If anything, Springsteen's early climb to success found him advocating more fiercely and empathetically for the American working class.

Over the course of those 50 years, Springsteen has won 20 GRAMMY Awards, two Golden Globes, an Academy Award for Best Original Song, and a Tony Award for his one-man show 'Springsteen on Broadway.' Though still one EMMY Award short of a full EGOT, he’s nonetheless made do with honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded to him in 2016 by President Barack Obama (with whom he would later host a podcast and write a New York Times bestselling book) and a planet - 23990 Springsteen - named in his honor.įrom his inauspicious start to his initial commercial peak in the 1980s, and through a career resurgence in the early 2000s, one of the Boss’ most remarkable achievements is that his songs have never seemed to lose their blue-collar everyman perspective. Fifty-seven Christmases later, in December 2021, Springsteen sold his fifty-year catalog of songs for a record-setting $550 million dollars. In 'The Wish,' a 1987 studio outtake eventually released on Tracks in 1998, Springsteen’s narrator traces his adult prosperity as The Boss back to a single childhood Christmas when his mother bought him a 'brand-new Japanese guitar.' The lyrics echo Springsteen’s real-life story of his own first electric guitar - a Japanese-made Kent, that he purchased for $70 in 1964 with the help of a loan his mother had taken out. 'I hate being called the boss,' Springsteen admitted in a 1999 biography.

In a bit of amusing irony, it’s also a name that stands in complete contrast to his 50 year canon of songs from the perspective of working-class folks. If you knew nothing else about him there’s still a good chance you’d recognize Bruce Springsteen by the name 'The Boss.' The nickname predates his entire career as a recording artist, going back to his days as a teenage bandleader at the Jersey Shore.

King of fighters 2004 special edition