Author Steven Hyden on his new Bruce Springsteen book and being a "Boss Nerd" even when it wasn't cool

In his new book There Was Nothing You Could Do: “Born In The USA” And The End Of The Heartland, Steven Hyden writes about Bruce Springsteen’s monumental 1984 record as a watershed moment—for American culture, for Springsteen, and for the author himself. Hyden, a cultural critic (and a former A.V. Club staff member), mixes memoir, sociological observation, and good old-fashioned journalism to explore how this blockbuster album defined a decade and created—and in some ways ended—the Bruce Springsteen persona. Hyden spoke to The A.V. Club about these subjects, as well as “the long hangover” that the record left behind.

The A.V. Club: How did you become a “Boss Nerd,” as you call yourself in the book?

Steven Hyden: Born In The USA is definitely among the first albums I was aware of as a kid. I’ve been aware of Bruce Springsteen for most of my life, since I was six years old. I’m 46 now. Obviously when I was six I wasn’t reading about Bruce Springsteen, and I didn’t really know about any of his other records. That happened when I was a teenager. One of the things that attracted me to this subject matter is that Bruce has been a presence in my life for as long as I’ve been alive, pretty much. It was something that was really interesting to me, and I felt like I could write a book about this.

AVC: So why this album?

SH: I should say that it’s not my favorite Bruce Springsteen album. My favorite is probably Darkness On The Edge Of Town, which is a popular choice among Springsteen fans. But Born In The USA to me is the most interesting album to write about. In my view, Born In The USA is the pivotal record in Bruce Springsteen’s career. If you look at the albums that precede it, they really feel like they’re building up to a moment like Bruce had in the mid-’80s, where he became this phenomenon. He had been gradually moving toward that, certainly since Born To Run. And in the decade that preceded Born In The USA, you saw this advancement and retreat, essentially, with Bruce. There’s something in him that wants to achieve that Elvis-level type of stardom, but there’s also a part of him that’s uncomfortable with it. And that level of discomfort really comes into play with the career that he has after Born In The USA. Which I think in many respects you can look at as a reaction to the success of that record. Certainly in the late ’80s and ’90s, it feels like a lot of what Bruce did was reacting to how that album turned him into an icon and in a way into a caricature.

AVC: You’re referring to Tunnel Of Love?

SH: Yeah, Tunnel Of Love through The Ghost Of Tom Joad, which is in many ways the anti-Born In The USA. It is as specific as Born In The USA is broad, it’s as inaccessible as Born In The USA is accessible. It’s as quiet and muted as Born In The USA is loud and bombastic. Then you see him moving into the 21st century, reuniting with the E Street Band, in a way trying to return to that status of Born In The USA, and living up to that national monument-type status that that record gave him. A big theme in the book is not just about Bruce Springsteen but also about how rock music has changed in the last 40 years, and how America has changed in the last 40 years. This just seemed like a good vehicle for talking about that.

AVC: Part of your book is about the idea of a monoculture, and how prevalent it was then as opposed to now. You write, “A meeting place in the middle doesn’t seem like a dream that people want anymore.” I think you’re referring to politics there, but does that also apply to that monoculture idea? Do we even want one anymore?

SH: I try to not use the term “monoculture” because it gets tricky when you talk about these things. It’s very easy to be reductive. Certainly not everyone loved Born In The USA and Bruce Springsteen in the mid-’80s. But there’s something specific in that moment—Bruce Springsteen was able to communicate something to people that could be read as progressive or conservative, depending on what your point of view was. He was kind of a Rorschach test for people. On one hand, you look at his lyrics, you look at the subjects that he was drawn to, there is a clear, populist, progressive bent. And certainly now, in the last 20 years, he’s been much more vocal about endorsing political candidates and being involved in activism. So there’s really no doubt about that.

But there was also an element to Springsteen in the mid-’80s, where he was this macho, muscular, good-looking, all-American guy, who a lot of writers contrasted with people like Michael Jackson, and Prince, who were not this sort of traditionally masculine American type archetype in the same way that Bruce Springsteen was. And there’s an undeniable sort of conservative appeal to that, that was something that I think also drew people in. And that sort of duality that he had at that time feels like something that would be hard to do today, even when you have an artist, like Taylor Swift, for instance, who is obviously the biggest star in the world. Her Eras tour is hugely successful. But even Taylor Swift has an element of people on the right reacting negatively to her. With Bruce and Born In The USA, he was able to write about political topics, but he was also above politics at the same time. And I just thought that that was an interesting thing to contemplate about that time and to talk about how that broke down over the decades.

