His blue-jeaned ass is emblazoned on the cover of 30 million copies of Born in the U.S.A., swaying and teasing. In ’80s concert footage, he’s a sweat-dripping, fist-pumping powerhouse with muscles bursting out of a sleeveless flannel and fuzzy sweatband. He’s earned his title as the hardest working rocker in the business; A Springsteen concert has no opening act, might start early, and is three to four hours of pure energy from The Boss and his faithful backing musicians, The E Street Band. He ricochets around the stage, dipping into backbends an inch from the ground, hanging upside down from the mic stand, toppling to the ground in a faux faint amid roaring calls for an encore, his signature, raw rasp wrapping around each word. He’s one of the greatest stadium performers of all time, and he knows it.
He looks like the all-American man. “Born in the U.S.A.” plays at Fourth of July barbecues, car dealerships, and political rallies of any party—anywhere red, white, and blue is draped. When Born in the U.S.A. took over the 1980s, its title track was quickly co-opted as a patriotic, at times jingoistic anthem, and it became Springsteen’s most misinterpreted song. “Born in the U.S.A.” contrasts an upbeat full-throated anthem with a blistering critique of American policy during the Vietnam War and its impact on the alienated working-class men who returned.
“Born in the U.S.A.” was infamously misunderstood by Reagan during the 1984 election cycle, after which Springsteen became more explicitly political, often proclaiming at concerts that “nobody wins unless everybody wins.” Springsteen’s politics have continued veering leftward since. His long body of work includes: endorsements of Democrats from John Kerry to Kamala Harris; his most controversial song, “American Skin (41 Shots),” about the killing of Amadou Dillo by NYPD officers; his live performance of “57 Channels” interspersed with audio from news coverage and chants of “No justice, no peace!” during the 1992 Rodney King riots; his Amnesty International world tour; rocking a field of 300,000 youths in East Berlin and stoking the fires of liberation a year before the Berlin Wall fell; every album he’s released about the alienation of the working class—see Nebraska, The River, The Ghost of Tom Joad (his astonishingly literary Grapes of Wrath-inspired album about the struggles of Mexican migrants); refusing to perform in North Carolina in 2016 to protest a “bathroom bill”; and his announcement just this week that he’ll be headlining a joint concert/rally in Philadelphia with Barack Obama (with whom he also co-hosted a 2021 podcast).
In the mid-90s, Springsteen started performing a dramatically different acoustic version of “Born in the U.S.A.” In the style of Delta blues and played with slide guitar, this haunting version leaves no room for misinterpretation. Springsteen eschews the upbeat chorus and ends abruptly with “I'm ten years burnin' down the road / Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go.”
Despite everything, “Born in the U.S.A.” can’t seem to shake its legions of fans that hear only gaudy patriotism. Perhaps it isn’t trying to. As much as “Born in the U.S.A.” criticizes America, it doesn’t give up on it. Springsteen admits, in retrospect, that he would’ve liked to have released his blues version of “Born in the U.S.A.” along with the upbeat original, clarifying his vision of America with room for all the possibilities, a protest and an anthem. Because at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s six-decade-long career is his obnoxious optimism about what the country could be.
***
“Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (Live in New York City)” is the most electrifying 19 minutes and 16 seconds of human existence. As the-Voice-Of-The-American-Spirit-Through-Bruce-Springsteen needs you to understand, it’s a “ROCK-AND-ROLL EXORCISM, A ROCK-AND-ROCK BAPTISM, A ROCK-AND-ROLL BAR MITZVAH!” Huddled before this frenzied altar of rock, I tried to determine why I’ve been obsessed with Bruce Springsteen since the first time I really listened to “I’m Goin’ Down.” The best I can come up with is that, in the context of our national mythology, he’s probably the closest we’ve got to an American god.
Here’s what I’ve jotted down so far as tenets of American mythology: the open road, outlaws à la Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the anxiety and appeal of motion, the salt flats in Utah, dust-red handprints on the walls of a dried and ancient canyon, and dangerous nostalgia for a non-existent better time.
