In Popular Culture
Testa's violent death inspired the first line of musician Bruce Springsteen's US hit song, "Atlantic City". The song opens with the following line,
"Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night/Now they blew up his house too".
The song depicts a young couple's romantic escape to the New Jersey city Atlantic City, but it also wrestles with the inevitability of death, as the man in the relationship intends to take a job in organized crime upon arriving in the city. The song also evokes the widespread uncertainty regarding gambling during its early years in Atlantic City and its promises to resurrect the city. This uncertainty and the man's uncertainty about taking the less-than-savory job are echoed in the lyrics "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back."
Read more about this topic: Philip Testa
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)