Rolling Stone
Born in the U.S.A.
Bruce Springsteen
Columbia
Rating: *****
BY Debby Miller | July 19, 1984
Though it looks at hard times, at little people in little towns choosing between going away and getting left behind, Born in the U.S.A, Bruce Springsteen's seventh album, has a rowdy, indomitable spirit. Two guys pull into a hick town begging for work in "Darlington County," but Springsteen is whooping with sha-la-las in the chorus. He may shove his broody characters out the door and send them cruising down the turnpike, but he gives them music they can pound on the dashboard to.
He's set songs as well drawn as those on his bleak acoustic album, Nebraska, to music that incorporates new electronic textures while keeping as its heart all of the American rock & roll from the early Sixties. Like the guys in the songs, the music was born in the U.S.A.: Springsteen ignored the British Invasion and embraced instead the legacy of Phil Spector's releases, the sort of soul that was coming from Atlantic Records and especially the garage bands that had anomalous radio hits. He's always chased the utopian feeling of that music, and here he catches it with a sophisticated production and a subtle change in surroundings — the E Street Band cools it with the saxophone solos and piano arpeggios — from song to song.
The people who hang out in the new songs dread getting stuck in the small towns they grew up in almost as much as they worry that the big world outside holds no possibilities — a familiar theme in Springsteen's work. But they wind up back at home, where you can practically see the roaches scurrying around the empty Twinkie packages in the linoleum kitchen. In the first line of the first song, Springsteen croaks, "Born down in a dead man's town, the first kick I took was when I hit the ground." His characters are born with their broken hearts, and the only thing that keeps them going is imagining that, as another line in another song goes, "There's something happening somewhere."
Though the characters are dying of longing for some sort of payoff from the American dream, Springsteen's exuberant voice and the swell of the music clues you that they haven't given up. In "No Surrender," a song that has the uplifting sweep of his early anthem "Thunder Road," he sings, "We made a promise we swore we'd always remember" no retreat, no surrender." His music usually carries a motto like that. He writes a heartbreaking message called "Bobby Jean," apparently to his longtime guitarist Miami Steve Van Zandt, who's just left his band — "Maybe you'll be out there on that road somewhere . . . in some motel room there'll be a radio playing and you'll hear me sing this son/Well, if you do, you'll know I'm thinking of you and all the miles in between" — but he gives the song a wall of sound with a soaring saxophone solo. That's classic Springsteen: the lyrics may put a lump in your throat, but the music says, Walk tall or don't walk at all.
A great dancer himself, Springsteen puts an infectious beat under his songs. In the wonderfully exuberant "I'm Goin' Down," a hilarious song that gets its revenge, he makes a giddy run of nonsense syllables out of the chorus while drummer Max Weinberg whams out a huge backbeat. And "Working on the Highway," whips into an ecstatic rocker that tells a funny story, hand-claps keeping the time about crime and punishment. Shifting the sound slightly, the band finds the right feeling of paranoia for "Cover Me," the lone song to resurrect that shrieking, "Badlands"-style guitar, and the right ironic fervor for the Vietnam vet's yelping about the dead ends of being "Born in the U.S.A." Though there's no big difference between these and some of the songs on Springsteen's last rock LP, The River, these feel more delightfully offhanded.
The album finds its center in those cheering rock songs, but four tracks - the last two on either side — give the album an extraordinary depth. Springsteen has always been able to tell a story better than he can write a hook, and these lyrics are way beyond anything anybody else is writing. They're sung in such an unaffected way that the starkness stabs you. In "My Hometown," the singer, remembers sitting on his father's lap and steering the family Buick as they drove proudly through town; but the boy grows up, and the final scene has him putting his own son on his lap for a last drive down a street that's become a row of vacant buildings. "Take a good look around," he tells his boy, repeating what his father told him, "this is your hometown."
The tight-lipped character who sings "I'm On Fire" practically whispers about the desire that's eating him up. "Sometimes it's like someone took a knife, baby, edgy and dull, and cut a six-inch valley through the middle of my skull," he rasps. The way the band's turned down to just a light rattle of drums, faint organ and quiet, staccato guitar notes makes his lust seem ominous: you picture some pock-marked Harry Dean Stanton type, lying, too wired to sleep, in a motel room.
