Hacker News Reader

Comment by threetonesun | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Springsteen was famous from Born to Run well before Born in the USA. And I don't believe the meaning of the title track was ever misconstrued, it was simply aggressively misused. But our national anthem is also a guy asking if the country will survive, so maybe that's just how we like our patriotic songs.

If anything the lesson here is focus on what you're good at (songwriting), and outsource what you're bad at to people who are as good as you at what you're good at. The E Street Band has been filled with consistently amazing musicians. Springsteen as another Dylan would have never made it big.

View on HN

And Australia had as a credible proposal for its national anthem a bush ballad about a sheep thief that committed suicide when the police caught up with him.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waltzing_Matilda#Official_use.)

Cornell University's fight-song is about failing out of school, or perhaps being expelled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_My_Regards_to_Davy

I like to think that Waltzing Matilda is much more understood than Born In The USA. It’s a bit more in the Aussie culture to run with something like that. The Born In the USA American crowd on the other hand self-identifies is infallible and their homeland is their sacred cow. I’d eat my hat if the majority of people who like that song know more than 4 words from it.

I remember my 9th grade English teacher asking us what the song Born in the USA was about. We responded with mumbly, "rah rah, America, patriotism." This was just before Nevermind came out so we didn't know we were supposed to think everything was dumb. Anyway, she gave us all a copy of the lyrics and then had us listen to the song. We were blown away...and well prepared for Grunge.

> But our national anthem is also a guy asking if the country will survive, so maybe that's just how we like our patriotic songs.

Even the over the top “America the Beautiful” has the line “God mend thy every flaw”. The founders were very focused on the fallibility of those in power.

I was a teen in high school when Born in the USA came out. As I recall, it was described to me as a “Come Back” album from an artist whose previous work had “saved rock and roll”.

IIRC a Rolling Stone reviewer wrote circa 1975: I have seen the future of Rock and Roll; it's Bruce Springsteen.

> it was simply aggressively misused

And it wasn't the only one. I remember a short snippet of Fortunate Son was used to imply it was a patriotic song in a TV ad (Wrangler jeans I think?). The line being "Some folks were made to wave the flag, ooh the red, white, and blue"

The song, released in 1969, is quite clearly a criticism of the US's Vietnam policy. It's not likely to be mistaken for anything else (the way Born in the USA occasionally is), but still was aggressively misused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com