The Sounds of Advent: Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the U.S.A."

The iconic, fist-pumping American rock anthem by the Boss is actually an unsettling and honest portrayal of a country that cannot keep its promises.

“A country is something that happens to you.”

-Hanif Abdurraquib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

“I’m ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go”

- Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the U.S.A.”

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*During Advent, I’m going to write a bit about how different musicians can offer perspective on the season in a series called “The Sounds of Advent.” This is week 2.

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Every Bruce Springsteen song is about a man dying.

This is to say that at the very heart of his songwriting ethos there is an urgency. Some of his largest hits explore the ways this country traps you while simultaneously promises you that you (and your honey) can go anywhere and do anything.

“I check my look in the mirror
Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
Man, I ain't gettin' nowhere
I'm just livin' in a dump like this
There's somethin' happenin' somewhere
Baby, I just know that there is”

- Bruce Springsteen, “Dancing in the Dark”

Springsteen told us this life was “a death trap, it's a suicide rap / We gotta get out while we're young…” and he promised us that if we “Show a little faith, there's magic in the night.” We just need to “get out while we’re young”…which is only right now.

But Springsteen always wrote these songs from a very privileged vantage point. This was pointed out to me by the critic Hanif Abdurraqib, who said of Springsteen’s 1980 album, The River, “that this is an album about coming to terms with the fact that you are going to eventually die, written by someone who seemed to have an understanding of the fact that he was going to live for a long time. It is an album of a specific type of optimism—one not afforded to everyone who listens to it.”¹ The Boss is always talking about death with the absolute assurance of life.

When you listen to Springsteen, you’re ready to die…only after you really live.

Except for Bruce’s 1982 album Nebraska.

This album—Springsteen’s sixth full-length release—has long confused his fans just as much as it concerned nearly all of his friends. The story goes that after the Boss had a massive run of killer rock anthem albums Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River (seriously—what a run), he had what he would later describe as a kind of manic depressive episode. A mental collapse. He went into the dark.

Armed with an acoustic guitar, Springsteen left town, isolated, wrote some of his darkest material, recorded them mostly alone in a small house, and started sending them to his friends. Longtime producer of the Boss and close personal friend, Jon Landau, said that when he first heard the Nebraska tapes the “recordings concerned me on a friendship level.”²

Nebraska departs greatly from the Springsteen corpus. There are no big electric guitars, no saxophones, no roaring drum fills because—there’s no E Street Band. And there’s no hope. After the Boss decided to just release this album from the tapes he had recorded on his four track (a process Warren Zanes details greatly in his fantastic book), he honored his band by removing their names from the whole project. This is just Springsteen and the darkness. And it rules.

“I wanted black bedtime stories [like Robert Johnson or John Lee Hooker],” he wrote in his memoir, Born to Run. “These songs [on Nebraska] were the opposite of the rock music I’d been writing. They were restrained, still on the surface, with a world of moral ambiguity and unease below. The tension running through the music’s core was the thin line between stability and that moment when things that connect you to your world…fail you.”³

Listening to Nebraska, the hope usually found in Springsteen is gone. All that is left is the blues. Each song is truly a dark bedtime story that haunts your dreams. There is nothing to lift you out, give you courage, fill your pride. The urgency is gone. I’m pretty sure this is because, during this window of time, Springsteen was no longer sure he was going to live. All he knew is that he was going to die.⁴

This is the album that sounds most like Bruce and least like him all at once. It is a triumph of a record and it is dark. Springsteen left his love of James Brown and the Stones in order to embrace his love of a band like Suicide (the dominant influence of the album’s sound and subjects…kind of says it all).

Nebraska is almost like a blip in the Boss’ catalogue. Looking at his discography, you’ve got anthem albums before and then, right after Nebraska is released in 1982, we get Born in the U.S.A. in 1984. With the iconic butt cover and all the hits including the album’s title track and “Dancing in the Dark,” this record would shoot Springsteen into the stratosphere of rock stardom.

But something about Nebraska never leaves Bruce. Something is hidden in these anthems on Born in the U.S.A. that marks his aesthetic from this day forward: the reality of hope in the midst of the death.

And that’s when he releases “Born in the U.S.A.,” as the single that would change his life (again). The song is played all over our sporting events, inside our political rallies, and across backyards and tailgates all over this country. Even if you know nothing about Springsteen, you know this song. It’s a song you can scream, sing, and jump to. It’s everything.