AVC: Speaking of the decades, you point out a lot of ways in which the album sounds very much of its time, but at the same time, it still sounds really vital. What do you think accounts for that timelessness? What makes it sound so vital now?

SH: What’s interesting about Born In The USA is that when it was 10 years old, in 1994, a lot of people felt like it sounded dated, that it sounded very ’80s. And that was related to how music had changed so drastically by ’94. It was the alternative, grunge era, it was gangsta rap. It was a much more aggressive time. That era of synthesizers and drum machines, that whole thing was really out of vogue in the mid-’90s. But when the album turned 20, in the mid-aughts, it had shifted again, where now Born In The USA started to become a reference point for a lot of up-and-coming bands. The Killers, Arcade Fire, the War On Drugs—they’re a little bit later, but they’re another example of that.

The album didn’t change, obviously, but the way it was perceived changed, and it had to do with what the current generation was drawing from. In the 21st century, the ’80s became a much more acceptable era to draw from for contemporary artists. Not just acceptable, but it became the preferable era. The other thing about Born In The USA is that it’s one of those records that signifies bigness to young rock bands. The Killers, for instance, when they made Sam’s Town, they referenced Born In The USA, because of how the album sounds but also because it represents an era of rock music when a rock artist had a monumental impact on the culture.

AVC: In the book, you reference the 1994 Backstreets article that’s a defense of the album. The need for such an article now is pretty unthinkable.

SH: Right. Exactly. And that’s a little bit different, because [Backstreets] is a fanzine directed at the hardcore fanbase. The reaction from those fans for Born In The USA is a little bit different. It’s more coming from a place of, this is the record that got people into the tent. He was already playing arenas before Born In The USA, but now he’s playing stadiums. And now it’s harder to get tickets. It’s harder to hear the quieter songs because you have all these new people coming in and they’re acting rowdy; they don’t care as much as the hardcore people. It’s really the record that if you were a hardcore fan, it felt like it may be less than the fan experience. And that’s a tale as old as time for artists like that. There’s many examples of an artist who’s been around for a while, and then they get more popular and the people that were there at the beginning don’t like that. It just happened with Bruce on a much larger scale than it does for a lot of artists.

AVC: I’m around your age, so much of the book rang true to my experience with the album. I was also a teenager in the ’90s, and I was definitely made fun of for being a Springsteen fan, especially because he had just done “Streets Of Philadelphia,” and my friends were tired of it. I had a hard time defending it.

SH: I remember when he did that MTV special, for Lucky Town and Human Touch. And I was sitting with some friends watching MTV, and that commercial came on, and my friends were just all making fun of Bruce Springsteen. And I didn’t say a word, and I felt guilty about that. He was already my guy. But I didn’t say anything because I was like 14. I wanted to fit in with people. But yeah, Bruce was somebody that if you were teenager, it wasn’t somebody who bragged about listening to. Which is interesting, because Tom Petty and Neil Young had a renaissance in the ’90s. They had credibility among musicians, but Bruce didn’t. It’s funny, Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam loves Bruce Springsteen, but he wasn’t talking about that in the ’90s. Neil Young was his guy. It really wasn’t until the mid-aughts where that turned, where you had, again, the Killers, Arcade Fire, the Hold Steady, the National, Against Me!. That was one of my favorite things to write about, Bruce in the ’90s, because it is a fascinating period. And he did put out some great music in that time, but it really was like a wilderness period. It was like the long tail of Born In The USA. There was a long hangover with that record.

AVC: You write about that one model of synthesizer that everyone in the ’80s used, the Yamaha CS-80, and how he used it as “scene-setting dry ice smoke,” which is different from other artists. Do you think part of the reason that the record stayed relatively timeless is that he was using these now-dated things in interesting ways?

SH: The synthesizer was the thing that tied it to the ’80s for the longest time, so it didn’t make it timeless. It actually made it sound like a record that came out in 1984. But subsequent generations have revisited that time and they really rescued it from it just being like a mid-’80s thing. It’s something that feels as much of a touchstone of rock music as like the way Bob Dylan used the organ on his records in the ’60s. You know, when you hear that organ sound that comes from Dylan’s mid-’60s records, you hear that in Americana records all the time. So many bands have used it that way after him. And the way Springsteen used synthesizers was a way to create atmosphere on the record, that musical dry ice type effect.

