Quote Originally Posted by Peter View Post
Fake astroturfing wannabe blue collar fool?

You are going to have to help me with the astroturfing bit. Oh, and the fake. THe blue collar fool bit I get- we can 'park' that, as I believe you fellas are fond of saying.
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...