People forget how bad it was. They forget that day after day, week after week, month after month in the 1980s, the same small group of pop stars dominated radio, magazines, and TV. It was the big four: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen. In the 1980s, the decade before the wilds of the internet, you could not escape these Goliaths.
How one of them, Bruce Springsteen, got so huge, and what it means, is the subject of a fascinating new book, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland.
In the book, journalist Steven Hyden recounts the time when a rock singer could become a ubiquitous global force of nature. Hyden valorizes the unifying effect Springsteen had on Americans while wisely warning of the mass mob coercion that can happen when pop stars become gods. In short, he celebrates the time when Springsteen appreciated his entire audience and hadn’t become a more predictable left-wing mouthpiece.
Reading There Was Nothing You Could Do made me grateful for the digital revolution that allows us to have all of music at our fingertips. It also made me proud of the American punk rock ethos of the 1980s, which loudly and bitterly criticized corporations forcing pop stars many of us didn’t like on us. Those of us in college frequenting the “alternative music” clubs like the 9:30 in Washington, D.C., thought Springsteen was awful — bloated, corny, musically bombastic yet simultaneously tame. But as Hyden notes, there was nothing we could do to avoid him and his cheesy Jersey anthems. It was in the air.
As Hyden recalls, Springsteen went from a minor New Jersey bar band leader inspired by rhythm and blues in the 1970s to something beyond superstardom in the 1980s. The supernova was his 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. There is no way to exaggerate how huge “the Boss” became — Hyden calls Springsteen “his own nation-state,” and he’s not far off. He was loved like the Beatles, respected like Bob Dylan, and as culturally important as Elvis.
The height of Springsteen’s fame was also the high summer of the Ronald Reagan years, and here’s where things got interesting. While Springsteen sang about wounded veterans and the struggling working class, his music also sounded propulsive and joyful. His fans included Republicans and frat boys. He posed in his album cover with an American flag. He was famously praised by George F. Will, an episode that drove the punitive Left, Springsteen’s usual audience, crazy.
To his credit, Hyden here throws readers a curve ball. While it’s now well-known that Springsteen is a left-winger, Hyden defends conservatives who loved the Boss in the 1980s as well as the way Springsteen was reluctant to pick political sides at the time. Hyden reproduces an interview in which Springsteen refused to endorse either Reagan or his opponent Walter Mondale. Instead, Springsteen opted for a “human politics” that could appeal to everyone in the country.
As Hyden notes: “In the mid-eighties, a pop star could still position himself ‘above’ politics and exist as a common touchstone that people with opposing ideologies could enjoy. Although Bruce did not bridge the racial divide with the Born in the U.S.A. tour, he did appeal to both liberals and conservatives. Not equally, perhaps, though that’s impossible to quantify. What matters is that Bruce did not make his audience choose a side. His music stood for American concepts that nobody could disagree with at face value: each person has dignity, your bonds to family and community are vital, and our country can and must do better.”
Furthermore, Hyden sounds a warning about modern pop stars like Taylor Swift being forced by woke mobs to renounce certain politicians. While “blaming an artist for a political outcome is a sign of a deeply unserious culture,” it also strikes Hyden “as potentially dangerous.” Hyden sees that “a progression from stadium rock to political fascism is not inconceivable. A pop star of the magnitude of Taylor Swift already wields tremendous power without also adding a political dimension. Her army of Swifties could potentially overwhelm many of the world’s military battalions.”
This is not a good thing, Many of us who were spending nights in the “alternative music” and punk clubs of the 1980s while Springsteen was king of the world (although yes, I did see him live at the time) were drawn to different bands because they offered critical thinking, sarcasm, and independence. We knew political herds were dangerous.
There Was Nothing You Could Do is a very well written, wise, and insightful book. My one criticism is that Hyden misses a major art form that contributed to Springsteen’s humanism: literature. In a New York Times interview, Springsteen once said the following: “I skipped most of college, becoming a road musician, so I didn’t begin reading seriously until 28 or 29. Then it was Flannery O’Connor; James M. Cain; John Cheever; Sherwood Anderson; and Jim Thompson, the great noir writer. These authors contributed greatly to the turn my music took around 1978-82. They brought out a sense of geography and the dark strain in my writing, broadened my horizons about what might be accomplished with a pop song and are still the cornerstone literally for what I try to accomplish today.”
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The Boss was more interested in the human soul than partisan politics. It’s a shame he and too many other entertainers can’t say the same today.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.