BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
BORN IN THE U.S.A.
1984-COLUMBIA
Produced By BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, JON LANDAU, CHUCK PLOTKIN & STEVE VAN ZANDT
- Born In The U.S.A.
- Cover Me
- Darlington County
- Working On The Highway
- Downbound Train
- I'm On Fire
- No Surrender
- Bobby Jean
- I'm Going Down
- Glory Days
- Dancing In The Dark
- My Hometown
The biggest seling and most successful of Springsteens albums is also my least favorite. Not that it's bad...it's not. Maybe it's because before this album's 15x Platinum, Grammy winning, 7 top ten singles, Courteney Cox and MTV oversaturation of The Boss, being a fan of Bruce was something special...kind of like a really cool secret that no one else knew about. There seem to be 2 views of Bruce. If you were a fan of his first 6 albums, you were a fan for life. If you discovered him on Born In The U.S.A., you just didn't seem to get it.
As much as the album was obviously designed to make Springsteen a huge pop success, the album also contains some brilliant songs. Lyrically, the songs are powerful and visionary in the way only Bruce can do it. And there are hooks everywhere you turn. The synthesizers sounded bad in '84, and they still do. It sounds and feels like a sellout, but it's not.
I still kinda almost wish it wasn't Springsteen who had made it. It is a great album. But I'll still take almost any of his other work over this.
This is album #51 in an ongoing series.