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.īy 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. 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. When we’re free to love anyone we choose When this world's big enough for all different views When we all can worship from our own kind of pew Then we shall be free. 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: 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. 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. 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.īrooks, then, who is fifty-two, is doubly out of step.

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. 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. (Brooks has sold more than a hundred and thirty million in twenty-five years). Nobody but Taylor Swift seems to sell records anymore, in any genre.

This week, with “Man Against Machine,” the dormant king of pop country returns to a different world. Garth Brooks last released an album of original material thirteen years ago.

Garth Brooks performs at the We Are One concert to celebrate the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama.

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