The Misunderstood Message of Heartland Rock

What was heartland rock? Did anyone ever really know? No less an authority than John Mellencamp dismissed the term as the work of “lazy journalists.” But in the 1980s, the music’s heyday, the phrase denoted an array of artists and tendencies while also conjuring something more atmospheric. Everything about the sound was big: the guitars, the drums, the voices, the choruses tailor-made to be shouted along to at a stadium or at a wedding or in your car, nowadays probably to the embarrassment of your kids (or maybe grandkids). The bigness is in the blaring synthesizer riff that opens Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 smash “Born in the U.S.A.,” and the soaring refrain of Tom Petty’s 1989 classic “Free Fallin’,” and the pounding drums and crunching guitar that propel Mellencamp’s own 1982 chestnut “Hurts So Good.”Heartland rock had a big heart, too. It was concerned with the lives of everyday people, building worlds so vivid that listeners effortlessly recognized themselves in them. Heartland rock’s imagined community lies in both the quirky detail of chili dogs outside the Tastee Freez in Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane” and the more impressionistic evocations of bygone back-seat dalliances in Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind.”The dominant mood was obsessive nostalgia: A remarkable amount of the music consists of grown men singing about teenagers. Tugging on the heartstrings can be a cheap trick in the hands of the wrong songwriter, but the genre’s best songs are redeemed by a fastidious eye and a poetic ear. In Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” lovers, like fast cars, are “sprung from cages on Highway 9 / Chrome-wheeled, fuel-injected, and steppin’ out over the line.” Seger, in “Night Moves,” evokes callow summer fumblings in language that’s decidedly unromantic: “I used her, she used me, but neither one cared / We were getting our share.”Heartland rock had a consistently left-leaning politics, although this aspect has long been a point of misunderstanding. “Born in the U.S.A.” expresses a