There’s a reason why “Bruce Springsteen” is still a viable Halloween costume in 2024and that reason is “Born in the USA”.
The breakthrough album, which turns 40 next month, capped a dozen years of rise to stardom that turned a critically adored, fame-ambivalent singer-songwriter into a pop icon on a scale only inhabited today by Taylor Swift and Beyonce.
The Boss stage of the red bandana and the sleeveless flannel shirt It was just a blink in an acting career that has lasted more than half a century. More than a dozen albums Springsteen They have been accompanied by portraits of his always worn face; only “Born in the USA” came accompanied by a close-up of Annie Leibovitz of the Boss dressed in jeans.
But it was this synthesizer-heavy era that made Springsteen into a permanent celebrity beyond the sphere of music fans, and made it possible for him, at 74 years old, to continue filling stadiums even now, Despite how profoundly the United States has changed.
The disappearance of that metaphorical barn, in which the workaholic Springsteen briefly became an unlikely figure of national consensus, is the subject of the fan’s new book Springsteen Steven Hyden, “There was nothing to do: Born in the USA’ by Bruce Springsteen and the end of the Heartland”.
If the book cannot explain the slow decline of a country that at least seemed to want consensus – which, as it observes Hydenalso confuses the co-host of the podcast Springsteen, Barack Obama-, at least it is an astute and nimbly written look at the circumstances and legacy of an album whose excessive popularity has paradoxically made it divisive among Tramps Like Us.
As Hyden points out in his prefacealmost no serious fan of Broooooce states that “Born in the USA” be your favorite. She was too contemporary, too accessible, and represented the only occasion in which Springsteen aimed his hopeful but essentially fatalistic worldview at fickle listeners who would never sit still for the relatively slow-paced 43 minutes of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” or the dark-eyed introspection of “Nebraska”.
This last album was published in 1982, while the marathon recording sessions of “Born in the USA” They lasted like the shooting of a movie. Stanley Kubrick, and the two LPs are inextricably linked. (The book of the musician and writer Warren Zanes about the realization of “Nebraska”, “Deliver Me From Nowhere”it’s good, but the one Hyden is more broadly curious).
The song that would give the title to “Born in the USA”, with its patriotic chorus and its cannon drumsfirst appeared as a non-percussive acoustic lament during the bedroom sessions that gave rise to “Nebraska”. Like many of the outtakes of “Born in the USA”that grim version wouldn’t be officially released until the box set. “Tracks” 1998, almost at the end of a decade in which Springsteen he more or less accepted the idea that his time of unit change had passed.
His solo acoustic tour following his 1995 folk album, “The Ghost of Tom Joad”covered a period of time longer than the tour of “Born in the USA”although in much more welcoming places. Springsteen He opened these concerts by asking attendees to remain silent so he could listen to the songs, behavior that was not typical of an old rocker worried about his market share.
Hyden He came of age during the savage era of Springsteen in the 90s, and has already dedicated books to Pearl Jam and Radioheadgroups that became enormous during the decade in which the influence of Springsteen was at its lowest point. But that perspective helps him perceive the long arc of the Boss’s career.
He opens the book remembering the first time he heard “Born in the USA” when I was a kid, a little-discussed but important group for multi-platinum albums by this era. Like contemporary bestsellers “Thriller” and “Purple Rain”the brilliant production and omnipresence of “Born in the USA” they made it a powerful gateway drug for impressionable music obsessives.
I am like Hyden in this sense: a guy who decided for the first time that he was a fan of Bruce in elementary school, years before the self-hatred and political disenchantment elucidated in “Dancing in the Dark” and “My Hometown” had some rational meaning to me.
Hyden is an imaginative cultural omnivore, which means that his critical examination occasionally takes the form of something resembling fan fiction. What if, for example, the boss had decided to continue flirting with acting – something that we would later have a sample of in the music videos of “Glory Days” and “I’m on Fire”led by John Sayles– and would have agreed to star in the melodrama “Born in the USA”from the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” Paul Schraderin 1979?
In our universe, Springsteen he simply pocketed the title of the script Schrader and repaid him by composing a song for the film that was finally released as “Light of Day”starring Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett.
But Hyden build this alternative timeline, in which Springsteenand not Richard Gereplays the lead role in “American Gigolo” of Schraderand then Springsteenand not David Bowiewrites and performs the title song for the perverted 1982 remake of Schrader from the 40’s horror movie “Cat People”. It’s not profound, perhaps, but it’s fun to reflect on.
Or what would have happened if Springsteen had followed “Born in the USA” with a sequel album made from leftovers from the same sessions? Hyden presents its list of suggested songs for “Man at the Top”the album Springsteen from 1985 that never existed (although all its songs are real), giving it four out of five stars in an imaginary review by Rolling Stone.
Even more intriguing, it proposes a future-past in which the appearance in the early 90s of stars like Billy Ray Cyrus and Garth Brooks convince Springsteen that heartland rock has become country, and he is repositioning himself accordingly.
Your appetite for these kinds of fanboy thought experiments is a reliable indicator of whether this book is for you. If Springsteen’s incarnation with the red-headed band and the drooping arms is the only one you’d recognize at a costume party, it may not be. But if the sight of a bejeweled, tormented-looking man with slicked-back hair and a goatee makes your brain say, “Tom Joad-era Bruce,” he definitely is.
(c) 2024, The Washington Post
