Life goes on, my friends. Life is for the living. As far as Tom Petty, I think it was his name, which is analagous to Richard Petty, NASCAR Driver. So it was like you were getting two hits of straight-up Americana for the price of one. Listen to this Tom Petty song, get three free sparkplugs.
Astroturfing, as I'm sure you know, is when a practitioner pretends to be "down-home," local, one of the boys, country, etc. It's often a ploy practiced by corporations or politicians. They pretend to be real Kansans but in fact they're some sh!tfvcks straight from NY's Upper East Side.
Anyway, I must admit I was a bit wrong about Springsteen. I had thought that he spent some time in high school in California. This would have been another form of astroturfing: pretending that one is from blue-collar New Jersey, while actually hanging with the cool kids out in Cali. Now it seems that his *parents relocated to Cali, while Bruce stayed in Jersey. So he is at least from Jersey, and emerged from Jersey. At the same time I do detect a degree of posing there, particularly in the aggressive claiming of the blue-collar mantle. I don't trust it, in fact it annoys me. I grew up close to there, in Maryland, so he's always represented the kind of BS one has to reckon with in one's early days. Fake bards, ad-men, people trying to appropriate whatever is authentic in one's life...
There was an NRA chap on the Today programme this morning. Lord, but their arguments are pisspoor! Pointing out that people die because of things other than guns really isn't an argument for being allowed to own guns.
Ultimately, they just love owning guns and see high rates of gun deaths as an acceptable price to pay for their right to do so. Fair enough, but I wish they'd just be honest.