Literary Lives
American Outlaws
Bruce Springsteen and Nashville’s Outsiders
Steven Hyden, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland. Hachette Books, 272pp., $32 cloth.
Brian Fairbanks, Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever. Hachette Books, 464pp., $32.50 cloth.
Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. is a towering monument of rock history. The album offers an unrelenting progression of seminal songs, from the rousing title track to “Cover Me,” “I’m Goin’ Down,” “Dancing in the Dark” and beyond. Many Springsteen fans count other albums as their personal favorite—I prefer Darkness on the Edge of Town—but Born in the U.S.A. features such a formidable track list, Steven Hyden notes in his book There Was Nothing You Could Do, that it functions as a “de facto ‘greatest hits’ album.”
Born in the U.S.A., Hyden writes, is “undoubtedly” Springsteen’s “most iconic record from a pop-culture perspective. It’s the album that defines his persona in the broadest sense—the way Bruce sounds, looks, and acts in the popular imagination derives mostly from the Born in the U.S.A. era.” Hyden is well-positioned to make such a claim. He’s an erudite rock critic who has recently written books about Pearl Jam and Radiohead, and is especially skilled at placing a musical act’s work in historical and cultural context. In his book about Radiohead, he presented the English band’s foreboding 2000 album Kid A as a herald of the tribulations of the early 21st century: 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial meltdown, and the tech ascendancy.
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