Remembering the rock 'n' roll humanism of Bruce Springsteen

People forget how bad it was. They forget that day after day, week after week, month after month in the 1980s, the same small group of pop stars dominated radio, magazines, and TV. It was the big four: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen. In the 1980s, the decade before the wilds of the internet, you could not escape these Goliaths.

How one of them, Bruce Springsteen, got so huge, and what it means, is the subject of a fascinating new book, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland.