RAMBLE ON: "We Shall Be Free" by Garth Brooks

“This ain’t comin’ from no prophet… just an ordinary man…”

This might seem like false humility; Garth Brooks can think of himself as an ordinary man but he’s certainly not an average man. It’s easy to forget how big he was, as he’s mostly stayed within the realm of country music these past couple decades (though he’s still massive there; he’s won Entertainer of the Year repeatedly in years he didn’t even release new music). But in the ‘90s, he wasn’t just a superstar in country music, or even just music in general; he was one of the biggest celebrities on the planet. He was Michael Jackson. He was Babe Ruth. He was a paunchy cowboy in a ten-gallon hat and he ruled the world.

In other ways, he actually was ordinary, at least to listeners who preferred their country music more raw and less crowd-pleasing. One does not sell the insane numbers that Garth did by accident; the harsher critics said he did it by being blandly appealing, middle of the road, and uncontroversial. It’s certainly true that Garth was no outlaw; he was a man for the people, every last one of them, and nowhere was that more obvious than on 1992’s expansive and warm-hearted positivity anthem “We Shall Be Free.”

Garth always said one of his key influences was Billy Joel, that other corny American stratospheric-mega-seller, and “We Shall Be Free” pulls liberally from the Joel catalog, particularly “Keeping the Faith.” (It predates “The River of Dreams,” the other Piano Man hit it most resembles, by a year; perhaps Garth inspired Billy.) It’s a sound designed to appeal to the maximum amount of people, and Garth makes sure to cast a wide net with the lyrics too, imagining a utopia that has fulfilled all the universal goals and dreams we’re supposed to agree on. Tolerance, equality. Feed the hungry, end homelessness, protect the environment. A number of celebrities appear in the video, and I deeply urge you to watch the video before reading further if you haven’t yet, each cameo is more insane than the last; Whoopi Goldberg, Patrick Swayze, Paula Abdul and so many others appear to offer platitudes and slogans, all of them framed like a READ poster in a school library. There’s clearly no intention to be divisive or challenging; there should be absolutely nothing controversial about it, except for being cheesy. It was the most controversial song of his career.

Garth’s politics aren’t a secret. The New Yorker once ran a headline calling him “Country Music’s Square, Liberal Dad.” Somehow this didn’t stop him from being the biggest star in history in the always-conservative sphere of country music. But rarely were his ideals as explicit on “We Shall Be Free,” whose message of inclusion was enough to get it banned from many stations. The line that caused most of the controversy is the beginning of the second verse … “when we’re free to love anyone we choose.” In my memory, that phrasing wasn’t inextricably tied to gay activism yet, but maybe I just think that because I was a kid, it wasn’t like I knew anything about politics then. In any case, Brooks erased any ambiguity and affirmed that yes, it was a gay rights statement; Garth, who had a gay sister, wanted no confusion about this.

Homophobia was a constant overtone in the ‘90s. Supporting gay rights was a genuinely daring move in 1992 even for mainstream liberal celebrities, let alone a country singer, and even as an eight-year-old the challenge in those lyrics weren’t lost on me. But I was also still naïve; I caught the clip of the two men celebrating in each other’s arms during the video, but skipped over the ones that followed. A white woman holds a black infant; a little white child and a little black child hug. These are family-friendly images that don’t strike me as noteworthy or challenging now, nor did they at the time, but that's exactly what they were; only half of Americans approved of interracial relationships in 1991. So that may very well have contributed to the backlash; it was Garth’s first single to miss the top ten. He says the backlash surprised him. The Internet didn’t exist yet; it was a lot easier to be surprised by this kind of thing.

I tend to think of the ‘90s as an innocent time; that’s not *just* because I was a kid, but it is true that ‘90s kids were inundated with warm fuzzy messages from children’s television, most of them resembling this video. Michael Bolton tells us solemnly that racism is a form of ignorance, John Elway and Troy Aikman assert the importance of an education. It’d be easy to dismiss this song and video as just more sanitized positivity for unsophisticated minds, except that it’s also unflinching about the darkness of the world. There are a lot of stark, scary clips in this video; the song proper starts with a smash cut from Garth to starving African children, and it keeps up that pace with footage of riots, wars, cross-burnings. (This is surely the only video ever to feature both neo-Nazis and Craig T. Nelson.)

“We Shall Be Free” is somehow edgy for its wholesomeness. While the gay rights message has become less challenging with time, other parts of the video have only become more so. “When we all can worship from our own kind of pews, we shall be free,” goes the song, over footage of a Muslim man praying towards Mecca. Garth says this song and video were inspired by the L.A. riots (there’s footage of Rodney King himself, that unlikeliest and unluckiest of peace activists, pleading for understanding). But it’s Garth himself who delivers the thesis of the video. “I know sometimes we stumble. But the human race?...” -- he chuckles and smiles here – “…it’s getting better.”

That was indeed the feeling of the time, in the delirium of the post-Cold War era when democracy was spreading across Europe. We see the Berlin Wall fall, a protester stop a tank at Tiananmen; the video ends with a dedication “to the human spirit. unbreakable.”  “We Shall Be Free” has the form of a spiritual, but the bright future he imagines isn’t a hypothetical afterlife, or a distant possibility far after our lifetimes. It’s real, and it’s just around the corner. Garth can afford to put images of famine victims and skinheads in his video because for him they represent problems that can and will be conquered. The worst moment in the video comes from Jay Leno, who smarms “Hey, wise up! Stay in school!” at the camera with his trademark oiliness. Leno’s insincerity has no place here; there’s no doubt that Garth earnestly means every word he sings.

To be unkind about it, I’m not sure what meaning this song could have these days except as an artifact of happier times. “We Shall Be Free” could only have been made when it was made; Garth attempted to make an updated version in the early ‘00s, but ultimately chose not to release it. Only recently has he let it see the light of the day; the celebrity appearances are just as mind-blowingly random as the original (Sean Connery??) but the feeling is much more hollow. It’s obvious why he sat on it: It no longer made sense in a post-9/11 world, and it certainly doesn’t connect to 2020 where global authoritarianism is back on the rise. Reba McEntire, who was in the original video, made a similar uplift anthem this year, “Be a Light,” and the difference between it and “We Shall Be Free” is striking. “We Shall Be Free” is buoyant and powerful; “Be a Light” is downbeat and dour. “In a world full of hate, be a light,” it goes. A world full of hate.

While I was writing this, President Donald Trump issued the closest thing to a concession he is likely to give, leaving the rest of us to navigate the aftermath of the most malicious, corrupt and exhausting American administration we are likely to ever live through. The guy I voted for won, and I feel relief (and not a little spite) from it, but I do not feel optimism. Well, maybe a little, I do believe things will be better than they were, but “We Shall Be Free” represents a joy for the future that I haven’t felt in a long time. Garth’s bright ray of hope feels like such a false promise to me now. It was a dream that didn’t come true, and at this moment in history, right after the election, watching the “We Shall Be Free” video causes me physical pain. It hurts, a lot. I watched it thirty times in a row. I’ll probably do so again before the night is over. I don’t know what keeps drawing me back to this corny song, long after the world made it obsolete. Maybe if I listen to it enough I’ll believe again that we’re moving towards that brighter future. Or that there’s a unified “we” to do it.