Red, White, and Misused: How “Born in the U.S.A.” Became an Anthem for Everything That It Wasn’t

Make it gritty.

When it came time to film the video for “Born in the U.S.A.,” that was Bruce Springsteen’s request.

For John Sayles, it was easy to fulfill. “I was able to say, ‘Well, we do gritty,’” he remembers. The director was coming off Baby It’s You, a movie about the kind of blue-collar Jersey guy that the Boss might sing about. The dramatic comedy takes place in 1966 but features five Springsteen classics that in real life weren’t released until the next decade. Sayles couldn’t help including them. “The main characters,” he says, “were people out of one of his songs.”

Naturally, the title track off of what became Springsteen’s bestselling album felt familiar to Sayles. It’s a story told from the perspective of a Vietnam War veteran who returns home to a country that has nothing for him. “I’m 10 years burnin’ down the road,” Springsteen sings. “Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.” The catchy chorus is a mix of pride and anger: “I was born in the USA now / Born in the USA / I’m a long gone daddy in the USA now …”

“It always seemed like that tattoo that somebody had instead of ‘Born to be Bad’ or ‘Hells Angels.’ It’s just ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’” Sayles says. “And there’s some pride in it. But also, you know what that means. That means, ‘I’ve survived.’ … A lot of the stuff that I’ve written is about this thing of our culture and what it promises you, what it delivers or doesn’t deliver, the pressures it puts on you, the sometimes perverse pride you have in being able to surf this big wave.”

The “Born in the U.S.A.” video is a lament and a tribute. Mixed in with—yes, gritty—16-millimeter concert footage of a denim-draped Springsteen belting out the song, there are handheld shots of factories, construction workers, an amusement park ride, a check-cashing store with a long line, soldiers, a small Asian American child, and a military cemetery. The mini-movie starts with a waving American flag and ends with Bruce posed in front of one. The statement is obvious: “This is not just something to wave,” Sayles says. “This is also something to challenge, to ask questions of, to live up to.”

When I talked to Sayles in April, it was clear that he’s thought a lot about the meaning of “Born in the U.S.A.” since the album came out 40 years ago this week. But he realizes that most listeners don’t go that deep. “They love the song so much they’ve learned the lyrics, but they liked it before they learned the lyrics,” he says. “The political content, they may get it now. But they certainly didn’t know it the first time they heard it. It was just kind of a cool song.”

“Born in the U.S.A.” is two things at once: a soaring anthem and a protest song. Because of its dual appeal, it’s been co-opted more than any other record of the past 40 years. Conservative figures, including several U.S. presidents, have glommed on to the track without getting it. Or not caring to.

The misuse of “Born in the U.S.A.” has been so blatant that it’s distracted us from its message. As Nietzsche put it, “The text has disappeared under the interpretation.” The misinterpretation is so glaring and has gone on for so long that it’s still a punch line. In Air, the 2023 period piece about the way Nike courted Michael Jordan in 1984, Jason Bateman’s character admits that it took a belated close reading of the lyrics to get to the truth: The song he’d been listening to in his car every morning wasn’t as unquestioningly patriotic as he thought it was. “I was really singing, enthusiastically,” he says, “with completely the wrong idea.”

Springsteen himself seems to know that the long history of misreading “Born in the U.S.A.,” willful or not, says more about the song’s worst fans than the song itself. “Records are often auditory Rorschach tests,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run. “We hear what we want to hear.”

On September 19, 1984, Ronald Reagan held a reelection campaign rally in Hammonton, a small New Jersey town best known as “the blueberry capital of the world.” Early in his speech, the president, as all smart politicians tend to do, pandered to the crowd.

“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,” he said. “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.”

That day, Jon Shure was covering the event for The Record, the state’s second-biggest newspaper. Looking back on it, the former reporter laughs and calls Reagan’s Springsteen reference “cultural misappropriation.” But at the time, Shure didn’t think it was strange. He just assumed a speechwriter inserted the Jersey-bred rock star into the president’s address.

“I think Reagan was a ‘Write it down for me, and I’ll say it’ kind of guy,” Shure says. “I don’t think he gave a lot of thought personally to that. I think he was very much a scripted and programmed president, which makes sense since he was a movie actor.”

It’s actually not surprising that Springsteen would be on Reagan’s radar. By that summer, Born in the U.S.A. had already topped the album chart. The title track was still a month away from getting released as a single, but it was in the zeitgeist. Even in the buttoned-up world of conservative politics.

