Total Boss Move

by Will Comerford for the Spring 2026 issue

Brian got a money quote, and the whole newsroom was buzzing.

This was June of 2000. Newspaper-style journalism was on its deathbed, but we didn’t know that yet. MTV had purchased our website, Sonicnet, and they rashly invested millions in building a massive news room with seasoned editors and writers for 10 genres of music (pop, rock, hiphop, country, classical, jazz, folk, R&B, electronic, and I swear there was a tenth. I’m thinking, “world”). The Viacom folks even splashed out for an absurdly expensive ad campaign, with the likes of Sting and Def Leppard saying, “Me music. It’s mine.” This lasted a few months, and was followed by the newsroom’s paranoid monitoring of fuckedcompany.com, that real-time chronicle of the Dotcom bust, to catch wind if we were about to lose our jobs. We did.

I was, incidentally, a terrible reporter due to a disabling fear of asking dumb questions. That is death in journalism — great reporters love asking dumb questions and watching their subject squirm. So instead I was relegated to writing content filler like “birthday articles,” tour announcements, and occasional interviews of C-list bands.

That June Bruce Springsteen debuted “American Skin (41 Shots)” at a concert in Atlanta. The song was inspired by the 1999 murder of unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo at the hands of four New York City police. They were acquitted earlier in 2000. And now the Boss was headed to New York to play ten shows at Madison Square Garden. One of the old news hounds at Sonicnet knew the next move — “Call the Fraternal Order of Police,” he told Brian.

The reporter got on the phone with Bob Lucente, president of the New York chapter of FOP. That guy was ready to meet a dumb question with a perfectly brainless response: “He’s turned into some type of fucking dirtbag,” Lucente raged. “He goes on the boycott list. He has all these good songs and everything, American flag-waving songs and all that stuff, and now he’s a floating faggot.”

None of us knew what a floating faggot was, but it had a sort of poetry — a bright spark from a bonfire swirling into the night — and it seemed to tie together Lucente’s sentence that started with flag waving. As the old head in the room had predicted, it gave the story some real legs. The quote was picked up by major media outlets and contributed to the uproar around the shows at MSG. Despite the boycott, all 10 shows sold out. Despite Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s request that he not play the song in question, he played it every night. Total Boss move.

It’s funny that Lucente had the impression that the Boss had a separate flag-waving life before becoming a “floating fag.” I guess that goes to show you that people only really hear choruses. I imagine 99% of the US population over age 40 knows the anthemic repetition, “Born in the USA.” People who know the song better have long pointed out that it’s more caustic than patriotic. But, in a way, it seems to be both. 

Consider the verse where the narrator complains about his troubles finding a job: “Come back home to the refinery/ Hirin’ man says, ‘Son, if it was up to me…’” He doesn’t say exactly why he can’t get a job, but you have to wonder. Does it refer to “quotas”, the enemy of conservatives in the 1980s? Cheap immigrant labor? Maybe there’s irony in the chorus, but most people heard it as a statement of pride, and perhaps a claim to special rights. (Cheech and Chong released a parody song, and subsequent movie, “Born in East LA,” about an immigrant fighting deportation.) Throw in some casual racial slurs — “Sent me off to a foreign land/ To go and kill the yellow man” — and this song is actually a remarkably good fit for a MAGA anthem.

It’s not surprising that Reagan famously tried to “claim” Springsteen during his 1984 presidential campaign: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts,” he mused (or read from his speech writer’s prompter). “It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen.” Springsteen pushed back against this in his tour behind “Born in the USA,” but his words from the stage never overpowered that chorus. When he talked to Kurt Loder in Rolling Stone, later that year, he said he was not registered for either party and admitted, “The flag is a powerful image, and when you set that stuff loose, you don’t know what’s gonna be done with it.”

These days it seems pretty obvious that the Boss is a blue warrior, showing up to endorse the Democrat every four years, or speaking out on the latest outrage. But that was not always his identity. In the RS interview, he was cautious in his words on Reagan — “He presents a very mythic, very seductive image, and it’s an image that people want to believe in. I think there’s always been a nostalgia for a mythical America, for some period in the past when everything was just right. And I think the president is the embodiment of that for a lot of people… I don’t know if he’s a bad man.” He also declined to endorse Walter Mondale, saying, “I think there are significant differences, but I don’t know how significant. And it’s very difficult to tell by pre-election rhetoric.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that he maintained political ambiguity. Reagan had liberals running and hiding. New Jersey in 1984 was a lot less blue than it is now. It was arguably a swing state, with two Democratic Senators, but with the exception of 1960 and 1964, Jersey’s electors went for the Republican in every presidential election since FDR.

And Bruce continued to avoid endorsements through the 1980s and 1990s, staying neutral as Jersey swung for Clinton twice. But that began to change after “American Skin.” In 2004, the Boss campaigned hard for John Kerry.

That outspoken political side has remained consistent the past two decades, including vocal opposition to Trump. While his lyrics, particularly on songs like “Born in the USA,” seem like they could be a perfect fit for the MAGA movement, the difference was always the nature of his empathy. The Boss seems to empathize with everyone, not just people who look like him. You can see that in his lyrics for “American Skin.” There is empathy with cops: “Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life.” But it extends to empathy for immigrants like Diallou and nonwhite Americans: “It ain’t no secret, No secret my friend/ You can get killed just for living in your American skin.” 🏁

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