Into Nowhere

In Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1954–1988, T. W. Ryback writes that the conflict between the Soviet-bloc governments and their young people can be “measured in watts and decibels rather than megatons”2. He suggests that during the Cold War, rock and roll was the most powerful Western weapon to invade socialist Eastern European popular culture, as it gave Eastern youth a view on the non-Communist world and voice to their discontent. In a similar perspective, in Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen: The Untold Story of a Concert in East Berlin That Changed the World3 E. Kirschbaum asserts that Bruce Springsteen’s concert in East Berlin on July 19, 1988, played a role in the Cold War’s quiet end. Representing a sort of a “Born in the U.S.A”. ambassador outside the U.S., Springsteen gave an implicit, alchemical voice to different identities, tying together the political and cultural disaggregation that dramatically imploded with the end of the Cold War. Finally, throughout the Italian Eighties, Springsteen’s darkness also witnessed the crisis of the Italian main political cultures — Atlanticist, Catholic, and Communist — which tried to connect with him.