The hoax is the sense of soilidity of I and other. In the beginning is open space, zero, self-contained, without relationship. But in order to confirm zeroness, we must create one to confirm zero exists. We create two to confirm one’s existence, and then we go out again and confirm two by three, three by four, and so on. This is what is called samsara, the continuous, vicious cycle of confirmation of existence. –CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA
(GOOD DL’BOY OR TRANSGENDER CYBORG?)
If there’s a final frontier in the land of questionable taste with which I have yet to establish communications, it would be the frightful valley of contemporary Country Rock. Not country music in general, of course, but that highly successful mutant substrain that emerged over the last decade and a half, distinguished by such artists as Wynona Judd, Shania Twain, and the Dixie Chicks. Something about its pounding, overproduced homogeneity brings to mind the recordings of Jefferson Starship after even Grace Slick bailed out. That bad. Head and shoulders above all the other “New Nashville” performers, both in terms of sales and impact on the public imagination–or at least public attention–is a balding, lumpen, good ol’ boy with a wee streak of outlaw who goes by the name of Brooks.
Garth Brooks is by any standard a cultural force to be reckoned with. His carefully constructed sports-fan, regular-guy, suburban-cowboy persona, with its peculiarly soft masculinity, strikes a chord among baby-boomers, who often identify with his middle-class stories of decent, hardworking, Christian folk minding their own business. He’s certainly the best-selling country artist ever, and (if his record company’s tally is accurate) the most successful solo recording artist of all time, ranking third in total all-time sales below Led Zeppelin and The Beatles. While this enormous commercial success would seem to be the usual result of talent, timing, and a powerful marketing machine, I have recently begun to suspect that there is something radically different about Brooks’s stardom.
The question about actual sales figures is raised in part by the blatant marketing frenzy with which Brooks has pursued album sales over the past few years: withdrawing his first three albums, then rereleasing them as a box set with a handful of bonus tracks; producing a Greatest Hits package available for only one year; donating partial profits from the slow-selling Sevens to Oprah Winfrey’s charity Angel Network, on the condition that she plug the CD every day for a week. These actions may have moved units, but it left fans and industry insiders scratching their heads. Indeed, Brooks seemed desperate to reach the 100-million mark before the turn of the Millennium. Rumors of his megalomania and bullying behind the Nashville scenes surfaced, at odds with the artist’s “shucks ma’am” disavowal of any savvy self-management. A couple of years ago, I started hearing odd rumors about Garth–that he was retiring, that he was trying to switch careers by attending spring training with the San Diego Padres, that he had begun speaking of himself in the third person. Dude’s cracking, I thought.
Then, in the fall of 1999, Brooks announced his next project: an album by a fictional Australian/Angeleno grunge-rock star named Chris Gaines, to be performed and otherwise depicted by Brooks. The album was a prequel to The Lamb–the first feature-length film that Brooks’s production company was to release through Paramount. The Lamb was the story of an obsessed fan’s attempt to sort out the mystery of Chris Gaines’s death. Brooks was writing the screenplay, and would probably star as Gaines, recording a soundtrack full of new material, to be followed, if it seemed appropriate, by several more experiments with the Gaines persona. Creating a remarkable conceptual alias, Brooks had finally got my attention. Yet, I heard nothing about it until one year later, when In the Life of Chris Gaines finally began showing up in droves in CD store cut-out bins. I picked up a copy for $2.99, and set about trying to discern why the project was so arresting.
It wasn’t the music. In spite of a couple well-crafted pop songs, and the truly bizarre medley of The Youngbloods’ nineteen-sixties anthem “Get Together” with Cheryl Wheeler’s rap “If It Were Up to Me,” In the Life takes Brooks’s successful middle-of-the-road formula only slightly off its well-beaten path–into the territory of The Eagles or Bob Seger or, most strangely, former Fleetwood Mac frontman Lindsey Buckingham. Much of the Gaines LP replicates Buckingham’s distinctive sound, and even some of the biographical details of Gaines’s life are cribbed from Buckingham’s. An intriguing choice of prototypes, but rather than follow Buckingham’s example of risky musical adventurism at the peak of commercial success–a brilliant album’s worth of highly idiosyncratic post-punk pop songs set among the dross surrounding it on Tusk, followed by an increasingly quirky solo career–Brooks altered his generic AM radio instrumentation only slightly and poured his energy into manipulating the packaging and media relations.
In spite of various high-profile precedents of creating artistic aliases, such as David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, Brooks claimed, “It just happens to be something nobody has ever done before.” At least in terms of orchestrated hype, he has a case. Working with superstar pop producer Don Was and impresario Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, the Chris Gaines LP was cooked up as a greatest hits package. It included artwork for an entirely fictitious back catalogue, featuring a slimmed-down and toupeed Brooks with a soul patch and black leather pants, in which he looks for all the world like Trent Reznor. In one photo, Gaines even poses in a pair of black and white Pierrot leotards, basket bulging–a parody of the checkerboard suit worn by Brooks on the cover of his early hit The Chase. Both a one-hour special on the project for NBC and a “Behind the Music” episode on VHI exploring the fictional rocker’s tragic life were somehow finagled. Brooks appeared on Saturday Night Live as Gaines, and drew SNL’s highest ratings in five years. He made himself available for press and radio interviews and did the talk-show rounds.
