Garth Brooks last released an album of original material thirteen years ago. This week, with “Man Against Machine,” the dormant king of pop country returns to a different world. Nobody but Taylor Swift seems to sell records anymore, in any genre. (Brooks has sold more than a hundred and thirty million in twenty-five years). And country music has changed in several rather contradictory ways: it has become more musically innovative and inclusive at the same time that, lyrically and thematically, it has grown, in large part, more conservative and tribal. A hit song like this year’s “This Is How We Roll,” by the duo Florida Georgia Line, with a cameo by another current megastar, Luke Bryan, may sound like any other modern, genre-busting pop song. But the lyrics—“Yeah, we're proud to be young / We stick to our guns / We love who we love and we wanna have fun”—identifies its singers as defiant members of an insular and unyielding American subgroup, and you're either in or you're out.
Brooks, then, who is fifty-two, is doubly out of step. His music sounds much as it did before he entered semi-retirement, in 2001—pop country, but at this point your father’s version of it: stadium rock and piano ballads, marked by a bit of fiddle or slide guitar, and with no hip-hop influences to be found. His cultural politics have also become old-fashioned, in that they remain as broadly progressive and welcoming as they were back in the early nineties. In 1990, Brooks name-checked John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the “The Dance.” In 1992, with “We Shall Be Free,” he got country fans to sway along to such earnest proclamations as:
That song, co-written with Stephanie Davis, was, according to Brooks, inspired by the riots that year in Los Angeles, and it remains the most famous mention of gay rights in a country song. It was a hit, though not his biggest, and Brooks later noted that “We Shall Be Free” was the most controversial song that he'd ever released—which says something about his cautious approach to his own career, and a lot about the politics of country music.
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."
We all have certain pop stars whose worst qualities only endear them to us more. For me, it is Brooks in his full, earnest, bombastic, schmaltzy, show-stopping glory: posing ridiculously on album covers in ugly shirts, striding around onstage, sweaty and a bit out of breath, serenading cancer patients. Only Brooks (or maybe George Strait) could sell a pun-filled honky-tonk number called "Rodeo and Juliet," with lyrics like: "Into our scene of fair Verona / rides a queen from Arizona / the fairest in a pair of blue stud jeans." Only Brooks could make the May-December affair between a young female construction worker and her hardscrabble older co-worker in "She's Tired of Boys" seems anything other than unbearably creepy. And certainly only Brooks could make the city of Tacoma (in a song of the same name) seem like an iconic final destination in a full-flame torch song about a man out-driving his heartbreak.
Brooks, an Oklahoma native, won fame in 1989, at the age of twenty-seven, with his self-titled first album. A string of best-selling albums after that put him on a first-name basis with the American public. In 1991, Brooks released what will always be his signature song, "Friends in Low Places," written by Dewayne Blackwell and Earl Bud Lee, a twangy, rollicking party song that is best played in a bar, and sounds as if it were recorded in one. Many of his other biggest hits are about the usual country things: cowboys and the rodeo, new love and broken hearts. And most of them are exceptionally fun, done with a wink and Brooks's version of a light touch. But it is songs like "The Dance" and "The River"— fable-like ballads with simple morals that somehow manage to work at both weddings and funerals—that are better examples of what made Brooks so massively successful. They are all sentiment with no specificity. These songs could be about anyone, so a wide swathe of listeners thought that they were about them. Brooks led sing-alongs in stadiums across America, but he also played sold-out shows in Europe, and was surprised when everyone in the crowd seemed to know the words.
Purists at the time lamented Brooks's influence, and sneered that the cowboys he sang about meant little to him, and even less to the suburban fans listening in their cars. Brooks felt the sting. "If in the next five years things go south for country music, I'll probably get the blame for it," he told Billboard, in 1995. In interviews he was as likely to cite James Taylor and Billy Joel as his musical heroes as he was to pray at the altar of Hank Williams or George Jones. He discussed his career in relation to singers like Michael Bolton and Whitney Houston. He praised the lyrical sensibility of Hootie & the Blowfish. In 1999, he even tried making his own pop album, infamously transforming himself into an alter ego named Chris Gaines, complete with a dopey haircut, eyeliner, a soul patch, and a voice that seriously stretched the upper limits of his range. Brooks wasn't the first country singer to ascend to pop stardom—Dolly Parton and others cracked the crossover code before he did—but he ushered in, for better or worse, a new generation of artists who wore their country lightly: Shania Twain, Faith Hill, Martina McBride, and the Australian guitar-rocker Keith Urban. Even Darius Rucker, the lead singer of Garth-approved Hootie & the Blowfish, would eventually become a country star.
