Bruce Springsteen is considered by many to be the voice of America. A patriot. A hero. The blue-collar troubadour who.Springsteen is not a patriot. He isn’t the voice of American pride. He’s a salesman, and a disingenuous one at that.
Bruce Springsteen is considered by many to be the voice of America. A patriot. A hero. The blue-collar troubadour who stood shoulder to shoulder with working men and sang their stories back to them. But according to Aaron Lewis, that image is a fraud. He’s right. The evidence is impossible to ignore.
Lewis rose in the late 1990s as frontman of Staind, one of the era’s biggest rock bands, selling millions and filling arenas. In recent years, he has reinvented himself as a solo country artist. Unlike most musicians parroting Hollywood politics, he wears his patriotism openly. His songs are bluntly pro-American, his shows draped in the Stars and Stripes. Mocked and scorned, he hasn’t backed down. That’s why his criticism of Springsteen carries weight.
During a recent discussion with Tucker Carlson, Lewis called Born in the U.S.A. “one of the most anti-American songs ever written.” To a casual listener, that might sound absurd. After all, the title itself sounds like a celebration. The chorus is shouted like a stadium anthem. Politicians from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have used it as campaign music. For decades, it has been played at parades and fireworks displays as if it were no different from “God Bless America.”
But the verses of Born in the U.S.A. don’t honor America. They attack it. The song tells the story of a Vietnam veteran who comes home to find only unemployment and rejection. It describes the United States not as a land of opportunity, but as a cold and ungrateful country that discards its own citizens. It’s a protest song wrapped in a patriotic-sounding package. And millions of Americans, too distracted by the chorus, never realized they were singing along to an indictment of their own nation.
The truth is that anti-American sentiment runs through much of Springsteen’s catalogue. He built his image on denim, guitars, and the language of hard work. But again and again, his lyrics frame the country not as a place of promise but as a failed experiment. The River doesn’t just mourn economic despair; it tells the story of young love crushed under the weight of lost jobs and broken promises, a couple forced into early marriage and left with nothing but regret.
