Forty Years Burnin' Down the Road: Looking Back at "Born in the U.S.A." and "Purple Rain"
1984 was a big year for Prince and the Boss.
The 1980s are remembered as a pop music era. As a pop music era, the 80s peaked between the spring of 1983 (when Michael Jackson moonwalked while performing “Billie Jean” during the Motown 25th anniversary special) and the fall of 1987 (when Jackson released Bad.) As far as the peak year of the Peak 80s go, that year would probably be 1984, the only year Jackson, Madonna, and Prince would all land at #1 on the singles chart. (The whole list, which includes iconic 80s artists like Phil Collins, Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran, Lionel Richie, Tina Turner, Wham!, and Daryl Hall and John Oates, is here.) And if there was a peak month of 1984, it was probably June—forty years ago this month—when Bruce Springsteen released Born in the U.S.A. and Prince and the Revolution released Purple Rain. Those two albums, which came out within three weeks of each other, still stand as popular and artistic high points of the decade acclaimed by both critics and the general public alike. Consider:
Born in the U.S.A. was the second-highest-selling album of 1984, while Purple Rain was the fourth-highest-selling of 1984. The other albums in the top four? Thriller by Michael Jackson (coming in at #1 for the second consecutive year) and the Bob Marley compilation Legend (at #3). Born in the U.S.A. would go on to become the top-selling album of 1985.
In the 1984 year-end Village Voice Pazz and Jop critics poll, Born in the U.S.A. and Purple Rain would finish #1 and #2 respectively.
Born in the U.S.A. would become the third-highest-selling album of the 1980s (behind Thriller and Back in Black by AC/DC) while Purple Rain would finish the decade at #7 (behind Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses, Whitney Houston, and No Jacket Required by Phil Collins.)
Rolling Stone magazine’s end-of-decade best-of-the-80s list would place Purple Rain at #2 (behind London Calling by the Clash) and Born in the U.S.A. at #6 (behind The Joshua Tree by U2, Remain in Light by Talking Heads, and Graceland by Paul Simon.)
Yet despite the sales, critical acclaim, and packed stadium shows that accompanied the release of Born in the U.S.A., Springsteen has never been comfortable with his record’s success. Both the album and its title track are among the most-famously misunderstood works in rock and roll’s history. I’ll spare you the obligatory stories about how conservatives like Ronald Reagan and George Will misinterpreted and misappropriated “Born in the U.S.A.”—an angry, accusatory song about a working-class Vietnam veteran left behind in a deindustrialized America—as a patriotic anthem. Consider instead how people misread the album’s iconic cover.
Many saw Annie Leibovitz’s photograph, which deploys a red, white, and blue color scheme, as a portrayal of all-American, working-class, rockstar sex appeal. The cover is better understood as a commentary on the limits of blue-collar social mobility in the United States, a claustrophobic image of a working-class man pressed up against not the “stripes” but the “bars” of the American flag with, as Springsteen sings on the title track, “nowhere to run [and] nowhere to go”.
When the guy who recorded “Born to Run” sings nine years later that Americans have nowhere to run, he probably deserves a careful listen. Of course, Springsteen may not have helped that cause by bulking up, donning the rugged clothes of the working man, and then dropping a record full of glossy, mostly upbeat heartland rock songs into the middle of Reagan’s triumphant “It’s Morning Again” re-election campaign. The fans Springsteen had earned from Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), The River (1980), and Nebraska (1982) understood where he was coming from and what Born in the U.S.A. meant, but his millions of new fans weren’t getting deep enough into the record to wrestle with its tensions or his critique of capitalism and individualism. It’s for that reason Springsteen has repeatedly said he never felt he got Born in the U.S.A. right. He’s spent much of the past four decades attempting to shed Born in the U.S.A.’s skin by making his commentary on America more explicit.