That you get such a vivid sense of these characters is because Springsteen gives them voices a playwright would be proud of. In "Working on the Highway,: all he says is "One day I looked straight at her and she looked straight back" to let us know the guy's in love. And in the saddest song he's ever written, "Downbound Train," a man who's lost everything pours his story, while, behind him, long, sorry notes on a synthesizer sound just like heartache. "I had a job, I had a girl," he begins, then explains how everything's changed: "Now I work down at the car wash, where all it ever does its rain." It's a line Sam Shepard could've written: so pathetic and so funny, you don't know how to react.
The biggest departure from any familiar Springsteen sound is the breathtaking first single, "Dancing in the Dark," with its modern synths, played by E Street keyboardist Roy Bittan, and thundering bass and drums. The kid who dances in the darkness here is practically choking on the self-consciousness of being sixteen. "I check my look in the mirror/I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face," he sings. "Man, I ain't getting nowhere just living in a dump like this." He turns out the lights not to set some drippy romantic mood but to escape in the fantasy of the music on the radio. In the dark, he finds a release from all the limitations he was born into. In the dark, like all the guys trapped in Springsteen's songs, he's just a spirit in the night.
Issue 426: July 19, 1984
Robert Christgau
Bruce Springsteen: Born in the USA [Columbia, 1984]
Imperceptible though the movement has been to many sensitive young people, Springsteen has evolved. In fact, this apparent retrenchment is his most rhythmically propulsive, vocally incisive, lyrically balanced, and commercially undeniable album. Even his compulsive studio habits work for him: the aural vibrancy of the thing reminds me like nothing in years that what teenagers loved about rock and roll wasn't that it was catchy or even vibrant but that it just plain sounded good. And while Nebraska's one-note vision may be more left-correct, my instincts (not to mention my leftism) tell me that this uptempo worldview is truer. Hardly ride-off-into-the-sunset stuff, at the same time it's low on nostalgia and beautiful losers. Not counting the title powerhouse, the best songs slip by at first because their tone is so lifelike: the fast-stepping "Working on the Highway," which turns out to be about a country road gang: "Darlington County," which pins down the futility of a macho spree without undercutting its exuberance; and "Glory Days," which finally acknowledges that among other things, getting old is a good joke. A+
Billboard
Bruce Springsteen's 'Born In The U.S.A.' at 30: Classic Track-By-Track Album Review
By Caryn Rose | June 04, 2014 9:28 AM EDT
Bruce Springsteen released the record that would become his biggest-selling album of all time thirty years ago on June 4, 1984. "Born In The U.S.A." would skyrocket Springsteen to global success, get misappropriated by a President, and turn his ass into an international icon. The album featured seven top 10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, tying Michael Jackson's record set with "Thriller" ("Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814" would later yield seven in 1989-91, as well) and went on to be certified 15-times Platinum by the RIAA.
"'Born In the U.S.A.' changed my life and gave me my biggest audience," Springsteen said in his 1998 lyric anthology, "Songs." "It forced me to question the way I presented my music and made me think harder about what I was doing."
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Boss's iconic album, we're taking a track-by-track look -- and listen -- back to each of its twelve tracks.
1. "Born In The U.S.A."
The record opens with majestic synth chords, soon accompanied by Max Weinberg's snap-to-attention snare rim shot, reminiscent of (and influenced by) the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man." And that voice: Springsteen snarls straight out at you: "Born down in a dead man's town / The first kick I took was when I hit the ground / You end up like a dog that's been beat too much / Till you spend half your life just covering up..." The E Street Band comes in like a bulldozer after the first chorus, turning this song into a powerhouse, one that still brings the crowd to their feet night after night no matter whether he's playing it in New Jersey, Barcelona, or Dublin.
With those lyrics, it's hard to imagine how anyone could take this song as a paean to America, but they did, and they still do. The pinnacle of misunderstanding would be reached at a 1984 campaign stop in New Jersey, where Ronald Reagan stated that "America's future rests in the message of hope, in the songs of a man that so many young Americans admire, New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen."
