Complex Numbers

Born in the USA

I pick these links at random from a fairly long list of potential things to talk about. Today's link fortuitously coincides with the release of Western Stars, the Springsteen concert movie. But it's not about new music - it's about something that hit the record stores (for such things existed then) half of Bruce's lifetime ago.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/26/706566556/bruce-springsteen-born-in-the-usa-ameri...

What Does 'Born In The U.S.A.' Really Mean?

In the summer of '84 I was working long, arduous hours, outdoors, as a surveyor's assistant. This is probably where I got my utter hatred of unenclosed spaces from; it certainly wasn't the farm I spent my childhood on. Getting covered with poison ivy and stung by angry yellow jackets can do that to a kid.

But that was the summer that Born in the USA was released, and I was a Springsteen fan even then. I thought about asking my boss for the day off so I could buy the album - in LP format, of course - but he wasn't the type who would understand. In one of the many lucky coincidences involving me and Springsteen-related things, though, it rained that day so I wasn't working after all.

So I went to the shopping mall (80s, remember), bought the album, and went home to listen to the thing. That's how we did things back then, pre-internet.

If you're listening closely, the lyrics of "Born in the U.S.A." make its subject pretty clear: The 1984 hit by Bruce Springsteen describes a Vietnam War veteran who returns home to desperate circumstances and few options. Listen only to its surging refrain, though, and you could mistake it for an uncomplicated celebration of patriotism. You wouldn't be the only one.

This was about the time I first started realizing that most people don't listen to music the way I do. The big "hit" from that album was "Dancing in the Dark," a decent enough song, but all anyone else could talk about was the music video. I felt it was the weakest song on the album, though - everything else sounded like it was done in two or three takes, but that one song suffered from typical 80s overproduction. I found out later that I was right - the rest of the album was basically live.

But that asshole Reagan - he talked about the title track, all right. And got it entirely wrong.

By playing on the hope, Reagan seemed to overlook the despair.

That's a... generous way to put it.

"After it came out, I read all over the place that nobody knew what it was about," [Springsteen] said before performing "Born in the U.S.A" to a crowd in 1995. "I'm sure that everybody here tonight understood it. If not — if there were any misunderstandings out there — my mother thanks you, my father thanks you and my children thank you, because I've learned that that's where the money is."

See? Still a capitalist.

Maybe the meaning of "Born in the U.S.A." is the distance between the grim verses and the joyous chorus. It's the space between frustrating facts and fierce pride — the demand to push American reality a bit closer to our ideals.

The title of this blog is "Complex Numbers," with the mathematical definition front and center, but it's actually a multileveled play on words - "numbers" also refers to pieces of music, and I'm fascinated by the emergence of complexity from simplicity.