But now that forty years have passed, it’s time to stop holding the artist accountable for what his audience failed to understand. Born in the U.S.A. is a genuinely great album, a major artistic statement that is simultaneously exhilarating and cathartic. To begin with, it’s a blast to listen to, a full-blown 80s rock album with synthesizers, gated reverb on the drums, and bright, punchy, pristine production that never succumbs to excess or (depending on how you feel about “Dancing in the Dark”) slickness. As Robert Christgau wrote in his Consumer Guide review for The Village Voice (in which he gave the album a rare A+ rating) “the aural vibrancy of the thing reminds me like nothing in years that what teenagers loved about rock and roll wasn’t that it was catchy or even vibrant but that it just plain sounded good.”
Springsteen knows that’s the power of rock and roll: Hook a listener with something that sounds great, make them dance and sing along, and before you know it, the music’s deeper meaning will start breaking through. In this case, someone who listens to Born in the U.S.A. on repeat should soon realize that, emotionally, it’s not so much a rock and roll album as it is a blues album, a record that soothes pain by confronting it head on. The characters on Born in the U.S.A. are all watching the American Dream slip out of reach, their lives upended and degraded by deindustrialization and Reaganomics. Springsteen lends them a shoulder to lean on, remembering what they’ve lost while honoring their fight. This is on full display during the album’s brilliant second half, the best side two in all of rock and roll, which begins with the defiant “No Surrender” before charging through a series of songs about what many people in post-industrial America have indeed been forced to surrender: Friendships (“Bobby Jean”), romantic relationships (“I’m Goin’ Down”), the future (“Glory Days”), one’s self-worth (“Dancing in the Dark”), and one’s community (“My Hometown”).
It’s one long—and ultimately sad—goodbye. But Springsteen’s music grants his listeners space to both laugh and cry, to celebrate and mourn, to regret what is gone while acknowledging life must somehow go on. Don’t mistake Born in the U.S.A. as a tribute to resilience. That’s certainly part of the mix, but that puts too much focus on the individual. Instead, the album is better understood as a farewell party, a raucous wake, one last time for the working-class Americans at the heart of Springsteen’s music to come together and remember the good times before they’re scattered to the wind. In this way, Born in the U.S.A. recreates (at least in spirit) the communities so many had lost. It sympathizes with the downhearted and affords them a moment to cope with their grief through song and dance.
If you find it difficult to locate this sense of melancholy in Born in the U.S.A., try listening to the album by dropping Nebraska into the middle of it between “I’m on Fire” and “No Surrender”. It may seem strange interrupting an exuberant album like Born in the U.S.A. with an album’s worth of psychologically-harrowing acoustic numbers (although “Downbound Train” and “I’m on Fire” work as transitions) but both albums share the same origin: Many of the songs that would end up on Born in the U.S.A. were drawn from the same collection of unvarnished demos that constitute Nebraska. The themes that haunt Nebraska—alienation, desperation, fear, isolation, hopelessness—are present on Born in the U.S.A.; it’s just that on Nebraska they’re presented in stark relief, while Born in the U.S.A. tries to pull people through the darkness.
Today, many of the people who could see their lives reflected in Born in the U.S.A. have rejected Springsteen’s brand of progressive populism and have embraced Trump’s nationalistic populism instead. Springsteen is often mentioned as the only liberal who “gets” working-class Americans, but as much as he may understand where they’re coming from, it seems he’s lost the ability to connect with most of them. What accounts for that? Springsteen’s populism is founded on notions of solidarity and inclusion: Nobody wins unless everybody wins. It rejects unfettered capitalism’s scheme of winners and losers. Many working-class Americans affiliated with the MAGAverse, however, view American society as a zero-sum game and accept the cutthroat terms of the free market as their best shot at getting ahead. Trump not only aims to preserve the terms of this competitive social order but promises his supporters a leg-up by persecuting their enemies, be they foreign or domestic. It’s a message with a lot of appeal, but Springsteen sees through it: In a highly-competitive free market society, the working class will always remain at the mercy of the wealthy. Furthermore, people’s attempts to make the most of their freedom and get ahead in life often force them to make choices that poison their souls. Springsteen envisions a more socially just and compassionate America; for the length of his recording career, however, America (and much of his intended audience) seems to have been moving in the opposite direction.
