#then again Born in the USA was originally supposed to be on the Nebraska record so ykw that makes perfect sense. ty for your

[theinfinitedivides]

Springsteen hours on main rn not apologizing for that but the Broadway version of Born in the USA......................... my God

[janiedean]

hello!! I would *love* to know what it is about Bruce Springsteen’s music that you like so much (I swear this isn’t hate/trying to start an argument also!!)

OKAY SO THIS IS GONNA BE LONG

anyway it’s a lot of things honestly but if we want to make a non comprehensive list

he’s... viscerally honest? in the sense that one of the things that caught my attention when it came to bruce is that whatever he sings he means it and you can hear it from thirty seconds of it, and if you see him live it’s just even better, and as someone who prefers listening to people who write their own music for a lot of reasons but the chief one is that to me music is a thing I really relate to, I prefer listening to people who put themselves in their music you know, which is why bruce is just... that... much good when it comes to it for me

he has a gift for making relatable situations that you never experienced that I don’t think anyone else in music has, I mean... just take youngstown which is in my top ten bruce songs ever - I don’t come from the US, I never set foot in ohio and I don’t even know how the fuck does a steel factory work, but it doesn’t matter because if you hear that song you feel for the people in it almost like you knew them yourself and that’s a thing that just speaks to me and he isn’t from that background either but he could manage anyway, and tbh it’s kind of what I would like to be able to do with prose at any given time

musically he’s just... generally my thing, I mean when it comes to choice of melody/arrangements and so on but then again that is my genre so

I generally love how much of himself he puts into his songs - that’s tangential to point one but I mean, the thing is that he also makes his experiences viscerally relatable and the fact that one of the core themes of his work is how horrible it is to be stuck in a point in your life that you hate/feel unfulfilled in and where you can’t try to make your dreams come true which is one of the most common experiences you’ll ever find because all of us have been there makes it so that if it was cathartic for him then it’s also cathartic for the listener

that can work also for the other core themes - your relationship with your parents, relationship troubles, wanting to just get on a car and drive into the night and fuck everything, wanting something that makes you happy etc, it’s all just so well-punt in relatable terms that it just gets to you (I mean if you watch blinded by the light it makes it exceedingly clear, because that is why the pakistani kid living near london actually feels connected to bruce who’s an american dude from a blue collar family in nj) that you can’t help just feeling like he gets you

which is also a general thing because one of my Fixed Bruce Experiences is that yes it feels like he’s saying those things to me specifically even if I know he’s not objectively, and like... feeling like your favorite singer sees you and understands you and at the same time gives you an all new perspective on things you didn’t know is just... An Experience

with that I mean that before I listened to springsteen I didn’t know shit about a lot of things - for one I got sucked into reading about the vietnam war because of born in the usa, I read the grapes of wrath which is now top five novels for me because of the ghost of tom joad, I started reading dale maharidge’s books because of youngstown, I started reading up about racism/police brutality in the us because of american skin because when he was singing about his country in the way you do when you love your country and you criticize the shit out of it because you do (which is a thing I 100% relate to ie I love my country but I also could criticize the shit out of it for years because I do) then you wanted to learn more about it and it broadened my knowledge on a lot of things/got me interested in so many subjects (count that I’ve been into bruce since I was like twelve so it’s been almost twenty years now) and I’ll be thankful for that forever because being interested in those things at the moments it happened was... formative in a lot of ways and honestly I don’t wanna say that listening to springsteen made me realize idealizing things was Not A Good Idea but it was... part of it

I didn’t understand that specifically until I read his autobiography where he was blatantly open about how he struggled with mental health issues and how he channeled his coping into writing music knowing it was what he was good at, but in retrospective the fact that he did put those issues in music even if I didn’t know they were there is probably another reason why he was relatable (we don’t have the same issues but I could relate on... a lot of things he said tbh) and honestly I respect him madly for having had the guts to go out all in the open with it

