Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA was so perfect in its use of subversive irony -- passionate, furious lyrics laid atop deceptively soaring music -- that Ronald Reagan once famously mistook the single for a call to blind patriotism, rather than the protest song it actually was.
Last year during a live performance at Madison Square Garden, Springsteen -- armed only with a 12-string acoustic guitar -- did a breathtaking version of the song that would ensure no one ever made that mistake again. He stripped away any sense of irony and left only the pain, power, outrage and, yes, resolve that had been there, buried beneath the anthemic instrumentation, all along.
This is one of the best re-tools of a song you're likely to ever hear.
Here's Springsteen's Born in the USA.
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