142. Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the U.S.A."
Look, I am an indie music nerd through and through. I love Neutral Milk Hotel and I've seen Kingsbury Manx live and have owned multiple copies of Bee Thousand and I don't care if this makes me a normie but this album is fucking great (with one exception, which we'll get to) and I bought it when I was a kid and I was ready to put it on for the first time in decades and smirk at my wide-eyed naive younger self but it absolutely holds up (with one exception, which we'll get to) and the songs are great and it's great.
This album is basically the matter to Nebraska's antimatter. They were both written and recorded around the same time, and both are actually dark as hell, but Nebraska wears it darkness on its sleeve, while this album dresses it up so much in outstanding, exciting, pounding rock that you may not realize it's as dark as it is. Look at what happened to the title track! "Born in the USA" is about the evisceration of the working class and the futility of the Vietnam War, but because it's such a fucking stomp it got adopted by brain-dead Reaganites as some kind of fist-pumping jingo anthem. It was played at fucking Trump rallies. 40 years later and they still don't fucking get it.
But it's true, it's still a great song. It starts with that iconic riff and then Max Weinberg's snare, blown out to sound like an explosion, and Bruce's voice, ragged and raspy. That voice carries the whole album, the big dramatic version of Bruce, not the quiet whisper of Nebraska. "Darlington County," the country-tinged third track, is about two cousins, the narrator and Wayne, traveling from New York down to Darlington County, South Carolina in search of a good time and a union job. The final image in the song - "Driving out of Darlington County/Seen Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper's Ford" has haunted me ever since. What did Wayne do? And why is the narrator just leaving him there?
I forgot how good "No Surrender" is too. Definitely a 50's vibe, it's about, like a lot of songs on this album, learning to give up on your dreams. The protagonist in "Glory Days" can't do it:
Back in high school
He could throw that speedball by you
Make you look like a fool boy
Saw him the other night at this roadside bar
I was walking in, he was walking out
We went back inside sat down had a few drinks
But all he kept talking about was
Glory days, in the wink of a young girl's eye
Glory days, glory days
You can just picture this guy whose best years were 20 years ago boring you with his stories. (We all do it, whether we intend to or not. Sometimes the stories are about being in Prague in the 90's or shows we played or epic drug experiences, but we all do it.) Again, this song is driven by a strong riff that gets introduced in the opening bars and then repeated. It's such a staple for Springsteen on this album but it really works, and it ties the sound together.
OK, there's one exception, and it's "Dancing in the Dark," a song that sounds like it was flown in from another album and was written at co-producer Jon Landau's insistence that the album needed a single. (This album had seven singles, btw.) It's keyboard-based, not guitar-based, and featured a young Courtney Cox in the too-sunny video. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the album, but of course it was a huge smash hit and whatever, good for Bruce.
The last song on the album, "My Hometown," forms a thematic bookend with the first song, the title track. Just like the Vietnam vet in "Born" who returns home to find there are no jobs for him, the narrator in "My Hometown" drives his son around the town where he himself grew up, which has now been ruined by the closing of the textile mill. This is exactly the America that Trump got elected promising to fix, and of course all he delivered was tax cuts for the rich. The lonely characters of the songs here are still waiting for help.
Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Yes!
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