The lasting impact of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’
There’s a reason “Bruce Springsteen” is still a viable Halloween costume in 2024, and that reason is “Born in the U.S.A.”
The blockbuster album, which turns 40 this month, capped a dozen-year ascent to superstardom that turned a critically adored, ambivalent-about-fame singer-songwriter into a pop icon on a scale inhabited only by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé today.
The Boss’ red-bandanna-andsleeveless-flannel-shirt phase was only a blip within a performing career that has now spanned more than half a century. More than a dozen Springsteen albums have been packaged behind portraits of his invariably careworn mug; only “Born in the U.S.A.” came swaddled in an Annie Leibovitz close-up of the denim-clad Boss-terior. But it was this synthesizer-heavy era that made Springsteen a permanent celebrity beyond the sphere of music fandom — and made it possible for the 74-year-old to continue filling stadiums even now, despite how profoundly the America beyond them has changed.
The disappearance of that metaphorical breadbasket, wherein the workaholic Springsteen briefly became an unlikely figure of national consensus, is the subject of ride-or-die Springsteen fan Steven Hyden’s new book, “There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland.” If the book can’t explain the slow fade of a country that at least seemed to want consensus — which, as Hyden observes, also confounds Springsteen’s podcast co-host Barack Obama — it is at least an astute and briskly written look at the circumstances and legacy of an album whose outsize popularity has made it paradoxically divisive among Tramps Like Us.
As Hyden points out in his preface, almost no serious Broooooce fan claims “Born in the U.S.A.” as their favorite. It was too contemporary-sounding, too accessible, representing the only time Springsteen directed his hopeful but essentially fatalistic worldview at fickle listeners who’d never sit still for the 43 relatively down-tempo minutes of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” or the bleary-eyed introspection of “Nebraska.”
The latter album was released in 1982 as the marathon “Born in the U.S.A.” recording sessions wore on like a Stanley Kubrick film shoot, and the two LPs are inextricably linked. (Musician and writer Warren Zanes’s 2023 book about the making of “Nebraska,” “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” is good, but Hyden’s is more broadly curious.) The song that would become “Born in the U.S.A.’s” title track, with its widely-misread-as-jingoistic chorus and cannonball drums, first appeared as an acoustic, percussion-free lament during the bedroom sessions that begot “Nebraska.”
Like many “Born in the U.S.A.” outtakes, that somber version wouldn’t get an official release until the “Tracks” box set in 1998, near the end of a decade when Springsteen more or less embraced the notion that his time as a mainstream unit-shifter had passed. His solo acoustic tour behind his 1995 folk album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” covered a greater span of time than the “Born in the U.S.A.” tour had, albeit in much cozier venues. Springsteen opened these shows by asking punters to keep quiet so they could hear the songs — hardly the behavior of an aging rocker worried about his market share.
Hyden came of age during Springsteen’s ‘90s wilderness era, and he’s previously devoted books to Pearl Jam and Radiohead — bands that became huge during the decade when Springsteen’s influence was at a low ebb. But that perspective helps him to perceive the long arc of the Boss’ career. He opens the book by recalling his first exposure to “Born in the U.S.A.” as a tyke — a little-discussed but important constituency for multiplatinum albums in this era. As with the contemporaneous megasellers “Thriller” and “Purple Rain,” “Born in the U.S.A.’s” bright production and sheer ubiquity made it a powerful gateway drug for impressionable music-obsessives-in-waiting. I’m like Hyden in this regard — a guy who first decided I was a Bruce fan in grade school, years before the self-loathing and political disenchantment elucidated in “Dancing in the Dark” and “My Hometown” would hold any rational meaning for me.
Hyden is an imaginative cultural omnivore, which means his critical examination occasionally takes the form of something like fan fiction. What if, for example, the Boss had decided to pursue his flirtation with acting — something we’d later get a taste of in the John Sayles-directed music videos for “Glory Days” and “I’m on Fire” — and agreed to star in “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader’s melodrama “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1979? In our universe, Springsteen simply pocketed the title of Schrader’s screenplay, repaying the filmmaker by writing a title song for the movie that was eventually released as “Light of Day,” starring Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett. But Hyden builds out this alternate timeline, wherein Springsteen, not Richard Gere, plays the lead role in Schrader’s “American Gigolo,” and then Springsteen, not David Bowie, writes and performs the title song for Schrader’s kinky 1982 remake of the ‘40s horror flick “Cat People.”