The 1984 classic Bruce Springsteen regrets as too pop: “It forced me”
In the divisive 2026 Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, the steel-eyed label heads at CBS proved their grandeur to the ‘King of Pop’ with a list of their current artists, including household names from Cyndi Lauper to Billy Joel, Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen.
If this tells us anything, it’s that the movie is factually incorrect (Lauper’s first single came way after Jackson’s ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’ made their world debuts on MTV, which was the clinching point of the conversation), but also that Springsteen has been considered a mainstream name for many years. And, as the cutthroat nature of the music industry can attest to, you don’t make it far in the industry without sacrifice.
For most artists, including ‘The Boss’, this sacrifice would come in the form of thwarting their sonic character: CBS Records was undoubtedly one of the largest and most prominent mainstream music labels in the world, with the greatest reach.
Springsteen, who signed his first contract in 1972, would have to ensure that his songs stayed true to his complicated heart, but that they also fell in line with what the general public wanted, to keep the big bosses happy.
He managed to toe the line between the two expertly for over a decade, but in 1984, he veered too far towards the realm of pop, which was a hard left from the folk rock path Springsteen was carving out for himself. He was in the process of writing his would-be hit album, Born in the USA, having conjured up some 70 songs for the project, but his producer, Jon Landau, insisted that the project still lacked a lead single.
With hands red-raw from trying and failing in a continuous cycle, he wrote the hit in a single night. “It went as far in the direction of pop music as I wanted to go, and probably a little farther,” Springsteen once recalled, a painful blow seeing as the song quickly became the most popular from the album, reaching the second spot on the Hot 100, kept off by only Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’ and Duran Duran’s ‘The Reflex’.
Despite its inability to grab the golden ticket, the hands of fate worked elsewhere in Springsteen’s favour. The music video for ‘Dancing In the Dark’ was directed by Brian DePalma, featuring a then-unknown Courtney Cox, who was in attendance at one of his shows and was picked by Springsteen and invited to dance on stage with him.
It cemented the lasting legacy of the track (and video) as Friends fans around the world still watch for evidence of Cox’s face prior to being brushed with global fame, and while Springsteen may harbour some resentment for its palatable pop sensibility, he can’t deny that the single represents a huge milestone in his decades-long career, as it became emblematic of the beloved album and era.
In his 1998 lyric anthology, Songs, Springsteen shared, “Born in the USA changed my life and gave me my biggest audience. It forced me to question the way I presented my music and made me think harder about what I was doing”.
