If Nebraska seemed like an odd-fitting anachronism that surreptitiously captured its era, Born in the U.S.A. was its through-the-looking-glass opposite: a plainly right-on-time album that nevertheless felt retrograde. On its cover, famously, were Springsteen’s Levi-clad ass cheeks, red bandanna hanging from a pocket and the American flag striped in the background. The music videos had him greased up underneath cars, driving into work at oil refineries, and operating huge drills at construction sites. Springsteen picked up Reagan-era imagery, populist and all-American and nostalgia-soaked, and played with it, catching himself in a tangle of ironies along the way: a crystallized, made-for-MTV portrait of the working class styled just as the late-century proletariat frayed into pictureless disorganization.
At best, Bruce in the hard hat offered a partial view of late-century workers; at worst, Born in the U.S.A.’s imagery played right into the Right’s post-’60s culture-war script, pitting flag-draped construction workers against stoned student-radical brats, macho jingoists and ordinary Real Men against down-with-the-patriarchy hysterics. Part of these images’ value lay in their playful showmanship, their wink and feint. But part of their power, too, rested in how they traded on authenticity, leaving the world stranded in a no-man’s-land between scare quotes and grounded belief.
Suspicious critics saw the record as Springsteen’s cynical attempt to cash in on the Reaganite moment. Springsteen countered, in frustration, that he’d been misunderstood, and that hucksters like Reagan and Will had exploited his art. As anyone who listens to the lyrics knows, “Born in the U.S.A.” indicts the US empire in a way few products of American pop culture ever have. The song is “not ambiguous,” Springsteen once said. But meanwhile, as anyone who hears the music and the way Springsteen sings the hook knows, the song traffics also in very different feelings: an unresolved alchemy where invective turns into pride, pride into spent bitterness, all swirled up in a confused, downtrodden euphoria. Contra Springsteen and Will, it’s hard to imagine a more ambiguous song. This is what gives it its power, its troubled cultural endurance.
