Born in the U.S.A.

Born in the U.S.A. is not a flag-waving anthem.

The chorus is loud. The verses follow a Vietnam veteran who comes home to no job and no help. Springsteen first cut it alone at home in 1982, then the E Street Band turned it into thunder.

In 1984 a president praised it as a message of hope. Springsteen answered from the stage.

Source: Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (2016).

Name a song that sounds happy but isn't. We'll open the best one.

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Born in the U.S.A. rests on a contradiction that listeners have argued over for decades. The chorus is enormous. The title is shouted, the drums land hard, and a synthesizer figure runs through the track. The verses say something quite different. They follow a working-class man who is sent to Vietnam and comes home to no job and no help.

The two halves pull in opposite directions. The chorus is loud, but it is bitter rather than proud. A listener who catches only the refrain can come away with a celebration, while a listener who follows the verses hears a complaint. Much of what happened to the song afterwards comes from that gap.

The title came from a screenplay by the director Paul Schrader, who had sent it to Springsteen. The phrase gave him a starting point, and the song that followed was his own.

He first recorded it alone, as a dark acoustic demo, during the January 1982 home sessions that became the album Nebraska. Stripped down to a single voice, the song's anger was easy to hear. It did not fit that record, so he kept it for later.

In the spring of 1982 Springsteen played the song for the E Street Band at the Power Station in New York. Roy Bittan found the synthesizer riff that now defines the track, and Max Weinberg hit the drums as hard as he could. The version on the record was captured live in very few takes.

The arrangement did not change what the verses say. It changed the scale at which they arrive. A song that was bitter in its solo form stayed bitter, but now at a volume that made it easy to mistake for triumph. The same words carried a different feeling depending on whether they were heard in a quiet room or a full stadium.

The album Born in the U.S.A. came out in June 1984. According to Billboard, it reached No. 1 in the US and produced seven Top 10 singles on the Hot 100. The title track peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Numbers like these put the song in front of an audience far wider than the one that had followed Springsteen before. Many of those listeners met the chorus first, on the radio and in public places, and may never have sat with the verses. That is how a song about a forgotten veteran became one of the most misread hits of the 1980s.

In September 1984 Ronald Reagan praised Springsteen's message of hope at a campaign stop in New Jersey. The remark treated the song as an affirmation, which is the reading the verses push against.

Days later, on stage, Springsteen made clear that the song meant something very different. He did not leave the correction to the recording alone.

The misreading outlived that campaign. Campaigns of both parties have played the song at rallies ever since, often against his wishes. The pattern shows how a big chorus can outrun the story it belongs to. Springsteen tells the background in his memoir Born to Run (2016), and the song itself still pairs a shout that sounds like a cheer with a story that is anything but.