Yet just as country music seemed to be moving beyond the cultural notes of its past—becoming, depending on your take, either broadminded and modern or denuded and obsolete—the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led Nashville to circle the wagons. In 2002, Toby Keith sang lustily about America putting a boot in the ass of its enemies on the song "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American).” A year later, he helped run the Dixie Chicks, one of the biggest acts of the previous decade, out of town after the group's lead singer, Natalie Maines, insulted President Bush while onstage in London. Around the same time, Darryl Worley sang "Have You Forgotten?," a rabble-rousing propaganda song that argued the Bush Administration's position that the war in Iraq was a just response to the 9/11 attacks. Country radio continued to air plenty of tunes about love and whiskey, but you heard more about guns and God, too. Some stations started playing the national anthem every day at noon; Lee Greenwood's "I'm Proud to Be an American" enjoyed a revival.
The overt political fervor eventually dissipated, but the genre as a whole had moved back toward its foundational identity. Barack Obama could have been referring to the protagonist of a country hit at the time when, in 2008, he made the gaffe of speaking honestly about the white voters he was struggling to win over: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." These days, the genre's stars sing less about politics than about a de-facto political identity: Jack Daniels and Conway Twitty are the boxes that get checked by artists trying to shore up their all-American bona fides. People are more likely to praise the red-meat conservative Hank Williams, Jr., than they are his populist father—and nobody name-checks Garth Brooks.
Brooks sat out the rightward lurch. He retired following the release of his ninth album, “Scarecrow,” in 2001, saying that he wanted to spend more time with his family. And so it was never suggested that he should sing a song about the might of the American military or the rightness of its international adventures. Safely in retirement (he popped up with live shows from time to time) and with all those millions sold, he could have his picture taken with Obama in the Oval Office, in 2010, without worrying too much about what his fans might think. And a year later, when other celebrity endorsers of the President were jumping ship, he could say, "I love him to death and I fully support him and I just wish him well because it's got to be hell in that office."
He sings about God on the new album, and people on the Internet this week have taken special joy in mocking his new song, "Mom," written by Don Sampson and Wynn Varble, in which God comforts a soon-to-be-born child about to enter the scary world. He also covers other durable conservative tropes such as the Greatest Generation, hard-working families, and a time when Americans still made things—but, throughout, he does what he’s always done, which is to sound like an exceedingly nice guy who just wants to make people happy. He seems trustworthy and kind and open and generous and infectiously, if naïvely, exuberant about the unifying possibilities of simple, straightforward pop music. On the album's title track, "Man Against Machine," the blue-collar hero isn't some Joe Sixpack, but the African-American tall-tale legend John Henry. On "Cowboys Forever," he manages to suggest that the spirit of America's old-time ropers and rustlers is a shared cultural heritage that anyone, and everyone, might safely claim. Such borrowings and revisions are, at best, a stretch, but Brooks has often managed to make hokum sound like good, open-hearted truth.
Brooks is not the only country artist in recent years to prod at the practical implications of the genre's cultural narrowness, by which I mean its enduring whiteness. Compared to Brad Paisley's "Accidental Racist," a much derided though sincere duet with LL Cool J, or Eric Church's "Homeboy," about white appropriation of hip-hop culture, a song like "People Loving People," is not a particularly sophisticated mediation on race in modern America. Yet in the world of contemporary country, which is ruled by kids with escapist fantasies, and grownups eager to seem young, Brooks seems fatherly and proudly unhip. He is in a unique position to do some lecturing—to take a leading voice in the genre's current debates about race, gender, and cultural authenticity.
But there may simply be a limit to what he is willing or able to say, and, judging by his new album, this second act will not be one of reinvention as a culture warrior. Country's most famous liberal voice has also always been one of its more conventional ones—progressive populism reduced to something more like popularity. For years, Brooks has asked, Can't we all just get along? By which, he may mean only, Can't we all sing along?