Springsteen's initial response would come at a concert shortly thereafter, in the form of an introduction to a song off of "Nebraska," "Born In The U.S.A."'s bleak, acoustic predecessor: "Well, I heard that the President was mentioning my name in his speech the other day, and I got to wondering what his favorite album of mine must've been. I don't think it was the 'Nebraska' album; I don't think he's been listening to this one."
He would later specifically address the incident, telling an interviewer, "You see the Reagan reelection ads on TV -- you know, 'It's morning in America' -- and you say, well, it's not morning in Pittsburgh. It's not morning above 125th Street in New York. It's midnight, and there's a bad moon risin'. And that's why when Reagan mentioned my name in New Jersey, I felt it was another manipulation, and I had to disassociate myself from the president's kind words."
Born In The U.S.A." would ultimately peak at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spend 17 weeks on the chart.
2. "Cover Me"
Originally written for Donna Summer, Springsteen kept "Cover Me" for himself after he recorded a demo and liked it so much he decided to hang onto it. (He would later make up for it by writing her another song, "Protection.") "She could really sing and I disliked the veiled racism of the anti-disco movement," Springsteen noted later. "Cover Me," which would peak at No. on the Billboard Hot 100 and spend 18 weeks on the chart, is a love song, an impassioned plea for his lover to stand by his side against the outside world. The track also features some fiery guitar licks revealing an underlying intensity in the otherwise straight-ahead rocker, highlighted by a compact, tasteful solo halfway through.
3. "Darlington County"
"Darlington County" manages to combine all of the Springsteen tropes: two buddies out on the town, working hard, looking for some pretty girls. In anybody else's hands, the song would feel hackneyed; in Springsteen's hands, he creates a delightful story that's still an audience favorite to this day, right down to the "sha-la-la's" on the chorus, which remain ripe for audience sing-a-longs.
4. "Working On The Highway"
Borrowing lyrics from a "Nebraska" outtake, "Working On The Highway" is a enjoyable, Elvis-tinged romp telling the story of a guy who decides to risk it all on the wrong girl. Musically, it's minimalist, backslap rhythm underscoring a slightly echoey vocal, highlighted by a handful of guitar notes here and there. Garry Tallent joins in 30 seconds later, his bass adding another rhythm line to the song.
5. "Downbound Train"
Beautiful, powerful, heartbreaking, "Downbound Train" is, hands down, the saddest song on the record. A forlorn tale of lost love and hard times, this one is summarized best by the unforgettable line, "Now I work down at the car wash / where all it ever does is rain." This is another number for the rhythm section, drum and bass, moving the lyrics along while synthesizer and acoustic guitar fill out the color and emotion of the track.
6. "I'm On Fire"
Springsteen turns crooner; this number is definitely for the ladies: "Hey little girl, is your daddy home? / Did he go and leave you all alone / I got a bad desire / ohh ohh ohh I'm on fire." The vocals smolder, and the sparse instrumentation constructed out of synthesizer, snare drum, and guitar riff (based, according to Springsteen, off of a Johnny Cash and Tennessee Three rhythm he was playing with in the studio one night) is clearly built to give Springsteen room to do just that.
The video starring Springsteen as a mechanic working on the car of a lonely rich woman of this song plays into that image, "I'm On Fire" would reach No. 6 on the Hot 100 and remain on the chart for 20 weeks.
7. "No Surrender"
"No Surrender" is an anthem of friendship and youth and never giving up, most notable for the lyric, "We learned more from a three-minute record /than we ever learned in school." It was a last-minute addition to the record, included at the urging of Steve Van Zandt even as he left the E Street Band to pursue a solo career. Van Zandt was right: "No Surrender" is a pounding, driving, rollercoaster of positivity, rainbows, blue skies and white fluffy clouds that's become a Springsteen classic.
