Can a song can be a stirring patriotic anthem and a condemnation of certain aspects of the American experience at the same time, a paradox of a piece of music if you will?
On the surface, “Born in the USA” isn’t a patriotic song, far from it. Originally conceived and recorded as a mournful yet searing acoustic track during the Nebraska sessions, soon to be told as a movie, Deliver Me From Nowhere, the song tells the story of a man whose unfortunate life was decided from the moment of his birth, when he was “born down in a dead man’s town” and the “first kick” he took was when he “hit the ground.” Unfortunately, things do not get better for him from there. Presumably in his late teens, he gets in “a little hometown jam” and rather than face criminal charges, is forced to join the military to fight in the Vietnam War, sent by his government to “kill the yellow man” instead of prison. While the speaker doesn’t reveal his experiences halfway around the world, a location it’s possible he couldn’t even have pointed to on a map before being shipped there with a rifle, he comes home to a world no better than he left it, finding himself out of a job and unable to work. He goes back “to the refinery,” only to be informed that his old job no longer exists. The “hiring man” he must’ve known for years simply shrugs, and says, sorry, but it’s not up to him. Next, he seeks help from Veterans Affairs, but they can provide none, urging him only to “understand” whatever that means. Soon, things get even more tragic when we learn that the speaker isn’t the only member of his family affected by the war. He lost a brother as well, “fighting off the Viet Cong, They’re still there, he’s all gone,” and this brother left behind a lover “in Saigon.” All that’s left is “a picture of him in her arms now.” While it’s worth noting that in some analyses the brother is another soldier, not a blood relative, the song closes essentially where it began, in a world and a life without hope for better prospects in the future, as though the speaker was cursed from birth until death simply because he was born in the USA:
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go
Not surprisingly, many critics – and at times Bruce Springsteen himself – have emphasized the song’s darkness. As Mac Caltrider, writing for Coffee or Die Magazine, opined as recently as 2021, the “real meaning” of ‘Born in the USA’ is often overlooked, “The truth is, it’s an explicitly anti-war song that highlights how America failed Vietnam veterans.. The lyrics plainly spell out Springsteen’s disenchanted view of the war. The second stanza kicks off with a soldier enlisting as an alternative to penal punishment, rather than volunteering out of a noble sense of duty. On top of that, he doesn’t describe the war as some domino-theory solution to containing communism. Instead, he offers a blunt, hyperbolic view of the soldier’s motivation and American foreign policy in the 1960s and ’70s.” Similarly, Dr. Oliver Tearle of Loughborough University noted, “The song is, fundamentally, an anti-war song…The war is not viewed in noble terms at all. Indeed, the US foreign policy is deemed to have been racist by its very design: the singer’s description of Vietnamese people is a satirical parody of the chauvinistic attitude America displays towards foreigners. And when the man returned from the war? He went to the local gas refinery to try to get a job, but was unsuccessful. He went to the Department for Veterans Affairs (hence ‘VA man’) but had no luck, and no help, there.” Ultimately, Dr. Tearle concluded, not without some justification, “it is obvious that the song’s title, ‘Born in the USA’, is laced with bitterness. America is the country that sent this young man off to a war that achieved nothing, and that failed to offer him many opportunities before he went and offered him even fewer upon his return. He was born in the USA, but this is no reason for patriotic pride: quite the opposite.”