I love how he can write about like anything from his parents to class struggles to everything in nebraska to psychological consequences to wars in the people who fight them to actually nice feelgood songs to actual realistic love songs and he never sounds like he’s doing that without knowing what he’s doing... because he actually does

in retrospective he put into music one of my favorite pieces of literature ever so thanks bruce for that (I mean I listened to ghost of tom joad before reading grapes of wrath but tom’s speech is still... a piece of literature that kills me on a molecular level)

about the realistic love songs thing... I generally am never going to get over how he’s one of the few people around whose love songs don’t sound like generic ballad thing but they’re all... actually very down to earth and realistic and they don’t exactly try to tell you that Love Is Perfect And Amazing And Flawless? idk how to explain it but like... thunder road is about two fucked up people one of which isn’t even attractive trying to get a better life and sort of same for born to run which isn’t even a love song per se, rosalita is fun but you know from the get-go that the guy doesn’t have money to his name, there’s literally no song in springsteen catalogue that doesn’t tell you that Being In Love is easy and you don’t have to put work into it, and the only 100% happy ones are the ones just after he married the woman of his life and anyway they’re still more sincere than 90% of the stereotypical love songs around and I just... really respect that? because while i’ll like my sappy love song ™️ if it’s good, his just... are a whole other level

(this would require another rant on why tunnel of love is my subjectively favorite record of his because of how he cracks open and turns over the subject without sparing any ugliness from it nor all the issues he was having in his marriage and how listening to it you would know that marriage wasn’t going to last and he still went and put it on record for everyone to hear and... as stated I really just have endless respect for people who can do that with their experiences while making them universally relatable)

he’s seventy and he’s still putting all of himself into it? like in the last twenty years (ie since I’ve followed him) he did the folk songs record, some seven world tours where he played 3+ hours, the broadway show where he also opened up same as he did in the book about his songs and himself and it was just beautiful, the western stars movie along with WS being a concept album in itself and a damn good one, all his records have tried something new for him regardless of how good it came out or not and he’s still going strong and I just really admire how he can still do all of that while not having sold out to anyone and having stayed true to what his music was in the beginning

also: 3+ hours long shows. like guys if you haven’t been to a bruce concert... idk how to put it but when I say that going to a bruce concert is the closest I’ll ever get to a religious experience I’m not exaggerating. I really truly absolutely know I’ll never get standard religious experiences but I suppose that’s how bruce concerts are for me - it’s just, you’re there with 40k+ other people all of which are feeling like he’s singing straight to them because that’s how good he is and even if maybe song 1 means something to you and something else to the guy next to you you’ll still be there with your heart having grown four sizes anyway for different reasons because Bruce Is Speaking To You and it’s just... something else. like I know people who were meh about bruce who went to a concert and came out of it OH I SAW THE LIGHT CAN YOU LEND ME YOUR RECORDS and that’s exactly how it is

tldr: bruce is an amazing performer and lyricist and musician who is straight-up honest and true to his love for his own music who’ll manage to make everything relatable and who’ll sing like he’s talking to you specifically and again, when I watched blinded by the light it got it perfectly and reading the book it was based on was A Trip because here I was nodding along to an autobiography from a british guy originally from pakistan and his sikh friend also from britain who spoke about bruce and what he meant to them and they said the exact same things I felt about bruce - like the guy is that good that he can connect to virtually everyone and will make you feel like you have some kind of thing in common with people that are wholly different from you because bruce speaks to you both and that’s... not an easy thing to run into. like, you have to be real good to manage that. and... he is. he just is.

[janiedean]

*Roose Bolton voice* I'm dissapointed in you

HEY ANON SORRY FOR THE LATENESS BUT I’M SURE YOU SENT THIS FOR SPRINGSTEEN ANALYSIS, RIGHT? ;) then sure let’s have something! what can I get for you with the roose bolton voice, hm…

OH OKAY LET’S GO BLEAK POLITICAL.

so: SEEDS!

