Born in the USA: how Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album bridged the American political divide

In 1977, in the wake of the death of the king of rock’n’roll, the American journalist and music critic Lester Bangs said: ‘We will never again agree on anything like we agreed on Elvis.’ The ‘we’ was America. And Bangs was right – until June 1984, when Bruce Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A.

The album’s blend of synths, guitars and colossal drums would vault Springsteen into stadiums. It went on to sell 17 million copies, and for a time made its creator the biggest rock star in the world. Steven Hyden looks to trace who Springsteen was before this moment, what happened to him during it, who he became after it – and, with more difficulty, what became of his audience. Part ‘making of’, part cultural criticism, and part socio-political treatise with occasional lapses into fan fiction, this is something of a mongrel of a book – and, in truth, if you’re not already a devoted Springsteen fan, then it probably isn’t for you.

However, there’s an interesting conceit at its core: was Springsteen the last great centrist rock star? Hyden is on the money when he pinpoints how Presley’s mythology was ‘rooted in assumptions about the exceptionalism of the United States’, and how Elvis became

the very embodiment of the heartland that exists in our nation’s political and cultural imagination… the belief that Americans are inherently reasonable and good and inclined to be generous and thoughtful if given the right opportunity.

In the Netflix documentary version, we would smash cut from these words to footage of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

The same editing trick would work after Hyden quotes the 1980s Springsteen saying: ‘I guess my view of America is of a real big-hearted country, real compassionate.’ Cue shots from various Trump rallies: the screaming, enraged faces of the heartland, of what was, once upon a time, Springsteen’s audience.