"Born in the U.S.A." is a song written and performed by Bruce Springsteen, and released in 1984 on the album Born in the U.S.A. One of Springsteen's best-known singles, it was ranked 275th on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time", and in 2001, the RIAA's Songs of the Century placed the song 59th (out of 365), remaining a favorite in classic rock. The song addresses the economic hardships of Vietnam veterans upon their return home, juxtaposed ironically against patriotic glorification of the nation's fighting forces.
Recording history
This song was written in 1981 as the title song for a film that Paul Schrader was contemplating making and in which Springsteen was considering starring (Light of Day starring Michael J. Fox). Springsteen thanks Schrader in the liner notes of the album Born in the U.S.A.
Casual home demos were made later that year, following the completion of The River Tour. A more formal solo acoustic guitar demo was made on January 3, 1982, at Springsteen's home in Colts Neck, New Jersey during the long session that constituted most of the Nebraska album released later that year. Acoustic versions of several other songs that eventually appeared on the Born in the U.S.A. album were also on this demo, including "Child Bride" (an early version of "Working on the Highway") and "Downbound Train". However, Springsteen's manager/producer Jon Landau and others felt that the song did not have the right melody or music to match the lyrics, and also did not fit in well with the rest of the nascent Nebraska material. As a result, the song was shelved, although the recording later surfaced in the late 1990s on the Tracks and 18 Tracks outtake collections.
Full E Street Band versions were recorded during the Electric Nebraska sessions, with the Born in the U.S.A. album take 4 completed on April 27, 1982, at the Power Station. Much of the arrangement was made up on the spot, including Roy Bittan's opening synthesizer riff and what producer Chuck Plotkin nicknamed Max Weinberg's "exploding drums". The famous snare drum sound on this record, notable for its gated reverb, was obtained by engineer Toby Scott running the top snare microphone through a broken reverb plate with a fixed four-second decay and into a Kepex noise gate. This is the version that appeared on the Born in the U.S.A. album, a full two years later. The studio recording also originally ended with a lengthy jam session, which was later edited for the song's commercial release.
Themes
"Born in the U.S.A." has been called one of the most misunderstood songs in history, citing NPR, the BBC and others. It has been treated as a flag-waving paean to America by politicians like Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan, reacting to the dominant tone of the song's chorus, without seeming to acknowledge the bitter critique of American policy and society present in the lyrics as a whole. The song presents a Vietnam veteran as a tragic figure alienated upon his return from the war.
Two scholars writing in the journal American Quarterly explored the song as a lament for embattled American working-class identity. They wrote that "the anthemic chorus contrasted with the verses' desperate narrative," a tension which informs an understanding of the song's overall meaning: the nationalist chorus continuously overwhelms the desperation and sacrifice relayed in the verses. They offer the interpretation that the imagery of the Vietnam War could be read as metaphor for "the social and economic siege of American blue-collar communities" at large, and that lyrics discussing economic devastation are symbolic for the effect of blind nationalism upon the working class. The song as a whole, they write, laments the destabilization of the economics and politics protecting the "industrial working class" in the 1970s and early 1980s, leaving only "a deafening but hollow national pride." The article quotes Springsteen saying that the working-class man was facing "a spiritual crisis, in which man is left lost. It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society anymore. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family ... to the point where nothing makes sense."