That September, George F. Will had written a Washington Post column about Springsteen. The bow-tied commentator, who was closely tied to the Republican president, saw the Boss play live that summer. Then he raved about the performance in print in a way that proves there really is a difference between hearing and listening.

“I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times,” Will wrote. “He 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.!’”

To that point, it was the most prominent, direct political misuse of the song. There was irony in the fanfare: “Born in the U.S.A.” was written and released in the early ’80s. Springsteen was singing about hard times that were getting worse during the Reagan era.

Shure mentioned Reagan’s cheerful Springsteen name-drop in his article that was published the next day and then moved on. Springsteen didn’t have that luxury. When the president talks about you, people start asking questions. Two days later, the musician addressed the issue during his version of a campaign rally: an arena show.

“The president was mentioning my name the other day. And I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album must have been,” Springsteen reportedly said from the stage in Pittsburgh. “I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.” Then he started playing “Johnny 99,” a song about a laid-off autoworker who kills a night clerk, gets arrested, gets sentenced to 99 years in jail, and then begs the judge for the death penalty. Not exactly a message of hope.

Springsteen spoke out again the next night, this time without mentioning Reagan by name. “There’s something really dangerous happening to us out there,” he told the audience. “We’re slowly getting split up into two Americas. Things are getting taken away from the people that need them and given to people that don’t need them.”

Eventually, a USA Today story with those comments made its way into the hands of Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale. At a Garden State rally that October, he quipped, “Bruce Springsteen may have been born to run, but he wasn’t born yesterday. And when Bruce heard what President Reagan had said, here’s what the Boss said to him. Then he read Springsteen’s “two Americas” quote. “That’s the real Bruce Springsteen,” Mondale said. “And he’s for the Mondale-Ferraro ticket.”

In an interview with Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone that fall, Springsteen criticized the president’s campaign: “You see the Reagan reelection ads on TV—you know: ‘It’s morning in America.’ And you say, well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh. It’s not morning above 125th Street in New York. It’s midnight.”

But even after Loder pressed him, Springsteen chose not to endorse Mondale. Or anyone. Even after being tossed into the middle of a campaign because of his music, he refused to take the bait. The cycle repeated again and again over the next 40 years.

Eventually, Springsteen started picking a side. But not back then. And in the 1984 election, Reagan cruised to a historic landslide victory. He carried 49 of 50 states, including New Jersey.

It’s hard to imagine now, long after he campaigned for both John Kerry and Barack Obama for president and called Donald Trump “a moron,” but there was a time when Springsteen didn’t publicly wade into partisan politics. He wasn’t stumping for candidates in the ’70s and ’80s, even if his music had a deep progressive streak.

“He was writing songs about downtrodden people that you could read politics into,” says Uproxx critic and Ringer contributor Steven Hyden, the author of the new book There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland. “But they are really stories about people, where the politics is in the subtext.” Even a song like “Born in the U.S.A.,” Hyden adds, is more subtle than it seems. “He’s not saying in that song, ‘We need to support veterans,’ or ‘We shouldn’t go into wars against foreign countries, and we don’t have an exit strategy.’ He’s writing about people, and he’s empathetic to them. And you can listen to those songs and feel like, ‘Wow, we need to do more to help people like this.’”

Springsteen’s altruism wasn’t confined to his songs. In the late ’70s, he read Vietnam veteran and anti-war activist Ron Kovic’s memoir, Born on the Fourth of July (later turned into an Oliver Stone biopic starring Tom Cruise). The two eventually met by chance in Los Angeles, and Kovic took the rock star to a local center for vets. For the musician, who was drafted by the Army in the late ’60s but got a deferment by playing up a concussion he’d suffered in a motorcycle accident, the experience was eye-opening.

“I’m pretty easy with people, but once at the center I didn’t know exactly how to respond or what to do,” Springsteen wrote in Born to Run. “West Coast shadows of the neighborhood faces I’d grown up with stared back into my eyes. Some of the guys were homeless, had drug problems, were dealing with post-traumatic stress or life-changing physical injury. I thought about my friends who’d been killed in the war. I didn’t know what to say, so I just listened.”

