THE PLANK JANUARY 19, 2009
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Anyone on the Mall yesterday will tell you: The crowd's favorite performer by a good margin was Garth Brooks, who played a raucous medley of "American Pie," "Shout" and his own "We Shall Be Free." (I don't want to shock, but the audience at Barack Obama's inauguration concert preferred the non-country numbers.) Brooks has been semi-retired for the entire Bush presidency, but maybe Obama can lure him back to work with a certain open cabinet position: After all, it might be helpful if a key voice on the new president's economic team got a little bit louder now (hey!).
--Ben Wasserstein
1 comments
I wonder how many of us at the event were, like me, cheering Garth Brooks so much because we were so darn shocked that Garth Brooks (!?) was actually pretty good. I mean, look, you can put Stevie Wonder or Herbie Hancock on stage with just about anyone, and it's still gonna sound good. (U2 was a disappointment; Bono has not kept his voice up well enough to perform many of their pre-"Achtung Baby" songs.) But Garth Brooks, with no second headliner, given the longest set of the show? That had "crap you wouldn't wipe off your own child's face for fear of getting it on yourself" written all over it, at least for those of us who remember the line-dancing craze of the '90s, so realizing moments into the set that Garth freakin' Brooks could bring it like that was a happy revelation.
- rhubarbs
January 19, 2009 at 1:26pm