However, songs with a rousing chorus like this are not designed to be understood in one take. People, including Springsteen, said that they needed to put in the time and effort to listen to the song. The Reagan campaign’s cluelessness about this is old news. The song is clearly a bitter message about the men who went to fight in Vietnam and the problems they had when they returned home. ![]() Till you spend half your life just covering up You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much The first kick I took was when I hit the ground If you listen more carefully you hear words like these: You can hear this song a hundred times and not hear any lyrics besides these. It’s the music, the rhythm, the chords, and the arrangement, that drives them into your skull. However, the words themselves are banal and repetitive. It is almost impossible to hear this chorus without singing along, even for people who were not born in the U.S.A. In 1984 (1984, yikes, how Orwellian!) Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign tried to use Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a campaign theme. I want to argue that rock n’ roll music is the inheritor of the Gorgianic strand of sophistic rhetoric. Note especially the last sentence above, where he talks about the particular power of words that are sung to beguile and persuade the soul. This is the sophistic logos, a persuasion through hypnotizing words rather than logical argument, as in Aristotle. The translator of the above passage has attempted to preserve a bit of this effect. Much of the effect of Gorgias’ speech derives from rhythmic, poetic language with odd turns of phrase and lots of repetition of words and sounds. Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft. But come, I shall turn from one argument to another. ![]() Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and grievous longing come upon its hearers, and at the actions and physical sufferings of others in good fortunes and in evil fortunes, through the agency of words, the soul is wont to experience a suffering of its own. I shall show how this is the case, since it is necessary to offer proof to the opinion of my hearers: I both deem and define all poetry as speech with meter. ![]() Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity. However, what I am interested in here is not the argument, but the theory of rhetoric represented here by the seductive power of words. Gorgias argues that she is blameless because her actions were either due to the will of the gods, or she was “by force reduced or by words seduced or by love possessed.” Gorgias’ argument deprives Helen of all agency and thus all moral responsibility. In “Encomium of Helen” the sophist Gorgias defends Helen of Troy, widely considered to be the epitome of a bad woman. I guess I should attempt to make a bridge between “guitar” and “sophist.”
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