Every artist has two categories of songs that come up every time they put together the setlist: The fun ones and the mandatory ones. Although there are bound to be moments where everyone can switch it up and throw audiences a curveball that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise, any audience will feel cheapened if they don’t hear some of their favourite tunes when they get to see them. But Bruce Springsteen also has the good fortune of seeing nearly half his concert setlist be nonstop sing-alongs.
While not everything that ‘The Boss’ did was meant to be screamed by a stadium of fans every single time he played them, that everyman spirit is there in every song he sings. ‘Born to Run’ may have been burrowed into the ground by too many people, but whenever he talks about hitting the road with Wendy and finding that place where they’ll walk in the sun, it feels like watching the ending to one of the greatest teenage fairytales never written.
If there’s one thing that runs through the heart of every Springsteen song, though, it’s the pride of being an American. Springsteen absolutely loves his country even for its greatest faults, and when he has been the most critical of his home, songs like ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ are the kind of reminders that people have family in all parts of the country that they haven’t even met yet.
It’s easy to doll him up as the Americanised version of what a rock star should be, but ‘Born in the USA’ tells a different story. No matter how many times people hype it up as a patriotic anthem, Springsteen is seething with anger and crying out in pain on the tune, saying that the government sent innocent kids out to die in Vietnam and didn’t give them a damn bit of help when they came home.
“On Born in the USA, I only had half a record and I waited about a year and a half for four or five more songs, and I didn’t like them when I was finished with them.”Bruce Springsteen
The song itself is bulleproof on its own, but Springsteen remembered that the only reason he put it out was because of fatigue, saying, “On Born in the USA, I only had half a record and I waited about a year and a half for four or five more songs, and I didn’t like them when I was finished with them. Finally, I just got fed up and it went out anyway.” But if the album we got was a rough sketch, it’s still a brilliant portrait of what America was like at the time.
While it doesn’t have the same operatic quality as Born to Run or the sullen characters of Nebraska, Born in the USA uses every one of the songs as a look into a different town in the country. Not every one of them are as fun-loving as singles like ‘Dancing in the Dark’, but even when listening to tracks like ‘Downbound Train’, you can picture that person lost on the outskirts of town wondering if they lost the will to carry on a long time ago.
Not every Springsteen record has the same kind of themes as Born in the USA, but the throughline of American representation became a part of Springsteen’s psyche after a while. He had his wilderness period of making pop-leaning songs, but whenever listening to his later records, the best of them are the ones that set up a picture just like Born in the USA, whether that’s the existential crises going on in The Rising or the determination to persevere through hardship on Wrecking Ball.
Even though there are still people out there who proceed to not get the point of the song ‘Born in the USA’, the album is one of the greatest documents of what America has to offer. There are a lot of tortured souls scattered throughout its runtime, but the only way to appreciate the good times is to acknowledge how rough the bad times were.
