True, that rock lyrics are generally difficult to make out, but the following, which is heard loud and clear in the song, should have alerted most thinking Americans that something was up with that song...
"Born in the USA, I was born in the USA,
I was born in the USA, born in the USA.
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man."
From the article I posted in #65...
RE: Born In The USA
Juxtaposed with the bleak lyrical narrative of tragedy and indifference, the song’s seemingly celebratory chorus becomes a parody of patriotism, implying the foolishness of the benighted blue-collar victim of the system, naive enough to think that it’s really a good thing to be an American—or, God forbid, that America might be worth fighting for.
It’s tempting to dismiss the politicization of popular music as of limited consequence. But as the Popular Front keenly grasped, culture matters—and music matters perhaps most of all. Allan Bloom, glossing Plato, wrote that “to take the spiritual temperature of an individual or society, one must ‘mark the music.’ ” In America, popular music provides a soundtrack for growing up. And the lyrics of that music too often deliver the message that our leaders are “idiots,” that our politics are corrupt, that bourgeois life is purposeless, that this country is no freer than any other—and probably less so. How can we find ourselves surprised, then, by the cool indifference that typifies many kids raised in times of affluence, freedom, and peace?
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-communist.html
For my ears, rock (at least from the mid 60s on), has been nothing but background noise. And a noise that is nearly impossible to avoid.
Pity the people who could actually understand the lyrics and thought they were something insightful.