Born in the U.S.A. held the top spot on the album charts for all of July 1984; Purple Rain would claim #1 for the rest of the year. (When Purple Rain’s run at #1 finally ended in early 1985, the album that replaced it for one week was…Born in the U.S.A..) Like Born in the U.S.A., Purple Rain is also intended to pull people through hard times, a theme established with the album’s opening lines, spoken by Prince during “Let’s Go Crazy” in the manner of a minister presiding over a wedding: “Dearly beloved/ We are gathered here today/ 2 get through this thing called life.” A few lines later, Prince even alludes to the therapeutic purpose of his work by referencing “that shrink in Beverly Hills/ U know the one/ Dr. Everything’ll be alright”. He senses his audience—which also may feel it has nowhere to run and nowhere to go despite living in a nation that promises upward mobility—hopes to salve a psychological wound. And like Springsteen, Prince senses his listeners feel isolated and alone, singing, right before the song’s guitar riff kicks in, “In this life you’re on your own”.
Unlike Springsteen, however, Prince isn’t here as that good-natured buddy with a shoulder to cry on. Prince instead arrives as a messiah calling out to people to join him on “a higher floor”, in an “afterworld/ A world of never ending happiness/ [Where] u can always see the sun/ Day or night”. Prince’s aim is transcendence.
American life was always too conventional for Prince. He was as countercultural a figure as there ever was in rock and roll. Watching the film Purple Rain, it is strange to behold Prince dressed as a rock and roll dandy striding down the sidewalks of grey Minneapolis or standing on the banks of “Lake Minnetonka.” It’s as kooky as seeing David Bowie lounging around backstage or traversing the streets of London as the alien Ziggy Stardust. But both Ziggy and Prince make complete sense onstage. They are world creators, summoning people to leave the old, dead world behind and join them on a new, weirder plane of existence.
Prince’s challenge on Purple Rain was that if the record was too weird, people wouldn’t come along for the ride. His previous records—most notably Dirty Mind (1980) and Controversy (1981)—featured late-70s pop funk and spare post-disco tracks influenced by new wave and synthpop. Those albums, which established the features of his distinctive “Minneapolis Sound,” were certainly innovative but adored more by critics than the masses. The 1982 album 1999 positioned him for a breakthrough, though. The key track on that album was “Little Red Corvette”, which probably doesn’t get enough credit as one of the most important songs of the 1980s for how it re-centered the guitar as a lead (rather than rhythmic) instrument on R&B songs. (“Little Red Corvette” would beat Michael Jackson’s rock-oriented “Beat It” to record store shelves on their respective albums in 1982 and as singles in 1983 by a matter of weeks.) Prince’s turn to guitar-driven music meant he was no longer confined to making post-disco pop records. He could now draw from the language of rock and mash all his influences together into a style that was singularly his own. It also meant he had inroads to a much wider and more diverse audience.
Purple Rain is a collage of styles. People could hear something they liked in one song and stay for the weirdness. For instance, the nasty guitar licks on “When Doves Cry” undoubtedly hooked countless listeners to a track that was oddly devoid of a bass line, making it one of the most disorienting songs to ever hit #1. The whole album feels like an experiment in how far Prince could push and synthesize the sounds of mainstream 80s pop music. That sense of adventure is why so many contemporary soul musicians, ranging from soulquarians like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu to 21st century artists like Janelle Monae, hold Prince in such high esteem.
