"Garth Brooks: Country Music’s Square, Liberal Dad"

[PM Martin]

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/garth-brooks-country-musics-square-liberal-dad

"By now, Brooks’s big-tent idealism—cheesy and vague, to be sure, but sincerely and exuberantly expressed—feels like a relic of the early nineties, of a time when Michael Jackson sang “Black or White,” and it felt as though real progress might be just a catchy pop song away. Yet here is Brooks, in late 2014, on “People Loving People,” the first single from the new album, turning back the clock to what seems like a pre-modern age before irony, singing, “People loving people, that’s the enemy of everything that’s evil.” Country music’s liberal conscience has returned to the stage.

It’s odd to think of Garth Brooks as a political artist. His music has always seemed too polished and pleasant to hang anything on it. Throughout his reign in the nineties, Brooks was both celebrated and maligned as the singer who introduced country music to a wide national, and then global, audience. Like all pop supernovas, his success was owed in part to his singularity, and in part to his broad, flat appeal. Millions of fans can’t be wrong, but at the same time, the object of such widespread affection can’t really be doing anything all that interesting. In 1991, the critic David Browne wrote of Brooks, “with his meat-and-potatoes image, goony grin and virtuous all-American values, he is the Kevin Costner of country.” The old knocks about Brooks still hold today. Jon Caramanica, in a mostly admiring but caveat-laden review in the Times, describes the new album as “grand scale and hammy, in places eye-rollingly schlocky and in others outrageously moving.”

[a kennedy]

1. speaking of Garth Brooks.......he's a corn maze!!!!!!

http://www.jsonline.com/greensheet/menomonie-farmers-pay-tribute-to-garth-brooks--with-a-corn-maze-b99574612z1-328121291.html?ipad=y.

[Cracklin Charlie]

2. I like Garth for his politics.

He performed at President Obama's first inauguration concert. He did the really coolest thing...when he walked out to perform, he made a special point of waving to the Obama daughters. I thought that was nice of him to acknowledge the little first daughters, who had spent lots of time that day on celebrations for their dad.

Just one more thing. Garth does a song called "We Shall be Free" that equates true freedom with love and tolerance of others. When I listen to that song, by the end I am literally boo-hooing with tears running down my face. I kinda tear up just thinking about it.

Garth is an unapologetic liberal, and I like that.

[ohheckyeah]

3. I didn't know

he is a liberal. Cool. He sings one of the few country songs I love...The Dance. I love it even more now.

[lpbk2713]

4. Probably the best concert I ever saw was his Central Park Concert.

Billy Joel, Tom Horn, Don McLean. Everyone there was thoroughly entertained.

And each of his backup musicians is an accomplished entertainer in their own right.