This Thursday, I head to the swamps of Jersey to see Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band for the very first time. I’m bringing fellow Bruce fanatic, my mom, as my date. I’ve been hooked ever since she gave me his greatest hits to listen to on my daily school bus treks to, where else, New Jersey. I was 9 and enthralled. But what was he talking about? It seemed very exciting and painful. "Union card": Like the civil war? "Brilliant Disguise": Was Bruce a shapeshifter? "Badlands?" Where was that? "Born to Run": Where? Most abstract thoughts still eluded me, but that husky voice and jangling guitar heralded a scary and beautiful world emerging on the horizon.

Well, for awhile, I was unhooked. As a hormonal teen, I found refuge in the viking conquests of AC/DC, KISS, Guns N’ Roses, et al. Lust and aggression were in Bruce’s music too, but like in life, they had to compete with everything else. I wasn’t interested in that. Life seemed hard enough without a mirror reflecting its worries and regrets.

But around 17, Bruce came back to me. Spandex and groupies had gotten old. There’s nothing worse than a stale fantasy. I bought "Born in the USA," the album that catapulted him from regional rock star to American icon. I couldn’t stop playing it end to end. How did he he combine and synthesize so seamlessly everything from sex and love, to aging and reminiscing, to depression and loneliness, to war and deindustrialization?

Bruce doesn’t get enough credit for his ability to juxtapose seemingly contradictory notions and feelings. Lyrically, "Dancing in the Dark" is a story of boredom and loneliness, about a man who whenever he “checks his look in the mirror wants to change his hair, his clothes, his face.” His come on is as fatalistic as it is seductive, “This gun is for hire even if we’re just dancing in the dark.” But behind that staccato drum beat and bright synth, the song is jubilant. But you can’t separate the jubilance from the misery, the momentary ecstasy from the lifetime of struggle. It’s Bruce’s yin and yang. It’s holistic music.

The title track is notoriously holistic. When I first heard that star-spangled synth, ferocious, cannon-like drums, I immediately conjured patriotic glory — this was right after 9/11, to boot. But even then I knew there was more to Bruce’s guttural howling. It was too intense, too wrought. Plus, the lyrics, the ones I could make out, were not the glossy platitudes inflating the insecure world around me in the early 2000s. “Long gone daddy?” “Told to kill the yellow man?” I didn’t know much about Vietnam (the Civil War and Revolution were elementary school favorites), and "Born in the USA" may have been my first real introduction to that blotch on American life. It’s now trendy to say all of those millions of screaming jingoists were too stupid to listen to the lyrics, were too caught in Reagan’s cockeyed deception. When Reagan tried to co-opt Bruce before destroying Mondale in the '84 election, Bruce told the only man in America more popular than him where he could shove his endorsement. But Bruce did drape himself in the flag: on the album's cover, on the tour and pretty much everywhere else. I don’t see this as having it both ways. Bruce knows we’re tribal animals. Flags are totems; they come and go, but their power and glory get passed on. But he shows the effect the tribe and its totems have on the individual caught in their battles. When the wounded, disregarded vet wails, "I was born in the USA," it's as much an affirmation of individual survival as it is a bitter lament.

Bruce said in an interview he’s spent his career “measuring the distance between the American dream and American reality.” That’s true but incomplete. He measures the distance between the individual fantasies and strivings and the reality of his community:

family, work, country. Many artists and thinkers try to detach the two. Listening to Bruce, you realize how wonderfully, torturously symbiotic they are.