8. "Bobby Jean"
"Bobby Jean" is a rollicking 4/4 ballad whose highlight is the plaintive sax solo from Clarence Clemons which brings the song to a close. It's deceptively powerful, the story building in momentum from verse to verse, and was absolutely written to be sung in a stadium so the entire crowd could wave their hands in the air back and forth in time. The song is believed to be written in tribute to Steve Van Zandt and his friendship with Springsteen:
"Now there ain't nobody, nowhere
nohow gonna ever understand me the way you did
Maybe you'll be out there on that
road somewhere, in some bus or train traveling along, in some motel room there'll be a radio playing and you'll hear me sing this song
Well, if you do, you'll know I'm
thinking of you and all the miles in between and
I'm just calling one last time
Not to change your mind, but just
to say I miss you baby, good luck, goodbye Bobby Jean"
The liner notes of "Born In The USA" offered the dedication: "Buon viaggo, mio fratello, Little Steven."
9. "I'm Goin' Down"
"I'm Goin' Down" is easily the most underrated song "Born In The USA" despite its chart success -- it reached No. 9 on the Hot 100. It's a prime exemplar of the kind of good-time party song that Springsteen and E Street do best, sliding easily through the verses with a deceptively sad tale of faded love despite the bouncing rhythm. And, yes, there's another golden Clarence Clemons sax solo right in the middle, and a fun, jumping end. It's another song that's still a crowd pleaser around the globe, and with good reason.
10. "Glory Days"
Another one written for a stadium-sized sing-along, "Glory Days" is a tale of lost youth and adult resignation and acceptance of where you've ended up: high school baseball stars, marriages that didn't quite work out, and sitting around talking about the good ol' times.
"I had a friend was a big baseball
player back in high school (yeah)
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"
The video starred Springsteen as the aforementioned baseball player, and also featured his new wife, Julianne Phillips, in a walk-on role. "Glory Days" would peak at No. 5 on the Hot 100 and stay on the chart for 18 weeks.
11. "Dancing In The Dark"
There was a point at which "Born In The U.S.A." was finished, but Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau, told Bruce that he still needed a single. "Dancing In The Dark" was what he came back with. "It went as far in the direction of pop music as I wanted to go -- and probably a little farther," he later said. (That doesn't explain the Arthur Baker 12' remixes, however.) "Dancing In The Dark" was the first single, and the most popular song from the record, reaching No. 2 on the Hot 100 and spending 21 weeks on the chart.
It was helped along by its video, directed by Brian DePalma, and featuring a then-unknown Courtney Cox, pulled out of the audience by her hero to dance onstage. The video inspired hundreds of bad dance moves and hundreds of dreams of dancing onstage for Springsteen fans of both sexes.
12. "My Hometown"
This poignant ballad inspired by events in Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen's actual hometown, tied back into the themes introduced by the title track -- events that impact a community, such as factory closures and racial incidents -- but with the reminder that no matter what, this was still your hometown, and you should stand by it. "My Hometown" would go to No. 6 on the Hot 100 and remain on the chart for 15 weeks.
BBC Online
BBC Review: Born In The U.S.A.
Springsteen’s much-discussed genius lies in finding the humanity in the everyday...
P J Lucas 2007
East Berlin, 1988. Under a graphite sky, a familiar synthesizer riff echoes out over a vast arena. As a thundercrack snare drum underscores one of the most consistently spine-chilling intros ever, Bruce Springsteen, telecaster in hand, stares out toward half a million East Germans who've all started singing the chorus - before he's even begun the first verse.
500,000 Germans shouting "Born In The USA" in some huge-ass park in the late-eighties is plainly quite weird. But they're not American. They're not singing about being American, are they? Are they??
"Born In The USA", the title track of The Boss' mega-selling 1984 album, was much misunderstood. Accused at the same time of being repulsively nationalistic, and viciously Anti-American, the track was endorsed by conservative US politicians (including Ronald Reagan) as an exemplar of "classic American values" whilst the bitter lyrics actually tell the story of disaffected Vietnam veteran, chewed up and spat out by his own country:
'I had a buddy at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone
He had a little girl in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms'
Fire up YouTube and watch John Sayles' music video for the track. The killer punch comes near the end where you see the smiling veteran with a hole where his left eye should be.
