40 years later, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ still sounds like peak Boss
The album gets a fresh look in Steven Hyden's latest book, 'There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA and the End of the Heartland.'
Come this September, the seemingly ageless Bruce Springsteen turns 75 years old. True to his Jersey Shore form, he will be celebrating his birthday month with the E Street Band live from Asbury Park. Never one to rest on his laurels, or rest period, Springsteen has been prolific since the turn of the century releasing ten albums both solo and with E Street, writing a 500-page memoir, starring on Broadway, pandemic podcasting with a President and, of course, touring.
As towering and ubiquitous a figure as the Boss has been, it’s actually been 40 years since he hit peak popularity. In June 1984, the “Born in the U.S.A.” flag was planted and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band went from a beloved rock band to a global pop phenomenon. It’s far and away the band’s most successful album – roughly 30 million sold and counting – and featured seven Top Ten hits, including their highest-charting single “Dancing in the Dark,” which reached No. 2.
Steven Hyden, who was only six that summer, was so captivated by the cover and then the sonic boom and full-throated cry of the title track, that he would go on to become one of the most astute and entertaining music and pop culture critics around. His latest book, “There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA and the End of the Heartland” looks at the album from a number of angles, asking the central question if Bruce’s America – where no matter our differences, we share common values and have each other’s backs – still remains today. Or if it ever did at all…
(For an appetizer, here’s Hyden’s rankings of the 12 songs that make up Born in the U.S.A. I won’t stand for his “Cover Me” erasure.)
Q: You’re someone who has to stay on top of recent music as a critic, but you’re able to pull up the Springsteen deep cuts in this book. Was that challenging?
Writing a book allows me to align my professional listening with my recreational listening. I’ve been a Bruce guy since I was six and Dad played his Born in the U.S.A. cassette in the car; it profoundly shaped what I want to come from rock n’ roll. I’m always thinking about Bruce and the album’s legacy anyway, but getting a book contract to write about something I love lets me know the hours spent going through the print archives and revisiting Bruce’s albums, bootlegs, concerts, documentaries, and videos was not a waste of time.
Q: Can you set the 1984 music scene and where “Born in the U.S.A.” fits among massive hits “Thriller,” “Purple Rain,” “Can’t Slow Down,” “Like A Virgin,” etc.?
For lack of a better way of putting it, he’s the White male rock star of the equation. There are obviously other examples, but as a singular figure it was Bruce. “Born in the U.S.A.” became bigger in part of that specific American year, getting released in June and starting a tour shortly before the Los Angeles Olympics and Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign, where he famously praised Springsteen at a stop in New Jersey by misinterpreting the lyrics.
What people tend to overlook is by that time, Bruce wasn’t just a rock guy anymore. The buff cover of “Born in the U.S.A.” is much different than the stark scruffy close-up of “The River.” On stage, he doesn’t look the same – he’s jacked. The band became a staple of Top 40 radio and MTV and in that era, following the Thriller template and releasing seven singles off of “Born in the U.S.A.,” all of which reached the top ten.
In 2024, Taylor Swift has reached the same level of fame and ubiquity as Bruce, Prince, Madonna, but she got to where she was by releasing so much music over the last few years. The biggest albums of the ‘80s remained at the center of the pop culture universe for much longer, which was a place where rock star Bruce Springsteen had never been.
Q: A lot of Bruce fans think the “real” version of the song “Born in the U.S.A.” is the stripped-down acoustic version Bruce began playing years later, but you make a strong case for the famous one, why do you prefer it?
“Hungry Heart,” a song about a deadbeat dad, was Bruce’s first big hit, reaching No. 5 on the charts in 1980 and provided the “Born in the U.S.A.” formula of “making sad songs sound happy.” My favorite kind of music always has a little bit of art school and a little bit of the state fair. There isn’t a duality in the bluesy dirge “Born in the U.S.A.,” it’s a downbeat straight-forward song about a Vietnam vet who can’t get ahead, but I think putting these dark lyrics behind anthemic and exuberant music says something more complicated and interesting. The veteran in the album version is broken, but defiant. He’s not going anywhere and won’t be ignored. There’s pride in that. In claiming his citizenship, he’s calling out America for not living up to his promise. I think there is a lot more going on in the synthesizer-and-big-drums version. The opening was my Big Bang moment as a music writer.
Q: The “making sad songs sound happy” formula certainly worked for the biggest hit (and goofiest video starring future “Friends” star Courteney Cox) of Bruce’s career, “Dancing in the Dark…”
It’s big bold brassy pop and it’s all about self-loathing! Bruce smuggles “I want to change my hair, my clothes, my face,” in a song about a depressed man that gets entire arenas on their feet dancing. “Glory Days” also gets pretty bleak, a crowd favorite sing-a-long about a guy whose best days were in high school and who won’t shut up about it at the local bar. Bruce didn’t invent the formula, but he’s definitely one of the masters.
Q: It’s been a long run with the E Street Band since they got back together for the ‘99 reunion tour after a decade apart, how important are they to Bruce’s career overall?
There’s no question that E Street is vitally important to Bruce the artist and Bruce the man. The idea of community on stage and with the audience is a huge part of the live shows. When Bruce is solo or with other musicians, I can feel the missing elements that really bring the entire presentation home. In the arena, you want to see Little Steven, Max Weinberg, Clarence Clemons – before he died, his son Jake now – all those people up there who we’ve known for so long. It’s been the simple throughline since the beginning. At the heart of it, Bruce and E Street are a great live band who love playing with one another.
Q: One of the melancholic explorations in your book is the notion of the “End of the Heartland.” Is it possible in 2024 to believe in Bruce’s music uniting people in a divided America? No doubt that plenty of his Boomer fans who wore out “Born in the USA” no longer align with his politics…
In the 1970s-80s, there was a type of hard-hat progressives who worked in factories, belonged to unions and voted Democrat that Bruce spoke to, but I think that type of person has fallen by the wayside. Maybe they never existed to any major degree, but I do think it was how people viewed Middle Americans, in that classic blue-collar sense. Bruce has a song on “The Ghost of Tom Joad” called “Youngstown,” which was inspired by a local guy, Joe Marshall Jr., featured in the 1985 book “Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass.” Marshall’s father worked at the steel mill, and so did Joe Jr., until it was shuttered.
In 2016, the New York Times caught up with Joe Jr. and he was a proud Donald Trump supporter. That is a direct line to the political and cultural changes that have happened since “Born in the U.S.A.”
Q: You attended a 2023 show and wrestled with the ideas of the community in the arena and the realities outside of it, does Bruce Springsteen still evoke something deeper to you than simply a great concert?
When I was very young, Bruce put an idea in my head that there is a dream America, one that believes in core ideals that unite us. That if we just get beyond the noise, we can find a way to work together, but in the modern world that view of America feels increasingly irrelevant. Was it ever true or was it a romanticized notion that Bruce implanted in me? I’m not blind to the realities of the Heartland today, but I hold onto part of that dream as something worth believing in.
There is a heartbreaking lyric in “The River,” where Bruce asks “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true? Or is it something worse?” To me, something worse is not having a dream at all. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and a Bruce Springsteen show provides it. Those experiences truly mean something. Does it mean more than a great concert? I don’t know the answer to that. Sometimes it does, sometimes it’s just a killer show, but that also matters. Either way, Bruce delivers.