If asked to think about Bruce Springsteen, it’s likely you’d conjure that iconic image of him in his white t-shirt, blue jeans with a red baseball cap in tucked in the back pocket, standing in front of the American flag—this image is synonymous with his Born in the U.S.A album and tour and conjured repeatedly through Springsteen’s 40 years of performing since the album was released. That’s how big the album was.
Born in the U.S.A. was Bruce Springsteen’s seventh studio album, released in 1984. Among the seven U.S. top ten singles on the album were “Dancing in the Dark, “I'm on Fire,” and the anthemic title track. Thirty million copies of the album have been sold.
Music critic and writer Steven Hyden remembered first hearing the album when he was just six years old. In his new book, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland, Steven describes the first time he held the album in his hands and asked his dad to play it in the car’s cassette player:
“There is silence for exactly nine seconds. Finally, I hear a solitary piano chord followed immediately by the loudest music BOOM! ever to hit my young ears. … Then a synthesizer enters, playing a recurring riff that sends little lightning bolts ricocheting up and down my arms. It’s a sound that signals the arrival of something momentous and larger than life. A fanfare.”
Steven Hyden is a music critic and writer, living in Minnesota. He’s written several books on music criticism, as well as articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Salon. He is currently the cultural critic at Uproxx.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Steven talked about his new book, and why he wanted to explore Bruce Springsteen’s iconic album and how it marked a changing tide in America.
Steven described Bruce Springsteen’s efforts to connect with a mass audience and to impact culture much like Elvis, or Bob Dylan, or the Beatles. He made Born in the U.S.A. in such a way to achieve that. But, Steven noted, “when you achieve that level of success, you lose control over how you are perceived or how your music is.”
Case in point, the title track song “Born in the U.S.A.” Steven explained that Springsteen wrote the song to be critical of how America treated its veterans coming home from Vietnam, and how the country falls short of the ideals we all think it represents.
“And then the song goes out into the world and people interpret it as this sort of simple, patriotic song-- basically the opposite of what he intended,” said Steven.
Not having control over how fans interpret one’s work is something any celebrity must deal with when their popularity skyrockets, like Springsteen’s did after Born in the U.S.A. came out. “That was the record that made him the type of person where even if you didn't like Bruce Springsteen's music, you knew who he was. You recognized his name and he's basically had that level of celebrity ever since,” explained Steven.
Most of the songs on Born in the U.S.A. deal with darker topics, despite their upbeat sound, a songwriting device musicians use as a “Trojan horse.”
Steven explained, “It makes the songs richer in a lot of ways--you have this kind of catchy, anthemic music, and then you have lyrics that kind of go a little bit deeper… I think there is a Trojan horse aspect to it where if you want to sneak in more serious or profound ideas, a really good way to do that is to have music that people like and they want to hear, and that is going to get on the radio. If you have downbeat, sad, sort of anti-commercial music, it's less likely people are ever going to hear what your song is.”
While Born in the U.S.A was highly successful and made him a superstar, Steven speculated that Springsteen didn’t want to continue making this kind of album. He explained, “Even now, Bruce seems to have some ambivalence about Born in the U.S.A. The fact that it was such a pop success--on one hand, it was something that he aspired to, but on the other hand, it made him uncomfortable in a lot of ways.”
Steven noted that Springsteen was working on his 1982 simpler, more subdued, but critically acclaimed album Nebraska at the same time he was also working on Born in the U.S.A. The two albums are drastically different from each other and this was another reason why Steven wanted to write his book.
“He wrote all these songs on his own. And he played it into a tape recorder. And that became Nebraska. But he was also in the studio with the E Street Band just recording pretty impromptu these big sounding rock songs. It was like 2 parts of his brain working at the same time,” Steven explained.
As a music critic, Steven says his job isn’t to tell people what to think about a record. Rather, he hopes There Was Nothing You Could Do gives readers a new perspective on the Born in the U.S.A album, Bruce Springsteen, and the era.
He said, “I guess my hope would be that you can read the book and it'll be like another door that you can open into this album that you didn't already have, and it can allow you to hear this record and enjoy it, maybe in a different kind of way than you did before.”
For himself, the book was a way to re-examine the album that has profoundly shaped his life. In the preface he refers to Born in the U.S.A. as “my personal ‘big bang’ moment.”
“Springsteen influenced my worldview in ways that I didn't quite appreciate until I was writing this book and thinking about it a lot,” said Steven.
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