ABSTRACT
In the middle of a sold-out concert in Atlanta, Georgia in the summer of 2000, Bruce Springsteen debuted a new song. The song began with Springsteen plaintively chanting the words, “41 shots.” From those words alone, much of the audience instantly understood what the song was about. Just hours later, word of this unreleased song had spread to New York City, setting off a firestorm of controversy. Heads of two police unions called for a boycott of Springsteen’s upcoming concerts in New York. One called him “a dirtbag” and “a floating fag” for singing a song about this issue. Fans and activists called the song “brilliant” and “compassionate.” What was so incendiary about the words “41 shots”? As the concert-goers in Atlanta, the police in New York, and many people around the world quickly inferred, this was an allusion to the tragic death a year earlier of a West African immigrant in New York City, who was killed in a hail of forty-one bullets in the vestibule of his apartment building.
