Born in the U.S.A.

Twelve tracks of under five minutes, and the subtractive test finds most of them carrying an office. The title track must open: its riff and verses are the record’s whole argument. My Hometown must close, the one quiet song, where the argument is spoken plainly. Downbound Train, I’m on Fire and Glory Days are each required: a man losing job, girl and house in order; desire as illness; the past as the only wealth left. Bobby Jean and No Surrender carry the friendship. Working on the Highway and Darlington County, two jaunty songs ending in a chain gang and a handcuffed friend, partly repeat each other, and Cover Me and I’m Goin’ Down restate the bright mode without turning it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in the America of the early 1980s the promise of birth, work and home survives as a slogan after its content has been withdrawn, and the men left holding it can only shout it. The title track discloses it through form: a veteran back from the war, with “a brother at Khe Sanh”, no job and no brother, his loss set as a roared chorus that a listener can hear as pride. That it was heard as pride, by a president’s campaign among others in 1984, proves the disclosure: a hearer who takes only the chorus repeats the condition the verses describe. My Hometown names the economy plainly. Outside four songs the record gives mood more than meaning.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The record rises often, and mostly in one register, the lift of the stadium. The title track is its height: Max Weinberg’s snare struck like artillery, Roy Bittan’s synthesiser riff repeated until it becomes a siren, the voice at the limit of its range, held through a long drummed coda that does not resolve. Dancing in the Dark rises by restlessness, a man sick of himself sung to a dance beat. Bobby Jean swells into Clarence Clemons’s long solo. I’m on Fire reaches a hushed height by the opposite means, and My Hometown a quiet one. Cover Me, Darlington County, Working on the Highway and I’m Goin’ Down stay at the level of good bar-band energy, and much of the height is the same height.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Myth is built, and the sequence carries it. My Hometown builds the generations: a father sets his son at the wheel to show him the town, and at the end the son, now a father, is about to do the same as the town dies; the inheritance is ruin. The title track builds a birthright inverted: the phrase of national belonging becomes a curse sung by the disinherited son, his “dead man’s town” a land of the dead. Between them the record descends from Khe Sanh to the hometown. Around these, archetypes are evoked: the chain gang, the downward train, the companion who leaves. Much of it is rock’s own mythology of cars, towns and escape, used rather than remade.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the rock and roll, soul and Spector-scaled anthems of his own earlier records, and the bleak folk of Nebraska two years before. The turn is real. Songs from the same writing as Nebraska, about ruin, were recast as bright, drum-driven band records with synthesiser hooks, and he took up the production idiom of the year, gated drums and keyboard riffs, for the first time. The credit goes to the method of the title track, a protest song built as a stadium anthem with no ironic marker to warn the listener, and to the plain, almost spoken close. What holds the figure: the turn ran toward the mainstream sound of the moment and a larger audience, and risked an artist’s seriousness more than his standing.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The form is the gap between sound and matter: songs of unemployment, prison, divorce and a dying town set to bright, driving arrangements, so that the listener is made to cheer what the words mourn. Played as on Nebraska, these songs would know their despair; played as here, they know also how a society sings over its losses, and the title track’s misreading is what the form was built to risk. The sequence is counted here, once: side one from the veteran’s roar to the whisper of I’m on Fire, side two from a vow of friendship to the closing town, the record ending in quiet after eleven loud songs. In Cover Me and I’m Goin’ Down the brightness is lightness, not method.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Forty-two years supply the evidence, and it is real. The title track has kept yielding: the argument over what it means, protest or anthem, has run since 1984 through the press, the campaigns of several parties and later criticism, and the song itself keeps the question open. Downbound Train and My Hometown deepen with the history of deindustrialisation they record. Glory Days, heard young as a joke, is heard later as a song about the bar stool that waits for everyone, and Bobby Jean has gained a second life as a farewell within the band. Formally the yield is smaller: arrangements built for immediate effect give their content on first hearing, and Cover Me, I’m Goin’ Down and Darlington County are exhausted early.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is the rock album of the 1980s and the American song of work and place. The force lies in what the record proved: that a song about economic ruin and the aftermath of Vietnam could be the largest pop record in America, and that a protest song built as an anthem could stand as the case of the misread protest anthem in political music. Its musical idiom, the E Street sound with the gated drums and synthesisers of 1984, belonged to its year. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it set the model for the heartland rock of its decade; The Killers on Sam’s Town (2006) and The War on Drugs, in their synthesiser-lit road songs of the 2010s, built on its sound and subject; and the title song’s use in campaigns has continued to the present.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-two years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording has been in print since release and is heard as an album. Presence is of the widest kind: seven of the twelve tracks were released as singles in the United States and all seven reached the top ten of the Billboard chart; the title track, Dancing in the Dark, Glory Days and I’m on Fire have never left broadcast, the stadium or common use; and the title phrase is part of the language of American politics. Charged: the fabric is fixed to 1984 more than his other records, in the gated snare, the synthesiser tones and Dancing in the Dark’s drum machine, and the presence is of songs more than of the record played whole.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and in places load-bearing. The title track is the best-made thing on the record: snare and riff placed so that the song arrives as a single blow, and the coda left to run. I’m on Fire is exact in the opposite way: a ticking rhythm, a low synthesiser, a held organ and a voice close to the microphone. Bobby Jean’s arrangement builds with judgment to its saxophone. The songwriting is compact: Glory Days tells three lives in three verses, and Downbound Train drops a whole life in eight lines. The faults lie in a share: the production compresses the band into one bright surface, Dancing in the Dark’s arrangement is generic for its year, and two songs are competent rather than commanded.

Score: 8.1 / 10

One law governs the record: men to whom something was promised, work, a town, a woman, a country, find it withdrawn and answer with a voice that will not lie down, in anger, joke, vow or lament. The two most distant elements obey it: the title track’s roar and I’m on Fire’s whisper, the one a public loss and the other a private hunger with nowhere to go. Glory Days is the law as comedy, Downbound Train as tragedy, My Hometown as elegy, No Surrender as defiance. Darlington County hides its law until its last verse and then keeps it. The palette is largely one band sound, and the law loosens where the record turns to pure good time, in Cover Me’s generic fear and I’m Goin’ Down’s bar-band complaint.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Labour is held fully: the road gang, the lost job and the carwash of Downbound Train, the closing mill. The state and history are present in Vietnam and the veterans’ hospital of the title track, and in the racial violence of 1965 and the economy of My Hometown. The family is held in its father and son and in the failed marriages of Downbound Train and Glory Days; friendship in Bobby Jean and No Surrender; desire in I’m on Fire and Dancing in the Dark. One condition joins them: work is the hinge on which family, town and country turn. What holds the figure: most orders arrive song by song, and the sacred and the natural order are hardly present.

Score: 7.7 / 10