Prince’s experimentalism also led him to dabble in the sounds of psychedelia, which can be heard in the chamber pop of “Take Me With U”, the dreamy “The Beautiful Ones”, the reversed lyrics at the end of “Darling Nikki” (the song that outraged Tipper Gore and led to the placement of parental warning labels on records containing explicit lyrics) and even in the flowers strewn across the album’s cover. (Prince would dive even further into psychedelic rock on his 1985 follow-up to Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day.)
But the biggest psychedelic influence on Prince was Jimi Hendrix, whose spirit and guitar heroics serve as the album’s chief inspiration. Rock devotees had long recognized Hendrix as the apotheosis of rock music, a guitar god whose musical achievements were beyond the reach of mere mortals. Prince dared to, if not ascend to Hendrix’s level, reassert the standing of Black musicians at the top of the rock guitar hierarchy. Note that from the late-1960s onward, nearly every esteemed rock guitarist was a white man. Hendrix, while acknowledged as the greatest guitarist ever, was considered so otherworldly he was essentially treated as an exception. (At the same time, Chuck Berry was relegated to a primordial past.) Purple Rain can be understood as an effort to reclaim guitar-oriented rock and roll on behalf of the Black musicians who not only created the genre but took it to its greatest heights. It’s all there in the album’s title: Purple Rain is an homage to Hendrix’s signature song “Purple Haze”, while the word “rain” can also be heard as “reign,” implying a period of rule. And who better to “reign” in the new age of rock music than royalty, say, a prince.
And how does a Prince rule? Through the persuasive act of excellence. He’s a needy messiah, begging listeners to “Take Me With U” and promising them that “I Would Die 4 U”. It’s a convincing plea, though, because (he knows) his sheer talent and creativity will win everyone over. On the penultimate track, “Baby I’m a Star”, Prince confidently declares, “Before the night is through/ U will see my point of view”; a few lines later, he adds
Hey, take a listen
Tell me do u like what u hear
If it don’t turn u on
Just say the word and I’m gone
But honey I know, ain’t nothing wrong with your ears
It’s earned confidence coming from a man performing at the peak of his artistry, someone who is capable of delivering to the people something new yet exactly what they did not yet know they wanted to hear. “Everybody say nothing comes 2 easy”, Prince sings, “But when u got it baby, nothing come 2 hard.” Prince definitely had “it.” As Kurt Loder wrote at the conclusion of his review of Purple Rain in Rolling Stone, “Like Jimi and Sly [Stone of Sly and the Family Stone], Prince is an original; but apart from that, he’s like no one else.”
And after Prince wins the people over, transcendence arrives via the title track.
“Purple Rain” originated as a down-tempo Bob Seger-style country song before morphing into rock and roll’s greatest power ballad. The image of purple rain came to Prince as the sight of blood-red rain against a blue sky. The early 1980s was a time of heightened nuclear tension, a theme Prince touched upon earlier in songs like “Ronnie, Talk to Russia” and “1999”. As the world seemed to be careening toward a nuclear holocaust, Prince offered those listening an alternate vision, an escape, and, if it came to it, perhaps even salvation. The song serves as a fulfillment of the album’s promise.
Forty years ago this month, Bruce Springsteen and Prince released the sort of albums we rarely see these days: Major artistic statements aimed at the mass market. Given the diminished state of the recording industry and a highly-fragmented listening audience, we may never see the likes of such albums again. That would be unfortunate, because it is a uniquely exhilarating experience listening to ambitious music that neither narrows its appeal to the highbrow nor panders to the crowd but that sets out to communicate something profound, sublime, and moving to as many people as possible.
Signals and Noise
Democracy Watch
“I don't care about you. I just want your vote.”—Don Trump, speaking to a crowd in Las Vegas in 100 degree heat, after telling them he didn’t want any of them to succumb to the temperatures and die on him.
John Ganz writes about Trump’s mob-like world view and how that appeals to voters.
Timothy Snyder considers how Trump would replace the rule of law with modern revenge culture in his article “The Shamans and the Chieftan”.
