The Fourth of July gives us a chance to celebrate everything that makes America a big, messy and complicated but wonderful place to be. So, this week, we thought we'd look back at an album that's all about this push and pull in our country: Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A., which recently turned 40 years old.
To do this, we dug back in NPR's archives to share a couple of pieces. One is the original review of the album that aired in June of 1984. We've also got a reappraisal from 2019 that digs into how and why the title track has been so wildly misunderstood over the years.
Then we close with something special that many fans don't know much about: the dance remixes. Around the same time that Born in the U.S.A. was released, producer Arthur Baker was hired to completely reimagine three tracks. Writer Caryn Rose, who wrote a piece about these remixes for NPR Music, breaks down how they came to be, why they were so polarizing and why they're so hard to find.
Copyright 2024 NPR