Seeds is an outtake from born in the USA and was only properly published in 1998 when it ended up on tracks (a four-cds compilation of outtakes that still doesn’t even fucking scratch the surface of what he has in the vaults bruce come on take the rest out), but as a lot of other bruce songs that were never technically published on official records it has enjoyed a very lively life on stage/live especially when our man gets political. we should probably put as a premise, other than that, that this was one of bruce’s first political pieces following the vein that would then end up in bitusa, tom joad, youngstown and so on, and as a lot of those songs it focuses on poverty/unemployment in the us of a. it’s not a coincidence that it was out of the bitusa sessions post-nebraska, but then again nebraska was his first record with Serious Political Themes and half of the original songs ended up on bitusa anyway so those records are pretty much tied together.

also, seeds has been a favorite throughout the bitusa tour (the one where bruce dissed reagan) where it was played along the title track, a cover of war that you can find on the live 75-85 box set, johnny 99 and atlantic city. as in, basically it gave you a pretty straight bleak picture of the current times, and it came back with a vengeance post bush-jr and I’m 100% sure it’ll show up again when he tours post-trump.

anyhow, as I think I’ve bored you enough with the technicalities, let’s move on to the actual thing. so, what do we have?

Well a great black river a man had foundSo he put all his money in a hole in the groundAnd sent a big steel arm driving down down downMan now I live on the streets of Houston town

so, we’re starting with a bang. first thing, the song’s title is seeds, which should suggest us that it’s about either agriculture or farmers.

except that it opens saying that ‘a man found a great black river’, and at the end of the stanza we find out that we’re in houston, so presumably around texas, so the black river that then turns into a hole in the ground with a big steel arm driving down down down (which considering the fast rhythm of the song gives you anxiety just hearing it) means that someone found oil and started drilling it in texas and as a consequence the narrator lives in the streets of one of texas’s biggest cities, so we can suppose that this guy was a farmer, he lost his land because of the oil drill and now he’s homeless. NICE START GUYS! but let’s go on.

Packed up my wife and kids when winter came alongAnd we headed down south with just spit and a songBut they said “Sorry son it’s gone gone gone”

next stanza, we find out that our guy has a family that he had to pack up when winter came along, so either his land was dead because of the oil drill or he couldn’t support them anymore out of farming. now, this could either be set in texas or not, but since in the eighties a lot of people from the north who lost their houses or land and used to be farmers or steel workers or so on went to texas because it was said to be someplace they could get jobs (again I know I say it every damned time but if you read dale maharidge’s somewhere like america or journey to nowhere you’ll see exactly what I meant), so either he went to texas from a nearby state or he was in northern texas and went down south, but the point is: he lost his job, he was a farmer (so not in a good position to start from since farming hasn’t made much money for small owners for a while) and now he’s gone to texas with a spit and a song (ie: hope), but as the song’s music keeps on being fairly bleak, the only answer he’s given is ‘sorry but it’s gone, gone, gone’, as in: if he wanted work, there isn’t any.

Well there’s men hunkered down by the railroad tracksThe Elkhorn Special blowing my hair backTents pitched on the highway in the dirty moonlightAnd I don’t know where I’m gonna sleep tonight

If we thought that was bad news, though, we’re just getting started, because not only our dude isn’t the only one in that same situation (men hunkered down by the railroad tracks, referring to the fact that in the eighties a lot of people had started riding trains again like in the great depression so they slept near the railroad - the elkohorn special is the name of a train), in tents along the highway in the *dirty* moonlight which suggests you a fairly bleak, sad picture. also, he doesn’t know where he’s going to sleep tonight, which means he doesn’t even have the tent.

Parked in the lumberyard freezing our asses offMy kids in the back seat got a graveyard coughWell I’m sleeping up in front with my wifeBilly club tapping on the windshield in the middle of the nightSays “Move along man move along”

solution: sleeping in the car, since they don’t have anything else. so, the guy and his family try to sleep in the car in a lumberyard with his children being sick (graveyard cough, suggesting that it’s pretty damned bad), except that they can’t even do that because the police shows up and tells them to leave, which was apparently common practice in texas at the time (again: same thing happened to the reporters in the aforementioned book because they had a car with ohio plates…), so they can’t stay and have to *move along*, but to where? we just don’t know.

so: the guy used to be a farmer, lost his job, went down to texas to look for work with his wife and kids, didn’t find any, was treated like crap and can’t even sleep in his car with his family, the alternative is tents along the highway or a railroad in winter, his kids are sick and there’s no hint of salvation anywhere nor of government help nor… really much of anything.