Like any good god, Bruce Springsteen strikes a larger-than-life figure, both in work and image. Of all his songs, “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” is the E Street Band’s creation story. Scooter meets the Big Man—the rest is history. Hearing Springsteen tell the story of how the band, specifically he and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, came together is like hearing a mythos—the convergence of volcanic forces. And more than any artist—admittedly perhaps by longevity alone—Springsteen has spent his career wrestling with what it means to be American and what it means to be an American myth. His optimistic vision of America might’ve been considered naive in 1984 and even more so now. Critic Steven Hyden compares the decline of Heartland rock to the erosion of the American center. Decades later, the man who inspired “Youngstown” is now a Trump voter; in 2024, many of the blue-collar workers Springsteen claimed in the ’80s have become disillusioned with his vision and are now politically at odds with him. It’s an evolving reality his work still contends with. But if Springsteen’s songs are evidence enough, he seems to understand that American mythology also encompasses the violence, dissatisfaction, and ambiguity of its own creation and upkeep.
***
Like the many interpretations of “Born in the U.S.A.,” Springsteen’s hypermasculine persona is also full of complexities. When it came to his themes and wardrobe, Springsteen made himself in the image of his father, a man he describes as both his hero and greatest foe. His father was a WWII veteran who struggled with depression and schizophrenia. He was a rug mill worker, a bus driver, and a prison guard, but was usually unemployed. He drank ferociously and showed his son little love. In Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run, he muses that his father saw his own hidden, inward softness reflected outwardly in Springsteen and tormented him for it. He once said about his stage persona, mid-performance: “Those whose love we wanted but didn't get, we emulate them. That's the only way we have, in our power, to get the closeness and love that we needed and desired. So when I was a young man looking for a voice to meld with mine, to sing my songs and to tell my stories, well I chose my father's voice… All we know about manhood is what we have seen and what we have learned from our fathers.”
There’s a part in Springsteen’s Broadway performance of “My Father’s House” that gets me every time. The song is about running through the woods towards his father’s house. When he arrives, a stranger opens the door and tells him that no one by his father’s name has lived there for a long time. Midway through the song, Springsteen stops playing and launches into his signature spoken-word storytelling—he tells the audience he has a dream these days about performing in a sold-out stadium and spotting his dead dad in the crowd. He walks over to him, kneels down, and, pointing to his own shining silhouette on the stage, tells his dad, “That’s how I see you.”
Springsteen’s meditative and ethereal synth-heavy follow-up to Born in the U.S.A. does a complete 180 from the album that made him synonymous with 80s pop culture. Tunnel of Love is Springsteen at his most honest and autobiographical. It’s a devastating reflection on the dissolution of his first marriage, interwoven with his anxieties about manhood and living with his father’s shadow hanging over him. The complexities of his masculinity are on full display—he’s tough and fragile, loving, and deceitful.
There’s something incredibly queer about Bruce Springsteen’s hypermasculine ’80s stage persona. He might be an icon of macho heterosexuality, but through a queer lens, his performances of butch masculinity are so ridiculously intentional that he could easily be a drag king (he’s not, but like, imagine). He rocks a workman’s jacket, tight jeans, and huge forearms. During his energetic shows, he would also frequently kiss his saxophonist and close friend Clarence Clemons on the mouth (here’s a Twitter thread dutifully providing documentation). In numerous performances of “Thunder Road,” during the climactic ending where the young lovers escape their hometown, Bruce throws himself onto his knees and slides ten feet across the stage into Clarence’s open arms, where they share a long impassioned kiss. It’s unsurprising that he has a small but dedicated queer audience, and there’s a delightful subfield of academic literature (and many zines) analyzing queerness in Springsteen’s work, persona, and performances.
In “Beyond blood brothers: queer Bruce Springsteen,” Rosalie Fanshel compares Springsteen to Walt Whitman, writing, “Whitman interweaves his views of the United States with his love for its men. Many Springsteen songs read like Whitmanian portraits of the American moral landscape, not a few sharing Whitman’s erotic language to describe his feelings for his brothers.” In Springsteen songs, e.g. “No Surrender” and “Backstreets,” men swear devotion to one another, kiss goodbye, live on the outskirts of society, and fall asleep together on riverbeds—free and alive.
At 75, Bruce is on his first world tour since pre-COVID (“When the world shut down, I made a promise that if we got through this I’d throw the biggest party I could”), and there’s no doubt he can still bring it. In 2024, his sound is contemplative and celebratory of the musicians he’s been in fellowship with for 50 years—some still on the road with him, some who have passed. Road Diary, his documentary following life on tour, came out last week, and as he proclaims spiritedly in it, “I plan on continuing until the wheels come off!” If there’s any American myth we can count on, perhaps it’s Bruce Springsteen.