Despite the poor sync between the video and audio, Springsteen's leather-clad delivery is scarily fierce. Heard alongside the visuals of Bruce spitting the hopeless verses, the song is revealed as far more than a knuckleheaded, jingoistic sing-a-long. It's a ragged-lunged hymn to long gone friends, a treacherous government, a stupid war, having no job, but f*** it, let’s shout the chorus until we cough up our lungs.
Springsteen’s much-discussed genius lies in finding the humanity in the everyday, punching it out with a grizzled kind of grandeur, and managing it dressed as Mad Max. That’s why our German friends, with their cold war blues and bad blow-dries, are singing along in their hundreds of thousands. Despite huge political and national gulfs, there are more similarities than there are differences.
The other songs on the album? Apart from the unsettling, tender "I’m On Fire", it’s familiar fare throughout, reliable rock and soul courtesy of Bruce and his band of E Street musos, with the added bonus of "Glory Days" and the irrepressible "Dancing In The Dark" chucked in too.
But at no point does it become as stupid, or as complex, as track 1.
The Telegraph
Born in the U.S.A.
Bruce Springsteen
Thirty years on, it still rocks. Born In The USA remains the most tightly honed of Springsteen’s albums, the songs taut and economical, glistening with pop hooks and burnished with a dynamic Eighties sound. It successfully synthesises the two disparate strands of The River and comes up with something that manages to be both angry and celebratory, often in the same song. It is an album of glittering paradoxes, not least in the rage underpinning a sing-along title anthem that was wilfully misinterpreted by many on the American Right. Romance (Cover Me), defeat (Downbound Train), stoicism (Working On The Highway), lust (I’m On Fire), bittersweet nostalgia (Bobby Jean), frustration and longing (Dancing in The Dark) and a heart-swelling acceptance of personal identity (My Hometown), all wrapped up with slick pop production
AllMusic
Bruce Springsteen
Born in the U.S.A.
AllMusic Rating *****
Review by William Ruhlmann
Bruce Springsteen had become increasingly downcast as a songwriter during his recording career, and his pessimism bottomed out with Nebraska. But Born in the U.S.A., his popular triumph, which threw off seven Top Ten hits and became one of the best-selling albums of all time, trafficked in much the same struggle, albeit set to galloping rhythms and set off by chiming guitars. That the witless wonders of the Reagan regime attempted to co-opt the title track as an election-year campaign song wasn't so surprising: the verses described the disenfranchisement of a lower-class Vietnam vet, and the chorus was intended to be angry, but it came off as anthemic. Then, too, Springsteen had softened his message with nostalgia and sentimentality, and those are always crowd-pleasers. "Glory Days" may have employed Springsteen's trademark disaffection, yet it came across as a couch potato's drunken lament. But more than anything else, Born in the U.S.A. marked the first time that Springsteen's characters really seemed to relish the fight and to have something to fight for. They were not defeated ("No Surrender"), and they had friendship ("Bobby Jean") and family ("My Hometown") to defend. The restless hero of "Dancing in the Dark" even pledged himself in the face of futility, and for Springsteen, that was a step. The "romantic young boys" of his first two albums, chastened by "the working life" encountered on his third, fourth, and fifth albums and having faced the despair of his sixth, were still alive on this, his seventh, with their sense of humor and their determination intact. Born in the U.S.A. was their apotheosis, the place where they renewed their commitment and where Springsteen remembered that he was a rock & roll star, which is how a vastly increased public was happy to treat him.
Amazon.com
Born in the U.S.A. is an album painted in big, broad strokes. But it was still too subtle for some--namely politicians who tried to tap the title track as a jingoistic anthem when it is in fact a bitter diatribe by a Vietnam War vet whose country forgot him. The rest of the album is a glorious grab bag of radio-ready populist anthems--his best display of pure pop songwriting ever--including "No Surrender," "Dancing in the Dark," "Bobby Jean," and "Glory Days" alongside more circumspect numbers such as "My Hometown" and "I'm On Fire." It's not true that there's no arguing with success, but in this case Springsteen's widespread acclaim was warranted. With Born in the U.S.A., all those predictions from a decade earlier--that Springsteen was the future of rock--had come true. --Daniel Durchholz