Don Trump: Felon
Greg Sargent of The New Republic offers an important distinction between the legal cases that have been brought against Trump and those Trump promises to bring against his opponents: “Whereas Trump is being prosecuted on the basis of evidence that law enforcement gathered before asking grand juries to indict him, he is expressly declaring that he will prosecute President Biden and Democrats solely because this is what he endured, meaning explicitly that evidence will not be the initiating impulse.” I would just note that Trump’s assertions are in line with the delusional MAGA belief that liberalism is inherently criminal and must be responded to in kind.
The legal system that Don Trump claims is rigged against him found the Democratic president’s son guilty of felony gun charges. Hunter Biden is the first child of a sitting president to be convicted of a crime. President Biden said he would neither pardon his son nor commute his sentence.
2024 Election
Is Don Trump OK? I don’t think Don Trump’s OK.
In case you’re curious, Philip Bump of the Washington Post digs into the science of shark attacks and shocks from electric boats. MORE: “Let’s Talk About Trump’s Gibberish” by Tom Nichols of The Atlantic
CNN has the lowdown on Trump’s weird, gripe-filled meeting with Republican members of Congress, during which he called Milwaukee (the site of the 2024 GOP convention) a “horrible” city, suggested he could have had a “great romance” in another life, told attendees to “follow their hearts” on abortion, and complained about Taylor Swift’s apparent support for Joe Biden.
Megan Messerly of Politico notes that while Trump urged Republican members of Congress to talk more about abortion, he avoided the subject during his speech to the Southern Baptist Convention, only mentioning instead the need to protect “innocent life.”
And it looks like Trump and Mitch McConnell have kissed and made up, a development that led Jonathan Last of The Bulwark to write an article titled “Mitch McConnell Is Trump’s Gimp. Again.”
David Graham of The Atlantic explains how Trump’s disparagement of Milwaukee is consistent with past comments bashing American cities.
REPORTER: Trump is coming here — for the first time — since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol… Have you spoken with him about not doing anything like that again and committing to respecting the peaceful transfer of power?
HOUSE SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Of course, he respects that, and we all do.
By Walter Shapiro for Roll Call: “Ten Rules for Understanding the 2024 Election” (Really useful for keeping things in perspective over the next few months.)
Eli Stokols and Jonathan Lemire of Politco round-up Biden’s trip to France to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day. During the trip, Biden visited the Aisne-Marne cemetery, which Trump chose not to visit because he did not want to get his hair wet in the rain, telling his then-chief of staff John Kelly, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
Mike Memoli of NBC News looks at Biden’s surprising strength with older voters. Noah Bressner of Axios also examines the development.
An intriguing result from last Tuesday’s elections: Republican Michael Rulli won a special election in Ohio to fill a vacant seat in the House of Representatives, but only won by 10 points in a district Trump carried in 2020 by 30 points and that his Republican predecessor regularly won by 30 points. The rural, rust belt district runs from Youngstown to Marietta along the Ohio River in southeastern Ohio. Special elections aren’t reliable predictors of general election results, but it is striking to see such a significant drop in support for a Republican candidate in a solidly Republican district.
Minnesota Republican candidate for Senate Royce White posted a map of Minneapolis on social media purporting to show the locations of crime throughout the city that was actually a map of the city’s public water fountains.
Trump endorsed Republican Maryland senate candidate Larry Hogan. Hogan did not reciprocate.
Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post reports on Republican plans to once again cut corporate taxes if they regain power in the 2024 election. Sam Sutton of Politico profiles the Wall Street billionaires who have learned how to stop worrying about democracy and gotten behind Trump.
Don Trump floated the idea of replacing the income tax with tariffs, which would effectively result in a massive tax increase on low- and middle-income Americans.
Megan Messerly of Politico looks at how Trump has morphed into an anti-vaxxer and what that might mean in a second Trump term.