Later that day, Springsteen and Kovic talked about ways to raise awareness about the struggles of Vietnam veterans. Soon, while backstage at a New Jersey stop on the River tour, Bruce met Bobby Muller, the founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America. The organization was only a few years old and needed money. Springsteen knew he could help. So on August 20, 1981, at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, he held a benefit concert.

Afterward, Springsteen presented the VVA with a check for $100,000. The cash helped save the group. “It didn’t pay all of our bills, but it gave us the shot and hope we needed,” John Terzano, who ran the organization’s D.C. office, said in a 2016 VVA magazine retrospective by journalist Marc Leepson. “The only reason we survived is because Bruce came around in 1981.”

Springsteen’s commitment to Vietnam veterans wasn’t only monetary. Around then, he’d started working on a song about young men returning from the war. Fortuitously, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull writer Paul Schrader had sent him a script about a bar band trying to make it big—it was called Born in the U.S.A. “I copped ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ straight off the title page,” Springsteen admitted. (He eventually paid Schrader back with a song for the movie that the screenplay became: Light of Day.)

Springsteen and the E Street Band tracked “Born in the U.S.A.” at the Hit Factory in New York. The frontman called it drummer Max Weinberg’s best recorded performance. “It was a protest song, and when I heard it thundering back at me through the Hit Factory’s gargantuan studio speakers,” Springsteen wrote in Born to Run, “I knew it was one of the best things I’d ever done.”

The first person he played the finished version of the song for? Bobby Muller. As he listened, he smiled. The first time he heard it, Leepson, a Vietnam vet himself, had a similarly fuzzy feeling. To him, the song’s appeal was more about whom it acknowledged than its actual message. “Anytime we would get a mention by an artist as popular as Bruce, it was sort of validating,” Leepson says. “That would be my summary of that.”

Born in the U.S.A. was released on June 4, 1984. It was the poppiest record Springsteen had ever made. The first single, “Dancing in the Dark,” reached no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and is still the biggest hit of Springsteen’s career. The video, which Brian De Palma directed, starred a young Courteney Cox. It quickly became a sensation on MTV.

“‘Dancing in the Dark’ was grabbed on to immediately,” says Carter Alan, who back then was a DJ at Boston’s WBCN, one of the country’s most influential rock stations. “A lot of [Born in the U.S.A.] was danceable. And that’s a very danceable song. I mean, they made a 12-inch dance mix out of it.”

“Born in the U.S.A.,” released as a single a week before the 1984 presidential election, was almost as catchy as “Dancing in the Dark.” But it felt different to Alan. “I got to ’BCN in 1979, but it went back to the ’60s and the counterculture, so it had a whole anti-war image to it,” he says. “And people were very vocal about speaking against the war and speaking against the country if they thought something was unjust. And that continued even into the MTV era. So we got the message of what those words were about.”

To Alan, that message was obvious. “Some singers mumble, but Springsteen’s all about the words,” he says. “And he makes damn sure you can understand them. He doesn’t bury himself in the mix. There’s a lot of sound and noise going on in that song. I mean, those drums are like cannon shots. But you can hear everything he says.” The DJ found the misinterpretation of the song, one of seven top-10 hits off of Born in the U.S.A., to be laughable. “We played the fuck out of that song,” he says. “I mean, after 10, 15 times, you should be able to hear what those lyrics are about.”

And yet, the booming “Born in the U.S.A.”—and Springsteen himself— stirred up jingoistic feelings. When he was researching There Was Nothing You Could Do, Hyden noticed that in the mid-’80s, the press started comparing the rugged rock star to Rambo star Sylvester Stallone. “Commentators frequently noted the resemblance between Bruce and Sly and concluded that they represented something positive about America’s strength,” Hyden wrote. “It did not matter that Bruce wrote about veterans who came home to America as broken men, while Sly played a veteran who went back into Vietnam in order ‘to win this time.’”

Springsteen admitted in his memoir that he felt somewhat conflicted about “Born in the U.S.A.,” particularly back in 1984, when the Republican Party was “intent on co-opting a cow’s ass if it has the Stars and Stripes tattooed on it.” Though he understood that some people used the song’s soaring sound to soften its rage, he refused to concede to their ignorance. “If I tried to undercut or change the music,” he wrote, “I believe I would’ve had a record that would’ve been more easily understood but not as satisfying.”