Well big limousine long shiny and blackYou don’t look ahead you don’t look backHow many times can you get up after you’ve been hit?

now, that’s it for the backstory - we don’t know where the narrator ends up or if he finds work. but we learn his opinion. first of all, he talks to a generic ‘big long shiny black limousine’, which we can automatically assume means that he’s talking to someone rich (or the idea of someone rich) who could afford such a car (he certainly can) accusing them of not looking ahead ( = not seeing the consequences of their greed, which we can tie back to the oil drill in the first part that started our guy’s problems) and of not looking back ( = can mean that they don’t care for who comes behind them in wealth or that they don’t remember not being wealthy or both), and then asks them, how many times can you get up after being hit, as in, how many times could you fall on your feet before you end up like me?

we just don’t know, but probably more than the narrator… though one supposes the narrator is hoping the time comes for them, too. that becomes veery clear in the next part:

Well I swear if I could spare the spitI’d lay one on your shiny chromeAnd send you on your way back home

if he could spare the spit (which suggests he can’t, so maybe they barely even have means to drink and eat) he’d use it to spit on the limousine ie what stands for enormous undeserved wealth that a) the narrator will never obtain, b) caused the (economical) situation that brought the narrator to misery, so we also can see that the narrator is absolutely aware that his poverty is tied with the fact that rich people don’t care for the likes of him and would throw him under the dirt in a second, nor care if he can’t support himself anymore. and then he’d send the rich person back home, if he could. but he can’t.

and that’s bleak enough, but then we get to the last part and it gets possibly worse:

So if you’re gonna leave your town where the north wind blowTo go on down where that sweet soda river flowWell you better think twice on it JackYou’re better off buying a shotgun dead off the rackYou ain’t gonna find nothing down here friendExcept seeds blowing up the highway in the south windMoving on moving on it’s gone gone it’s all gone

at this point, the narrator is addressing someone else - someone named jack who could be anyone as it’s an extremely common name - who might want to go south and tells him not to. going south means leaving a town where the north wind blows (so where it’s cold and there’s nothing for them) to go where that sweet soda river flow which paints an imagery of a river overflowing with sugary refined drink… from which poor people can’t serve themselves anyway, and according to the narrator if that is the plan, then you’re better off buying a shotgun ie killing yourself before you go south because there is nothing down there except seeds blowing up the highway in another type of wind, so the seeds they might have planted back home are getting wasted along the highway people sleep on… and everything is gone and they have nothing left.

and the fact that it’s this bleak is probably why it didn’t end up on the record proper (admittedly bitusa has a slightly different feeling so it probably wouldn’t have fit given that it’s a lot more raw and musically angry than any other song on that record except maybe bitusa but the electric version lures you in with the beat and you don’t realize how angry it is until you hear the original imvho), but it’s sadly a fairly accurate portrayal of how things were going bad economically for all the people laid off without a second chance to find something better in the late 70s-early 80s. too bad that things haven’t changed and this piece has stayed pretty much relevant even these days.

thank you anon with the roose bolton voice, I hope you enjoyed the fruits of your disappointment ;)

[janiedean]

“Can’t wait till these two children’s cartoon characters fuck” yeah not creepy at all

Today, I will talk to y’all about what’s honestly one of the creepiest questions that has haunted me since I was twelve years old, specifically: how the fuck can people ever have thought that Born in the USA is a patriotic song in 1984 and how can’t they still understand it now?

Honestly, I have no idea, and in this essay I will walk you through it so it’s exceedingly and clearly explained how it’s in no way, shape or form a mindlessly patriotic song but, on the contrary, is a sharp, angry, vitriolic satire which criticizes the US government and its stance on the Vietnam war to Hell and back.

