Word: springsteen
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...request and to say, at a hundred checkpoints, "You can't go there." But we, the CDEs, could go almost anywhere. A flash of our red plastic badges with the magic word CONFETTI, and sawhorses magically parted, as if we had backstage and dressing room passes at a Springsteen concert. It was a class society, and we were among the elite. As we strolled through restricted areas, the crowd a few feet away waved their sausage balloons imploringly at us. To indulge them, I engaged in a brief but vigorous Stephen-Colbert-as-Tek-Jansen light-saber duel with...
...unfortunately and inaccurately-named genre—calling New Jersey part of the “heartland” raises both geographic and normative issues—popular in the early to mid-1980s, is usually defined by down-home folks like Springsteen, Tom Petty, and John Cougar Mellencamp: artists who wrote tender blue-collar tales of broken American dreams and perseverance over folksy rock backings, not maudlin anecdotes over bubbling synth lines...
...Springsteen himself is known for covering “This Land” on tour, prefacing his performances with the song’s full backstory, making it clear that his own anthem “Born in the U.S.A.” falls in the same camp as Guthrie’s protest song. The Boss wasn’t wrapping himself in the flag in this song, but calling out a nation for their callous treatment of Vietnam vets. Like Guthrie’s work, the song was misunderstood and appropriated by politicians, this time within a matter...
...album “Born in the U.S.A.,” released to mass commercial and critical appeal in the midst of the 1984 Mondale-Reagan presidential campaign. In the wake of this success, conservative columnist George Will wrote a column entitled “Yankee Doodle Springsteen,” praising the positive attitude of a song where “problems always [seem] punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” Apparently the Reagan-era deficits extended to the realm of irony...
...stop there; at a campaign stop in Hammonton, N.J., Reagan spoke about “America’s future,” a future that “rests in the message of hop in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.” The Gipper shouting out to the Boss...