Bruce Springsteen - Born In The U.S.A (LP)

It's almost hard to believe now that for the first decade of his career Bruce Springsteen was a gigantic cult artist; a musician who could sell a couple of million records and fill hockey rinks, but who was was no more likely than Elvis Costello to get airplay on pop radio.BORN IN THE USA was the album on which he flexed his muscles (literally) and changed all that. With song titles and choruses that seemed to reflect all that was good and strong in America, belying songs that were about everything that was going wrong, BORN IN THE USA was one of those cultural events that resonated with just about everybody--from both Republican and Democratic politicians, to Vietnam veterans (the title-track was a brutal account of a vet's homecoming), to social critics who found layers of meaning in these tales of disillusioned America, to dance-music DJs who found palpable beats in the dark passions of "Dancing In The Dark" and "Cover Me," to fist-raising pop fans who turned seven of these songs in