For certain kinds of rock bands that have a Heartland rock focus and are really striving to write these arena-ready anthems, that goes back to Born In The USA. That was the defining record that did that. And then there were other records of that time, too, that really built on that, which I write about in the book. My favorite section of the book, personally, is probably the Heartland rock section. Sometimes you write a book just so you can write like one chapter. And that’s not the only thing I wanted to write about in the book, but that was a lot of fun to do because I just think that’s a fascinating thing. I could go deep on Heartland rock. I could write a whole book on just that, you know, but it was fun putting that in the book.

AVC: I was thinking about hearing the album as a kid, and I associate it so strongly with images. Like in “Downbound Train,” that whole middle section of running through the woods to the house, that was almost scary. I’m wondering if you had a similar experience.

SH: Yeah, totally. I mean, Bruce Springsteen’s strength as a lyricist is how cinematic [the lyrics] are. He tells a story, and it puts images in your mind. It feels like a movie. I was trying to get that across when I was writing about Springsteen in relation to [writer/director] Paul Schrader, because I feel like those two had a parallel theme going on in the late ’70s and early ’80s in terms of what they were drawn to and what they were writing about. This record came from a screenplay that Paul Schrader wrote called Born In The USA, that’s how he got the title. So I think that the cinematic aspect of Bruce’s writing is definitely a big factor on this record.

Another thing with the images of this record is the relation of the songs to music videos. I think it is an important part of how this record is perceived. I think it’s really fascinating how you don’t really see this again, in Bruce Springsteen music videos, like the videos for “I’m On Fire” and “Glory Days,” where he’s acting in those videos. And he’s playing what I call the Bruce Springsteen character—in “I’m On Fire” he plays an auto mechanic, and in “Glory Days,” he’s a crane operator, but then he’s also playing in a bar band that happens to look like the E Street Band. And it’s not clear if he’s being himself, or if he’s the guy who operates the crane in the video. He also pretends to be a baseball pitcher. Those videos played a big role in shaping this idea of Springsteen as a regular guy, or as a person who’s presenting himself as a regular guy. And that’s been something that I think has haunted him ever since.

There’s always been this tension of him being obviously a multimillionaire rock star who writes about average people. And for people who don’t like Bruce Springsteen, the easiest and laziest criticism to make is that he’s a hypocrite, because he’s not actually the people that he writes about, which is like criticizing De Niro for not being Jake LaMotta or Travis Bickle. He is the Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro of his work. He is the writer, he’s the director, and he’s the performer. And he’s bringing these characters to life. With Springsteen, there’s always that disconnect that goes on, which I think is really fascinating. And it’s affected how he’s been perceived, ever since. I think he benefits from that, in a lot of ways, because people hold him in a certain kind of reverence. But then it also creates situations where there’s backlash against him, like the ticket controversy on this latest tour being the biggest example of that. If that were the Rolling Stones, it wouldn’t have been as big of a deal, I don’t think, but people look at Bruce Springsteen as being different.

AVC: Can you talk about that controversy, and Bruce’s response?

SH: [Many people thought] he shouldn’t charge a lot of money for tickets. You saw these stories, which I thought were pretty cheap shots, but they’re like, the characters in Bruce Springsteen songs couldn’t afford to go to his shows. Well, okay. [But] he’s a hugely successful star. I mean, the reason why they cost a lot of money is because there’s a high demand for it. If he charged 50 bucks, scalpers would charge $2,000. His logic, I think, was sound. But the way that he is perceived isn’t rooted in logic. That’s where it gets tough for him, I think. I can certainly be accused of psychoanalyzing Bruce Springsteen in this book, but whatever, I’m a music critic and that’s sometimes part of the job. I just wonder if on some level he’s a little exhausted with that.

AVC: What did you think of his last album of originals, Letter To You?

SH: I really love Letter To You. The soul covers record [2022’s Only The Strong Survive], I have zero interest in. I have less than zero interest in that. I feel like that whole thing plays into the corniest aspect of Bruce Springsteen. The people in my life who don’t like Bruce Springsteen, they imagine him as a guy who does soul covers records. That’s the perception that they have of him. Not as this genius songwriter, brilliant lyricist, all-time concert performer, just as this cornball doing old R&B hits. But Letter To You, that’s a really strong record. I generally think he’s been good in the last 20 years. I’m a big fan of Magic, that’s a great record. He’s certainly put out some clunkers, but as long as it’s not a soul covers record, I still have reasonably high expectations that it’s going to be good.