Forty years ago, Bruce Springsteen transformed into a political artist, all thanks to Ronald Reagan

This summer, it’s the 40th anniversary of Born in the U.S.A.

The album turned Bruce Springsteen into a muscled-up red, white, and blue megastar and made him a political artist. It also pointed toward a future when pop music and presidential politics would become uncomfortably intertwined.

It all started in South Jersey when Ronald Reagan made a campaign stop in Hammonton, aiming to co-opt Springsteen’s working-class hero image into his “Morning in America” message of national renewal.

That September was momentous for Springsteen. Born in the U.S.A was No. 2 on the charts, trailing only Prince’s Purple Rain on the way to producing a record seven Top 10 singles. (Can you name them without Googling, Bruce fans? Scroll down to test your knowledge.) That month, he also made his first appearance on the cover of People magazine.

He went to the Jacksons’ “Victory Tour” at JFK Stadium in South Philly, meeting Michael Jackson after the show. Then he showed up the next night at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park with Philly rocker John Eddie, and a certain young critic-in-training in the audience.

And, oh yeah, he also played six sold-out shows that month at the Spectrum in South Philly. Each opened with the title track of Born in the U.S.A., which Springsteen has called “one of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music.”

The day after Springsteen finished his Philly run in 1984, Reagan came to South Jersey. He echoed conservative columnist George F. Will, who had recently written, “the recitation of closed factories and other problems” in Springsteen’s songs “always seemed punctuated by a grand cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’”

A laughably off-base take, a Will-ful misinterpretation. But the Gipper ran with it. “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts,” Reagan said in the speech, after saying how happy he was to be in “the Blueberry Capital of the World.” “It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire — New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen.”

If Springsteen was surprised, he shouldn’t have been. He chose to outfit the Born in the U.S.A. album cover in the colors of the American flag.

Springsteen’s previous album, 1982′s stark, severe Nebraska — whose making-of is being made into a movie starring Jeremy Allen White based on a book by Warren Zanes — was received as a nearly nihilistic take on the Reagan years.

But Born in the U.S.A. was ambiguous. While the album was full of songs about characters whose lives are being squeezed by forces beyond their control — like “Cover Me” and “Downbound Train” — they were delivered as cathartic big-drum-sound ‘80s rock and roll. It was artful, balancing a dark, uncompromising message with exuberant, irresistible music that sold millions, and conveyed hope, or at least resilience.

It put Springsteen on the 1980s music Mount Rushmore with Jackson, Prince, and Madonna.

Artists can’t control how their art is understood, and Born in the U.S.A. invited misinterpretation. And Springsteen realized that if he wanted to exert any influence over its meaning, he better speak up.

Two days later, at a show in Pittsburgh, he joked that Reagan hadn’t been listening to Nebraska too closely, and said the next night, somewhat prophetically: “There’s something really dangerous happening to us out there now. We’re slowly getting split up into two different Americas. There’s a promise getting broken.”

“I don’t think [the American Dream] was that everybody was going to make a billion dollars but that everybody was going to have an opportunity and a chance to live a life with some decency and some dignity.”

(Springsteen now is a billionaire, with a net worth of $1.1. billion, according to Forbes.)

Springsteen’s politics had been largely noncommittal then. In his new book, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In the U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland, Steven Hyden quotes Springsteen telling MTV’s Kurt Loder that “I might’ve voted for George McGovern in 1972.” But otherwise, he sat out presidential elections.

The Reagan dustup pushed him to be more direct in his songwriting, on tracks like the emphatic “Seeds,” about the human cost of the oil boom and bust in 1980s Texas, which has been reappearing in set lists of late.

That evolution toward unequivocal protest music continued through “American Skin (41 Shots),” the 2000 song about the NYPD killing of West African student Amadou Diallo. By that time, politicians like then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani weren’t praising Springsteen, they were condemning him.

And rather than sitting out presidential elections, Springsteen started going all-in. He joined the “Vote for Change” tour in 2004 in support of John Kerry against George W. Bush, and stumped extensively for Barack Obama in 2008, including a free concert on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. standoff with Reagan became the model for artists to call for candidates to cease playing their music, from Tom Petty telling John McCain to back off of “I Won’t Back Down” to Heart denying Sarah Palin’s use of “Barracuda.” Most recently, Celine Dion objected to “My Heart Will Go On” being used at a Trump-JD Vance rally in Montana this month.

Taylor Swift, too, felt pushed to take a stand and speak out against white supremacy after alt-right hate groups were embracing her as an Aryan princess in the wake of deadly demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.

» READ MORE: Taylor Swift and the cost of speaking out on politics, or staying silent, in ‘Miss Americana’

It marked Swift’s Springsteen-like transition from aloof bystander to engaged participant. She voiced her opposition to Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), who she called “Trump in a wig,” and spurred a voter registration boom in March when she urged her 282 million Instagram followers to participate in the democratic process.

Swifties for Kamala posts appeared almost immediately after Joe Biden pulled out of the race, and unfounded rumors that Swift and Beyoncé are set to announce concerts in support of Kamala Harris circulate daily.

Tim Walz declared a Bruce Springsteen Day in Minnesota last year, with a proclamation that the Boss’ music is a reminder “of the values we hold dear, including kindness, compassion and fairness.” (A savvy politician, he also proclaimed a Beyoncé Day.)

A parade of pop stars will undoubtedly be on the campaign trail this fall, with Megan Thee Stallion in Atlanta and Bon Iver in Wisconsin already going to work for Harris. Will Springsteen be joining them, 40 years after Reagan sung his praises in South Jersey? He has six weeks off after playing Sea.Hear.Now in Asbury Park on Sept. 15, so he’s free to do all the political barnstorming he’d like. (Swift’s schedule is also open between an Aug. 20 date in London and the resumption of the “Eras Tour” in Miami on Oct. 18.)

But according to Trump, it will be of little consequence if Springsteen speaks out against him from the concert stage. In Wildwood in May, the former president claimed that he brings bigger crowds to the Jersey Shore than the Boss could ever manage.

“Is there anything better than a Trump rally?” he asked. “If some of these wackos came along, these liberal singers, they’d actually vote for me. You know, like Bruce Springsteen. We have a much bigger crowd than Bruce Springsteen.”

Forty years after the Spectrum date, Springsteen will play at Citizens Bank Park on Aug. 21 and 23, across the street from where the Spectrum once stood. The concerts are rescheduled from last summer after the Jersey rocker was taken ill with what later was announced to be peptic ulcer disease.

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band at Citizens Bank Park, 1 Citizens Bank Way, at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 21 and 23, mlb.com.

The seven singles from “Born in the U.S.A.” in order of their release are: “Dancing In the Dark,” “Cover Me,” “Born in the U.S.A.,” I’m On Fire,” “Glory Days,” “I’m Goin’ Down,” and “My Hometown.”