The way Hyden sees it, a more downbeat “Born in the U.S.A.”—Springsteen recorded a slower acoustic version for Nebraska—would’ve had more “rhetorical clarity” but wouldn’t have hit as hard. The song is a classic because of the way it channels both anger and uplift, not in spite of it.

“It’s a song about a disaffected Vietnam veteran who’s been chewed up and spat out by his country, but the guy in that song is also claiming his citizenship of America,” Hyden says. “He’s not disavowing America. He’s not saying, ‘I’m leaving the USA.’ He’s saying, ‘I was born in the USA. I am a part of this country as much as anybody else.’ And I love that about the song. I love that you can’t just put it in one box.”

There’s really nothing new about twisting pop music to fit all kinds of agendas, whether they’re educational, political, or corporate. The practice is as old and commonplace as the form.

How many American kids who sang Woody Guthrie’s Depression-era folk song “This Land Is Your Land”—which Springsteen played with Pete Seeger at Obama’s first inauguration—in elementary school remember the lost verses?

As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Have Lakers fans who love hearing Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” blare through the arena ever truly paid attention to the lyrics?

Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man
He’s down on his knees

And do you think the advertising agency that decided to use the sweet chorus of Faces’ acoustic ballad “Ooh La La” in an Amazon ad about a father-daughter bond ever bothered to parse the verses?

Poor old Granddad, I laughed at all his words
I thought he was a bitter man
He spoke of women’s ways
They’ll trap you, then they use you
Before you even know

Still, as annoying as this kind of blatant misinterpretation of art can be, I understand it. A song can evoke warm feelings, even if the lyrics don’t. “Born in the U.S.A.” is no exception.

“I don’t think it’s crazy or stupid that people didn’t get what the lyrics were about, because Bruce played that song with the American flag behind him onstage,” Hyden says. “The music is probably the most purely anthemic music he’s ever written, even more than ‘Born to Run,’ I would argue, because of the drums, the big synthesizer part, the chorus. It’s just designed for fist pumping and to shout along with.”

Still, over the years, Springsteen has done his damnedest to let the world know that he’s not on board with conservative politicians’ use of the song. In October 1996, when presidential candidate Bob Dole played it at a New Jersey campaign rally, the Boss spoke out. “Just for the record,” he said at the time, “I’d like to make clear that it was used without my permission, and I am not a supporter of the Republican ticket.”

That didn’t stop Republicans from using “Born in the U.S.A.” to try to gain support. Hard-right presidential candidate Pat Buchanan—whose 1992 RNC speech, columnist Molly Ivins famously wrote, “probably sounded better in the original German”—chose it as his 1999 Iowa Straw Poll entrance music.

“Thank you, Bruce Springsteen, for that tremendous introduction,” Buchanan told the crowd. After the song about a disillusioned Vietnam vet faded, MTV News reported, he made “a speech espousing a strong military and a crackdown on illegal immigration.”

And just before the 2020 election, weeks after Trump supporters played it outside Walter Reed Medical Center while the president was recovering from COVID, Springsteen said this: “In just a few days, we’ll be throwing the bums out. I thought it was a fucking nightmare. But it was true.” (At a rally this May, Trump casually referred to the musician as a “wacko” liberal and said, “We have a much bigger crowd than Bruce Springsteen.” Forty years after Reagan invoked Bruce’s name, the Republican presidential candidate is doing the same ahead of an election, albeit in an entirely different manner.)

Let’s face it: There’s no way Trump will be the last right-wing politician to be serenaded by “Born in the U.S.A.” The song is too powerful, too broadly appealing to alienate even those who might not like its message. Long after Springsteen is gone, people of all stripes will still be pumping their fists as soon as they hear Weinberg’s drums kick in. But hopefully that won’t be for a while.

At 74, Springsteen is still touring. And he still looks like he’s in better shape than Rambo. “He’s still doing a great show, and it’s still over three hours long,” Sayles says. “And he’s not going to leave until he feels like we’ve all had a good time.”

The director ended up making two more memorable Springsteen videos: “Glory Days” and “I’m on Fire.” But to him, there’s something about the first one that stands out. “There’s a big scene from a movie there with ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’” he says. “It’s a song that you’re immersed in. It’s just, ‘Oh, good, I’m getting to go there for a while.’”

When Sayles listens to “Born in the U.S.A.” now, all the baggage it has accumulated over the past 40 years melts away like a Bomb Pop in the Fourth of July sun. “I just think,” he says, “‘What a great fucking song.’”