June 4, 1984: The song “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen is a powerful anthem that reflects on the experiences of American veterans returning from the Vietnam War. It depicts the struggles and disillusionment faced by these veterans as they grapple with the harsh reality of post-war life. The song carries a deeper message of social and political critique, shedding light on the hardships faced by working-class Americans.

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Songfacts.com: Born In The U.S.A. by Bruce Springsteen

Often misinterpreted as a full-throated patriotic anthem, “Born In The U.S.A.” is about the problems Vietnam veterans faced when they returned to America. While veterans of other wars received heroes’ welcomes, those who fought in Vietnam were mostly ignored when they returned to their homeland, and many suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments.
This song was inspired by a chance encounter with Ron Kovic, who was confined to a wheelchair after being shot while fighting in the Vietnam War. Kovic, who enlisted to fight in the war, later protested against it, becoming a leader in the anti-war movement. In 1976 he published a book called Born On The Fourth Of July that told his story. In 1989 it was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise as Kovic.

Springsteen picked up a copy of the book in 1980 when he was on a cross-country road trip with a buddy. They were outside of Phoenix and Bruce found it at a drugstore.

About two weeks later, Springsteen was in Los Angeles staying at the Sunset Marquis hotel, where remarkably, Kovacs was also staying. They met in the pool area and had a long conversation, with Kovacs inviting Springsteen to join him on a visit to the veterans center in nearby Venice. Bruce accepted the invitation and found the visit quite enlightening.

“I’m usually pretty easy with people, but once we were at the center, I didn’t know how to respond to what I was seeing,” he said during his Springsteen On Broadway residency. “Talking about my own life to these guys seemed frivolous. There was homelessness and drug problems and post-traumatic stress – guys my age dealing with life-changing physical injuries.”

Springsteen used their stories as the basis for the song. “The verses are just an accounting of events,” he said. “The chorus is a declaration of your birthplace, and the right to all the pride and confusion and shame and grace that comes with it.”
Springsteen started writing the song in 1981 with the title “Vietnam.” He changed the title and the chorus when the director Paul Schrader sent him a script for a movie he was working on called Born In The U.S.A., about a rock band struggling with life and religion. Schrader was hoping Springsteen would appear in the movie.

Bruce didn’t participate in the film, but he lifted the title for the song, which became “Born In The U.S.A.” It went through lots of iterations before it was released as the title track to Springsteen’s seventh album in 1984.

Unfortunately for Schrader, when he was finally ready to make the movie in 1985, the title “Born In The U.S.A.” was too associated with the song. Springsteen made it right by providing the song “Light Of Day,” which became the new title for Schrader’s movie and the feature song in the film. The movie Light Of Day was released in 1987 with Joan Jett and Michael J. Fox in the lead roles. The song, as performed by Jett and credited to “The Barbusters” – the name of her group in the movie – was released as a single and charted at #33.
The chorus comes off as a pure expression of American pride, but the verses cast a shameful eye on how America treated its Vietnam veterans. Springsteen addressed this dichotomy when we spoke with Barack Obama on the podcast Renegades. “It’s a complex picture of the country,” he said. “Our protagonist is someone who has been betrayed by his nation and yet still feels deeply connected to the country that he grew up in.”

“Its imagery was so fundamentally American, but it did demand of you to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at one time,” he added. “You can both be very critical of your nation and very prideful of your nation simultaneously.”
Springsteen worked up the demo of this song in 1982 at his home studio in a batch of songs that became his Nebraska album. Released later in 1982, Nebraska ended up being just those spare demos without his E Street Band. Bruce went in the opposite direction for the Born In The U.S.A. album, using the band to create a big sound with lots of textures. The result was a classic rock and roll album with seven Top 10 singles. In order:

“Dancing In The Dark” – #2
“Cover Me” – #7
“Born In The U.S.A.” – #9
“I’m On Fire” – #6
“Glory Days” – #5
“I’m Goin’ Down” – #9
“My Hometown” – #6

These songs kept Springsteen on the charts for about a year and a half, from the summer of 1984 to early 1986. He dialed it back on his next album, Tunnel Of Love (1987), which is a lot more mellow and is mostly a Springsteen solo effort.

This song got famously political when President Ronald Reagan evoked it while campaigning for re-election in New Jersey in 1984. Reagan said in his speech: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs 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.”

Springsteen talked about this in a 2005 interview with National Public Radio. Said Bruce: “This was when the Republicans first mastered the art of co-opting anything and everything that seemed fundamentally American, and if you were on the other side, you were somehow unpatriotic. I make American music, and I write about the place I live and who I am in my lifetime. Those are the things I’m going to struggle for and fight for.”

Speaking of how the song was misinterpreted, he added: “In my songs, the spiritual part, the hope part is in the choruses. The blues, and your daily realities are in the details of the verses. The spiritual comes out in the choruses, which I got from gospel music and the church.”
Chrysler offered Springsteen $12 million to star in an ad campaign featuring “Born In The U.S.A.” He turned them down, so they used “The Pride Is Back” by Kenny Rogers instead. Springsteen has never let his music be used to sell products, although he did appear in a Jeep commercial in 2021. Jeep is a division of Chrysler.
This song inspired the famous Annie Leibowitz photo of Springsteen’s butt against the backdrop of an American flag. Bruce had to be convinced to use it as the album’s cover. Some people thought it depicted Springsteen urinating on the flag.