The Supreme Court
In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Court preserved access to the abortion medication mifepristone. The Court ruled the doctors who brought the case lacked standing to sue.
The conservative members of the Supreme Court struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks that convert semi-automatic rifles into weapons that fire at virtually the same rate as machine guns. A bump stock was used during the deadliest mass shooting in American history at a concert in Las Vegas. The federal government has banned machine guns. The opinion, written by Clarence Thomas, was a highly technical ruling that considered whether a federal agency could regulate such a device. Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent called out the conservative justices’ supposed adherence to textualism.
In the context of a discussion about political polarization in the United States that was recorded by a liberal documentary filmmaker and released to Rolling Stone, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito stated it was difficult to live “peacefully” with those who do not share his ideological views due to “fundamental” differences that “can’t be compromised,” agreeing with the filmmaker that the United States needed to return to “a place of godliness” and that the only way the political conflict would be resolved was for one side or the other to win. Alito made the comments during an annual dinner hosted by a conservative judicial group that promises those who join access to Supreme Court justices. The filmmaker posed as a concerned conservative when asking Alito the questions. Importantly, however, Chief Justice John Roberts was asked a similar line of questions at the event yet maintained his impartiality when answering.
The Senate Judiciary Committee uncovered three more trips Justice Clarence Thomas took on Harlan Crow’s dime.
Congress
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have introduced legislation that would impose the same $50 gift rule on Supreme Court justices that members of Congress must abide by.
Republican Florida Rep. Greg Steube wants to rename the United States’ coastal waters the “Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States.” Are they trying to troll the guy?
State and Local Government
Vittoria Elliott writes in Wired about Victor Miller, who is running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, on a unique platform: He plans on turning decision-making powers over to an AI chatbot he created, claiming it makes better decisions and has a better understanding of the law than anyone else does.
Republican Pennsylvania state legislator Stephanie Borowicz argued that a bill that would provide free menstrual products to students would lead to communism.
The Culture Wars
The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and a force in conservative politics, voted to oppose in vitro fertilization.
Crime
The violent crime rate in the United States continues to plummet, with violent crime down 15.2% from a year ago. The murder rate fell by a whopping 26.4%.
Media
Paul Farhi of The Atlantic reports traffic to conservative websites has plummeted, most likely the result of social media companies no longer pushing politically-themed posts on their platforms.
A federal judge has ordered conspiracy theorist and Infowars owner Alex Jones to liquidate his personal assets to pay the $1.5 billion he owes the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting.
The Economy
Rogé Karma of The Atlantic writes about the booming American economy.
Zachary Carter argues in Salon American voters aren’t really angry over the state of the economy or inflation, but rather the cost of housing. MORE: “Americans are Mad About All the Wrong Costs” by Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic.
The Environment
NOAA reports carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere faster than ever, accelerating on a steep rise to levels never seen before in human history.
Government Administration
Chris Bing and Joel Schectman of Reuters report the Pentagon ran a covert anti-vax campaign designed to discredit China’s COVID-19 vaccine. The campaign, which was initiated under Trump and ended by the Biden administration, was initiated as payback for China’s efforts to blame the pandemic on the United States.
International News
An Israeli operation in Nuseirat, Gaza, rescued four hostages but decimated numerous residential blocks and resulted in the deaths of over 200 Gazans, including dozens of children.
Centrist Benny Gantz has quit Benjamin Netanyahu’s three-man war cabinet over the Israeli prime minister’s handling of the war in Gaza. The move does not imperil Netanyahu’s hold on power, but does make him more reliant on right-wing elements in his coalition.
Far-right parties made significant gains in European Union parliamentary elections, but centrist parties will still hold on to the majority. The far-right doubled the vote of President Emmanuel Macron’s party in France, however, prompting Macron to call a snap parliamentary election that will occur shortly before the Paris Olympics this summer.
A new round of western sanctions have rattled Russian markets.