But this anthem is not Bruce shapeshifting—as if to forget about the death-experience of Nebraska and go “back to making the hits.” Quite the opposite. Now, as you walk through Bruce’s songs from here on out, the darkness of the blues is everywhere, including this seemingly upbeat anthem.

When you first listen to “Born in the U.S.A.,” you think this is a song of national pride. But then you listen to the lyrics.

“Born down in a dead man’s town

The first kick I took was when I hit the ground

You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much

Till you spend half your life just covering up”

This is a song about the kinds of “warriors” our country brings to war—and specifically the kind who came to fight in Vietnam. It’s about going to fight in a war you don’t understand only to survive to return to a country that doesn’t understand you. It’s about the failure of the United States healthcare system and the unreasonable promises we carelessly made to veterans we never intended on keeping. It’s about the tragedy of this country and how easy it is to find yourself in the middle of your life with “nowhere to run and nowhere to go.” All you have to do is be born in the U.S.A.

This dark subject makes since when you know that the song “Born in the U.S.A.” is actually a song originally written for Nebraska. Bruce wrote it in that little house alone with a four track and the darkness of his depression. And he has since released the original, haunting version of the song that sounds like the pain it is all about. It’s no anthem, it’s a blues song.

Before Nebraska, Springsteen is just one escape away from the freedom America promises: “we gotta get out while we’re young,” he says in “Born to Run.” All we gotta do is hop in the car and go. But after Nebraska, it’s just not that simple anymore. Sometimes there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to go.

And this is why “Born in the U.S.A.” is truly an advent song (took me a while to get here, didn’t it?). Advent, as we looked at last week, is a time of hope in the darkness. It is the full acknowledgment of pain inside the certainty of a beautiful future. It’s a lot like “Born in the U.S.A.” The hope it speaks of is mediated to us through the dark realities of this world. We can sing and scream a song of hope while we’re stuck on the ground.

In an interview with the GOAT Terry Gross in 2005, Bruce said of his songs, “the spiritual part, the hope part, is in the choruses. The blues and your daily realities are in the details of the verses.” This is sort of true. But when a song like “Born in the U.S.A.” is so bathed in the darkness in those verses, the choruses (as hopeful as they are) carry the darkness with them.

And I think this is really why Bruce Springsteen is so effective as a songwriter, and why this song is actually good. Because this is what life is like and why Advent is so powerful. Where else do you find the acknowledgement of a “people who walk in darkness” and an affirmation of the existence of “those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness” (Isaiah 9:2)? Good art represents not only the world we wish were true, but the world that actually is true—and the relationship between these two worlds. “Born in the U.S.A.” has a chorus you want to sing, but can’t fully sing so long as this country continues to kill the very people that make it great. We say we support the troops, but we rarely think about them. We say black lives matter, but we systematically disregard them and imprison them. We say a lot, but we’re all born in a country that can never live up to its platitudes and never will. This is actually what it means to be born in this country.

It’s the ache of these verses in “Born in the U.S.A.” that is so resonate with the Advent season. We want to be free, but we can’t seem to find our way there. We believe in the light, but we dwell in darkness. The albums after Nebraska are of an Advent-informed Bruce Springsteen: someone who went into the darkness. As he comes up into the light and releases Born in the U.S.A., he carries that darkness with him.

The people of God will likewise walk through Advent and through our whole collective life this way. And our anthems of worship will always carry with them the darkness we cannot escape this side of heaven. We don’t totally know where we will end up; we just know where we’re born.

Which is precisely the good news of Advent: we don’t need to know where we’ll end up. The gospel is not about a heavenly destination we must rise to; it’s about a heavenly visitation to the darkness we all were born into. God came here so we don’t have to go anywhere. Christmas is the story of the God of the Universe who is born into the darkness of our land to commune with us in the same conditions that bind us. In doing so, he broke the bonds of sin so that we might live together with him now where we actually live and where we will actually die. We can lose the illusion of a “runaway American Dream” where we escape to glory. It was never real in the first place.

You don’t need to have a way out because God found a way here. All you need to know is where you’re born.

1. Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), pg. 21

2. Warren Zanes, Deliver Me From Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (Crown: 2023), pg. 33.

3. Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (Simon & Schuster: 2016), pg. 299.

4. There’s a fantastic section in the book Born to Run, where Springsteen talks about how the fame had depressed him. He writes about how he would (in the days following his massive success) drive around his hometown but never get out of his car. He would fantasize about returning there one day with a wife and kids and community. This thought—as pleasant as it was—filled him with depression. It would never happen. “I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable,” he writes, “nobody gets a do-over.”