Looking back on the cover in a 1996 interview with NME, Springsteen said: “I was probably working out my own insecurities, y’know? That particular image is probably the only time I look back over pictures of the band and it feels like a caricature to me.”
The drum solo towards the end of the song was completely improvised. Drummer Max Weinberg said that the band was recording in an oval-shaped studio, with the musicians separated into different parts. Springsteen, at the front, suddenly turned towards Weinberg (at the back) after singing and waved his hands in the air frantically to signal drumming. Weinberg then nailed it.
Springsteen included “Born In The U.S.A.” on his solo acoustic tour in 1995. This was a surprising rendition of the song, making it much more somber but congruent with the message. Springsteen realized this arrangement was quite powerful and really drove home the meaning, so he did it the same way when he toured in 1999 after reuniting the E Street Band.
The video was directed by John Sayles, who wrote the screenplay for the 1978 movie Piranha and later directed the films Lone Star, Honeydripper and Eight Men Out . Most of the video is footage of Springsteen performing the song in concert – he wore the same outfit for a few consecutive shows so Sayles could get the shots (Springsteen didn’t want to lip-synch). Other footage came from a Vietnamese neighborhood in Los Angeles and Springsteen’s old stomping ground, Asbury Park, New Jersey. The video stuck to the true meaning of the song, with shots of factory workers, regular folks walking the streets, soldiers training for combat, and a line of guys waiting for payday loans.

Sayles said in the book I Want My MTV: “It was right around the time that Ronald Reagan had co-opted ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ and Reagan, his policies were everything that the song was complaining about. I think some of the energy of the performance came from Bruce deciding, ‘I’m going to claim this song back from Reagan.'”
Springsteen has often reflected on the Vietnam War in his work. He didn’t serve because he dodged the draft, pretending to be a misfit high on LSD. He has expressed guilt, knowing someone else went in his place, and may not have returned.

When Springsteen performed a spare, acoustic version of the song during his Springsteen On Broadway run from 2017-2018, he would introduce it with a story about Walter Cichon (pronounced sha-shone), leader of a New Jersey rock band called the Motifs, who seemed destined for stardom. Cichon got drafted and in 1968 went missing in action (Springsteen’s 2014 song “The Wall” is about Cichon). Bruce got drafted the next year. “It was 1969 and thousands and thousands of young men to come would be called, simply sacrificed just to save face for the powers that be, who by then already knew it was a lost cause,” he said. “I do sometimes wonder who went in my place, because somebody did.”

With this backdrop, “Born In The U.S.A.” tells the tragic story not just of soldiers who were neglected when they returned to Vietnam, but also to those who never made it home.
Springsteen allowed the notorious rap group The 2 Live Crew to sample this for their song “Banned In The U.S.A.” in 1990 after the group was arrested for performing songs with obscene lyrics. Bruce felt they had a constitutional right to say whatever they wanted in their songs.
In 1988, four years after this song was released, Sony bought Springsteen’s label, Columbia Records, meaning “Born In The U.S.A.” is now owned by a Japanese company.
Born In The U.S.A. was the first CD manufactured in the United States for commercial release. It was pressed when CBS Records (parent of Columbia) opened its CD manufacturing plant in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1984. Discs previously had been imported from Japan.
When the album took off, it was Springsteen’s second go-around with staggering fame. His 1975 album Born To Run immensely popular and got him on the covers of Time and Newsweek – in the same week! Springsteen handles it better than most (no drugs) but still needed some time to retreat. After touring for the Tunnel Of Love album, he broke up the E Street Band in 1989. In 1992 he released two albums on the same day – Human Touch and Lucky Town – that didn’t sell nearly as well as he expected. For the first time since the early ’70s, Bruce had to seek out publicity. He started doing a lot more interviews and began performing on TV shows for the first time. In 1999 he reunited the E Street Band and got back to his happy place: on tour with his favorite musicians.
The children’s TV show Sesame Street reworked this as “Barn In The U.S.A.,” credited to Bruce Stringbean and the S. Street Band. >>
Springsteen’s fist-pumping recitations of this lament for the plight of the Vietnam War veterans during his 1984-85 Born In The USA tour contributed to its misreading as a patriotic song by some listeners with a political agenda. Critic Greil Marcus wrote: “Clearly the key to the enormous explosion of Bruce’s popularity is the misunderstanding… He is a tribute to the fact that people hear what they want to hear.”
This was not the first hit song to tell a story about a Vietnam veteran’s return to America. In 1982, The Charlie Daniels Band took “Still in Saigon” to #22 in America. That song was written by Dan Daley, who felt that only two artists were right for it. “Since it was such a political song, the strategy was there were only two artists that it would make sense to give it to,” Daley told Songfacts. “One was Bruce Springsteen and the other was Charlie Daniels. Because both had made public statements in support of Vietnam veterans.”
Richard “Cheech” Marin parodied this in the song “Born In East L.A.,” which came from his 1987 movie of the same name. Sample lyrics:

Next thing I know, I’m in a foreign land
People talkin’ so fast, I couldn’t understand
Springsteen doesn’t often license this song for movies or TV, but it does show up in a 1986 episode of ALF and a 2021 episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (“The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain”). It also appears in the movies Mask (1985) and Skins (2002).
The opening line, “Born down in a dead man’s town,” is quoted in Stephen King’s It (1986) to introduce “Part 1: The Shadow Before,” which tells us all about the cursed town of Derry, Maine, and the children who came together to fight an evil clown.
Jennifer Lopez incorporated a bit of this song into her set when she performed at halftime of the 2020 Super Bowl. Lopez honored both her homeland and her heritage by donning a feathered cape with the Puerto Rican flag on one side and the American flag on the other. When she revealed the Puerto Rican side, her daughter Emme sang the chorus of “Born In The U.S.A.” Lopez was born in New York City.

Springsteen left the song out of his set when he played the Super Bowl halftime show in 2009.