Born in the USA is the title song of the eponymous 1984 record which turned my good old pal Bruce into a world superstar, but it had originally been written for 1982′s acoustic masterpiece Nebraska. It was then reworked into an electrical version whose music is probably what makes people thing it’s patriotic since it sounds happy and singing-inducing, except that if you listen to the original:

You can notice that the famous one is just the upbeat version of the hauntingly, frankly anxiety-inducing acoustic that does certainly not work to sing out loud, but admittedly isn’t as good to sing in a stadium.

After having made this clear, we can finally move on into analyzing the lyrics.

The song opens with:

Born down in a dead man’s townThe first kick I took was when I hit the groundYou end up like a dog that’s been beat too much‘Til you spend half your life just coverin’ up

Now, here we have the first iconic question of this evening, as in: how in the hell a song that opens with born down in a dead man’s town // the first kick I took was when I hit the ground can ever be taken for mindless praising/patriotism?

I have no fucking clue except for ‘people only listen to the refrain’. Anyhow, from this opening which is literally a kick in the teeth we learn that a) the narrator was born in a dead man’s town ie somewhere small without many options nor many people, b) his life has been shit since the early beginning since the first kick he took was when he hit the ground, which is fortified by the following two lines in which he compares himself to a ‘dog who’s been beat to much until he spends half his life just covering up’, a sentence that makes a hell of a lot more sense if you listen to the rest of what he has to say later.

For now, we have the immortal refrain:

Born in the U.S.AI was born in the U.S.AI was born in the U.S.ABorn in the U.S.A

In which the narrator informs us where he comes from, except that if we take the first stanza into account… the USA don’t sound really idyllic, now, don’t we?

Anyway, stanza two:

Got in a little hometown jamSo they put a rifle in my handSent me off to a foreign landTo go and kill the yellow man

And here we can finally see what’s the problem: our guy is a Vietnam veteran. However, things aren’t so easy. What we surmise from these short, extremely packed with information lines, is that:

the narrator wasn’t drafted;

the narrator was coerced into going by a method that was pretty common back in the day - people who ended up in bar fights or such altercations were given the choice of going to jail or go to Vietnam and of course if they had to support a family/needed money they’d pick Vietnam, but it’s still coercion and he certainly didn’t want to go;

which is why he says they put a rifle in my hand - it’s they running the action, not him;

and they also sent me off to a foreign land ie they/the army sent him to a place he doesn’t know (foreign) to go and kill the yellow man (vietcong) even if he didn’t want to.

And then we’re again informed that he was born in the USA, and that means he a) was born in a crappy place, b) was sent to Vietnam for a menial fight (a little hometown jam), c) was sent to kill people when he didn’t want to by higher powers who give zero shits about him.

Doesn’t seem like a compliment to me.

However, there’s more!

Come back home to the refineryHiring man says “Son if it was up to me”Went down to see my V.A. manHe said “Son, don’t you understand”

Our narrator comes back home to the refinery (compare with what I said before in the Youngstown analysis - that one also went to Vietnam and came back to a job at the steel mill he didn’t have anymore, so they both had highly stressful jobs that would take a toll on their health sooner rather than later) and the hiring man doesn’t hire him and shrugs like hey I wish I could but I can’t. So he goes to the VA who asks, don’t you understand, which in this case means that there’s no place for him in this context.

Which ties to the fact that Vietnam veterans were treated like shit and generally ignored because the war was lost and people didn’t want to think about it, except that at the same time they were the first to actually vocally come together and ask for help and actually they were the first who recognized the importance of treating PTSD and ran free clinics in which also WWII and Korea veterans could come for treatment, but hey, let’s send people to fight wars we know we’re losing and then let’s not help them, why not?

But no, son, don’t you understand.

And then he informs us again that he’s born in the USA, a country where after being sent to war without wanting to he’s not wanted anymore after he comes back.