At the same time, a song is more than merely its lyrics, one might argue that like most works of art it is ultimately greater than the sum of its parts. Springsteen might’ve recorded the first version of “Born in the USA” alone in a rocking chair along with similar acoustic tracks such as the haunting “Atlantic City,” but the original is far from the one he ultimately chose to release two years later on the album of the same name. We cannot say for sure what prompted the decision to essentially rewrite the song, but we can consider that the released version bears almost no resemblance to the original recording. In many ways, it’s the exact opposite other than the lyrics, replacing all that was either spare or haunting with fire and fury. Rather than acoustic, the recorded version of “Born in the USA” is fully electric, an almost big band, wall of sound affair. Instead of a mournful, solo guitar, the main riff is a bombastic combination of keyboards, piano, and glockenspiel backed by a thrumming rhythm section and pounding drums. By the time the chorus arrives, most listeners can barely stop themselves from raising their fists in the air and chanting along with Springsteen as he screams, “Born in the USA, I was born in the USA,” as though his life depends upon it. While one wouldn’t describe the impact as uplifting by any means, there is a combination of pulse pounding music and growled vocals that screams defiance, as if the song can be reduced to a dare of sorts, like Springsteen is saying, yes, American has it’s problems, we know that, every country does, but we don’t care, find some place better if you can. However you choose to describe it, in a musical era defined by anthem-rock, where bigger was usually better, and seemingly every band had a song designed exclusively for crowds to pump their arms and scream along with, “Born in the USA” remains a classic of the genre, an archetype of the form, so explosive the lyrics are almost entirely forgotten beyond the chorus. From its release until now, many have turned to the song for patriotic inspiration. George Will told readers of The Washington Post that Springsteen “is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” Ronald Reagan infamously attempted to co-opt the message into his 1984 re-election campaign, telling a New Jersey audience that he and Springsteen share the same American dream. “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” A few years later, Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca offered Springsteen $12 million – a huge sum in that era – for the rights to the song as part of an ad campaign that would equate America being back with Chrysler being back.
As a result, many, including Springsteen himself have claimed the song is misinterpreted or misunderstood. As he put it, “Born in the USA” is one of his “greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music.” Rather than patriotic, he viewed it as a “a demand for a ‘critical’ patriotic voice along with pride of birth.” Dr. Tearle described the same phenomena this way, ‘Born in the USA’ is rock music’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: perhaps of all American songs, none has been more consistently misinterpreted than the title track from Bruce Springsteen’s bestselling 1984 album. And when we say ‘misinterpreted’, we don’t just mean people have missed the point slightly: they get the message of the song completely wrong so they think it means the opposite to what it actually means.” For their part, NPR, as part of the American Anthem series, claimed, “‘Born in the U.S.A.’ may hold the title for the most historically misunderstood.” Springsteen, however, is also fond of the phrase “trust the art, not the artist,” suggesting that art takes on a life of its own beyond the intentions and limitations of the artist, leading to the conclusion that the artist alone doesn’t get to decide what a given song means to the listener. In this case, who gets to decide? The millions upon millions of fans who shake their fist and scream the lyrics, believing it is a patriotic anthem, Springsteen, or the critics, who seem to be privileging their own position from on high, educating the great unwashed about what something really means? Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie of all people seemed to suggest exactly that, remembering the reaction from the crowd when Springsteen opened a show at Giants Stadium with the track on the original tour. “Bruce started every show with a really rousing, anthemic-type version of ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’” he recalled. “With a bandanna on and a cutoff shirt and the fist-pumping, it felt like a celebration of being born in the USA — when really, it’s a defiant song about ‘I was born in the USA, and I deserve better than what I’m getting.’ I think plenty of people didn’t get what it was about, including the president of the United States,” he added, referencing President Reagan’s campaign event.
Is it possible that they’re both right? That the song can be a stirring patriotic anthem and a condemnation of certain aspects of the American experience at the same time, a paradox of a piece of music if you will? Personally, I would suggest that’s the case and Springsteen himself has hinted so as well, claiming “The pride was in the chorus. In my songs, the spiritual part, the hope part, is in the choruses. The blues and your daily realities are in the details of the verses.” Regardless, if “Born in the USA” were a poem, it would be difficult to argue that it’s depiction of the American birthright is anything except dark and depressing, but as a piece of music, there’s equally no doubt that Springsteen himself, who was eleven years into his career at that point, already famous, and well aware of the impact of his creative choices, transformed into the opposite and did so intentionally. Even aside from the bombast in the music itself, songs have a singer. We do not listen to them in our heads as a piece of poetry, where we supply the voice of the speaker. They are, instead, sung to us by an individual, who beyond their own artistic choices, is a person in their own right, one that fans at least believe they have a personal connection to, if not an actual relationship with. From this perspective, the poor bastard “Born in the USA” is about isn’t actually the actual voice we hear. Especially when you see the song live, as I have been fortunate enough to as recently as 2023, Springsteen is the singer, and of course, he too was “Born in the USA,” where from humble beginnings he went on to make a billion dollars doing what he most loves in this world. If that’s not patriotic, what is?
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