Back in the old smug, condescending days, when boyish, prep school–faced conservative intellectuals wore bow ties and peered from lordly heights at pop culture, Washington Post columnist George Will stuffed wads of cotton in his ears and stood through the whole four-hour duration of a Bruce Springsteen concert. He arrived at a stadium in the suburbs of Washington, DC, without knowing how marijuana smelled or what Springsteen’s music sounded like, and emerged, still a bit puzzled about whether he’d been in the company of stoners, feeling as if he had the wind at his back. Here, at last, was a “wholesome cultural portent.” A star without even “a smidgen of androgyny.” An image of an ideal, made-for-Reagan working class. “Rock for the United Steelworkers” that didn’t languish in shuttered-factory blues, or export blame onto the rich, or “whine” and curl into helplessness. Springsteen was a greasy-denim, bandana-sporting dynamo — abruptly muscle-ripped, after a waifish early career — whose power cords and corn-fed “homilies” instructed fans to “‘downsize’ their expectations,” to buckle in for a lifetime of hard work, to embrace “family and traditional values,” and to well up with passion when they saw the stars and stripes.

“If all Americans — in labor or management, who make steel or shoes or cars or textiles,” Will wrote in his next column, “made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism.” We lived in lazy, profligate times, fearful of the rest of the world’s productive capacity, but Springsteen — the “hardest working white man in show business,” one critic quipped — made music infused with the great American work ethic. It was the summer of 1984, and Springsteen wasn’t the only act on tour: Ronald Reagan, too, was out cruising the country, parading down the campaign trail. Will whispered his way into the president’s ear: it was time for the Republican Party to nourish itself on the hearty blue-collar patriotism of Born in the U.S.A.

Five days after Will’s column came out, the America Prouder, Stronger, Better tour, the follow-up to 1980’s Let’s Make America Great Again campaign, pulled its plush, dollar-soaked bandwagon into the slipshod center of New Jersey. Out came Reagan, striding into the gushy set of a Robert Altman movie. “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,” he told the crowd. “It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire — New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” Seven records in, Springsteen had just released his first truly superstar-level pop album; now he found himself sent off to fight in the culture wars.