoboken—for that matter, Jay Gatsby’s West Egg—loomed large over albums like Born to Run and The Stranger, which straddled city and suburban settings. Indeed, the Route 9 romanticized in Born to Run was in fact a seemingly endless strip of car dealerships and fast-food restaurants. This metropolitan culture—both a racial blend and a class divide, along with a romanticism about the city— gave songs as diverse as Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and Springsteen’s “Jungleland” and “Johnny 99" their stories, as well as a truly complex sound that incorporated Black, Latin, and country elements filtered through a network of radio stations, record labels and concert circuits that projected this sound into the national mainstream.