From 'Born in the U.S.A.' to 'Fuck off, America'

On June 23, 1985, I saw Bruce Springsteen at the dusty Richter Stadium in Montpellier. It was the eleventh concert of the European tour of Born in the U.S.A. and about forty thousand people filled the venue and accompanied the Boss's voice when he kicked off with the song that gave its name to one of his most famous albums of that decade. The song, misunderstood as a wholesale patriotic exaltation, was in reality the exact opposite: a denunciation of how the country had abandoned a generation of its citizens. Springsteen himself complained about it many years later (2016) in his book Born to run: " Born in the U.S.A. continues to be one of my most important musical pieces and, at the same time, one of the most misunderstood."