The bridge, though, gives us even more interesting info:

I had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet CongThey’re still there, he’s all goneHe had a woman he loved in SaigonI got a picture of him in her arms now

This stanza has an inane amount of info we can unpack in a handy checklist:

the narrator wasn’t the only person in his family to go - he had a brother in Vietnam, too;

the brother not only died but most likely died during the khe sahn battle which is admittedly one of the fucking dumbest decisions ever taken by the US military in their entire history and which was a defeat from the US even if they don’t like to admit it and prefer the ‘withdrawn’ excuse, which places him at the most recognizable and famous point of the Vietnam war for the casual listener/student;

the viet cong he and his brother fought are still there, he died, so = the US lost the war;

BUT the brother was in love with a Vietnamese woman (in love ie a serious thing) and the narrator has a picture of the two of them together, which suggests that neither he nor his brother hold the Vietnamese any ill-will and actually most probably dislike the US government more than the people they were supposed to fight.

We have no refrain after that, just the solo, but I don’t think he needs to say again how he was born in the USA for us to assume that when he says that, he’s being extremely sarcastic and not proud of it whatsoever.

Anyhow, we’re finally at the last stanza:

Down in the shadow of the penitentiaryOut by the gas fires of the refineryI’m ten years burning down the roadNowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go

Again showing how good he is at packing info in a short space while providing the listeners with info about how it sucks for his character, he paints a fairly bleak picture with two lines: the shadow of the penitentiary suggests how he comes close to being arrested and the out by the gas fires of the refinery suggests that he’s out there inhaling the toxic gas but not working there, so he’s basically left to himself without any help.

Also, he’s ten years burning down the road, which means that he’s been back for that long and no one’s helped him since then, and then he has nowhere to run and nowhere to go, so even if he wanted to leave, he literally can’t because he has no other option than his dead man’s town (most likely because he doesn’t have the means and the money and he most likely has untreated ptsd, so he’s stuck there), and that is how his country left him. And now the last refrain changes:

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.Born in the U.S.A., I’m a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.Born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.Born in the U.S.A., I’m a cool rocking daddy in the U.S.A.

Because now not only he’s born in the USA, but we also know that he has a kid (I’m a long gone daddy + cool rocking daddy) and both definitions contrast with each other - long gone is the exact contrary of cool rocking, which suggests that the latter is as sarcastic as the rest of the refrain (the long gone pairs exceedingly well with the ten years burning down the road) and if we take LONG GONE at his word, he hasn’t seen his kid in ages because he can’t work or has ptsd or both.

So hey, being born in the USA for the narrator meant:

being left without options except the refinery in his town if he wanted to work;

being sent against his will to vietnam;

losing a brother in there, too;

(also, out of the two of them, the brother ie the one who found love there died while he who has nothing in either ‘nam or the US survived);

losing his job;

being rejected by everyone including most likely his family/his child;

being left on his own even by the VA as in the office supposed to help him;

risking going to jail;

being unable to change his situation or crawl out of it because all of those circumstances make sure he can’t literally do it;

all this while he’s probably hearing rhetoric about how great his country is everywhere.

So, that is why the refrain is not mindless patriotism but pure vitriol - it’s like, ‘hey, if you listened to the thing, everything sucks but hey, I was told being born in the USA is great so hey, I WAS! AMAZING, RIGHT? /sarcasm’, not ‘OH MY GOD HOW GREAT THE US IS I LOVE IT UNCRITICALLY’.

Admittedly, the fact that Ronald Reagan thought it was a patriotic song that might resonate with his audience:

Shows exactly all the reasons why Reagan was a complete idiot without a shred of text comprehension, and too bad people remember Reagan’s opinion more than the mythical, amazing, unreachable slam Bruce gave that speech not long later:

TLDR: this is not a song about mindless patriotic US drivel and it’d be frankly obvious from basically listening to the lyrics, but then again listening to the lyrics is the same thing as reading something with a modicum of using your brain, and from what I see reading while using 0,05% of someone’s brain capacity on tumblr is basically asking for the impossible.

Anyhow, I think anon’s time would be better spent thinking about how creepy is it that I see people on youtube commenting on American Skin (41 Shots) with ‘omg Springsteen is a leftist now I’ll go burn my copy of BITUSA’ when it’d be obvious from that song that his politics haven’t changed from then than about how people shipping things is apparently creepy.

:’)