My friend Kerry over at Hemisphire is one of those crazy people who is fighting the crowds for the inaugaration festivities.
In fact, not only is he fighting the crowd today but he also fought it on Sunday for some of pre-inaugaral festivities.
He wrote a post about about it which you can read to get his full experience, but I want to extract this one statement:
“Bruce Springsteen was moving and U2 was rocking, but I would never have guessed the guy who got the crowd going was Garth Brooks covering ‘American Pie’ and ‘Shout’.”
I’m not surprised in the least. As I have posited before, Garth Brooks is one of the most important artists in American history. Of course he got the crowds going — he’s a modern day Elvis.
Making such grandiose claims about Mr. Brooks relevance was a hotly debated topic the first time around. It seemed to hinge on the definition of ‘important’ and ‘impactful.’
I concede that Brooks’ musical stylings are not all that innovative. He is obviously heavily influenced by his forerunners and would probably readily admit as much.
But as far as being a performer, a star, a celebrity — Garth Brooks can only be bested by a few musical acts in American history.
I don’t bring this up to debate it again. I just wanted to let Kerry know that he shouldn’t be surprised at all and that I could have predicted it.
oh no here we go again :)
I must bow to your greatness. Wait ’til you see today’s post.
record sales. End of story
No offense to Garth, but this is about a decade late in coming:
http://www.cmt.com/news/news-in-brief/1598217/george-strait-named-acms-artist-of-the-decade.jhtml
Better luck next decade for Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw.
Well Garth certainly didn’t deserve it for the first decade of the 2000s. George probably should have gotten it in the 80s to be honest.