And the record bombed. The media were particularly vitriolic, most often speculating facetiously about Brooks’s mental stability before putting the whole affair down to an aborted attempt to cultivate a mainstream pop constituency. Although Brooks’s people claim multiplatinum numbers, Soundscan figures indicate less than a million copies actually sold, in spite of a desperate last-minute retail price reduction. Brooks had effectively committed commercial suicide. A hastily thrown together Christmas album, released only months later, reeked of spin control, and fared even worse at the checkout counters. In the year following, Brooks announced (not for the first time) his retirement from the music industry and scrapped plans for The Lamb, replacing it with a made-for-TV Christmas special featuring Whoopi Goldberg. His wife filed for divorce. On the surface, we were witness to the crashing and burning of a star who misunderstood his fan base and made a big, wrong move. But surfaces can be deceiving.
For the key to the tremendous fan and media backlash is rooted not in the music’s stylistic deviations but rather in Brooks’s violation of the tacit agreement that his performative identity as a good ol’ boy, one of the people, would remain the one real identity around which his relationship with his audience was to be enacted. The inevitable corollary of Garth Brooks saying “I could’ve been Chris Gaines” is “I chose instead to be Garth Brooks, but it is an equal and equally fictional personality.” If Brooks indeed views “Garth” as a fiction on the same level as “Chris Gaines,” then Brooks’s oeuvre instantly becomes an extremely interesting experiment in aesthetic manipulation. Where Ziggy and Sergeant Pepper were mere exercises in fiction by their respective creators, Chris Gaines essentially dislodges both his own and the GB persona from the anchor of a fixed, generative personality. Once we ascribe this kind of intentionality to the work, as I believe we should, then the Chris Gaines project becomes a retroactive time bomb that explodes and reassembles an entire decade of significant cultural production to mean approximately the opposite of its initial public reading. No longer a good ol’ boy, Brooks is now a sophisticated conceptual artist, with an audience of millions, at that.
Famous for his alternately flamboyant stage antics and chillingly smooth “Howdy Neighbor” patter, the GB character was pegged as an artifact early on. The patent diva theatricality of his repeated retirement threats, the almost constant jockeying for headlines, the obsession with breaking show-biz records, and the relentlessly uncreditable playacting of “sincerity” all stand as uncontradicted testament to the micromanaged artificiality of Brooks’s public figure. Additionally, Brooks has repeatedly made statements distancing himself from his persona, culminating in his notorious deadpan usage of the third person to refer to his creation’s activities.
Alternately, if “Chris Gaines” is Garth Brooks’s “other,” it’s a horrifying testament to the narrow spectrum of options accepted by the greatest consensus of cultural consumers in history (100 million records sold). He might as well have gone in blackface. As a dislocation of the real in an attempt to prove the relative authenticity of the Garth Brooks persona, Chris Gaines is an utter failure. The only interpretation in keeping with Brooks’s track record of canny manipulation of the mediascape is that Brooks was deliberately undermining the same mechanisms of fixed, essentialist identity that he had played off of in order to tap into the public’s desire. He was, in effect, ringing down the curtain on the Garth Brooks character, while pulling out the rug from his public’s conviction that the celebrity persona of the white, Christian, monogamous, heterosexual male was in any way less of a performative construct than Marilyn Manson or Ru Paul.
Although Madonna has been touted as the embodiment of feminist scholar Judith Butler’s notion of subversive contemporary disruption of imposed identity, the character of Chris Gaines amounts to a more radical destabilization of the relationship between media identity and the consumer, and does so in a way that doesn’t identify white, suburban heterosexuals as a distasteful option, let alone a ratifying “other.” There is no winking acknowledgment of “I am enacting a discourse on performative identity,” as evidenced by Madonna’s generally ostentatious stylistic about-faces, and particularly by her association with “vogueing.” Vogueing ultimately reinforces the concept of an essentialist personality underlying the charade, and attributes mutable performative identity only to those “in the know,” finally functioning as mere stigma management. Likewise, “passing” implies a doomed liminal transition into a mythic overworld of unselfconsciousness into which the flawed may emerge transfigured by their masquerade. Neither vogueing nor passing, Garth Brooks appears unsatisfied with any level of authorization, recognizing no normative threshold of authenticity.
Much of the surprise factor in Brooks’s shifting persona is due to the quarter from which he emerged. Country Music has long been a traditional stronghold of racist, sexist, and homophobic standards, and the concept of performatively constituted identity remains the domain of queer and feminist studies. Brooks’s career nevertheless exhibits a marked openness to these Nashville taboos early on: He risked alienating his fans in 1992 with “We Shall Be Free”–a single and video that overtly condoned homosexuality–and 1993 saw the benevolent outing of his sister and bass player Betsy Smittle during a Barbara Walters interview. Drag kings are reported to have a particular fondness for portraying Brooks, favoring “Friends in Low Places” for their pantomimes. More recently, Brooks received a GLAAD media award, bracketed his SNL performance as Gaines with skits alternately featuring Brooks in drag as an old French whore and as his GB persona, hopelessly infatuated with male exotic dance-troll Mango. In April 2000, Brooks headlined a benefit concert of out stars including k.d. lang, The Pet Shop Boys, and Melissa Etheridge. For the highlight of the show, he performed a duet with George Michael, stating afterwards that he was “here to tear down these fences we put around ourselves.”
Whether or not Brooks is aware of the reality-shredding implications of his actions is moot. To be aware necessitates having a stable reference point from which to weigh the success of his imposture, thereby attributing authenticity to an imitated other. Nevertheless, Brooks certainly is aware of the stakes involved, as he apparently wanted to build the biggest damn house of cards he could, before pulling out the tablecloth. His career was orchestrated to reach the maximum number of people, before destabilizing their common ground. Brooks’s surprise at his audience’s perturbed reaction to his fracturing the omerta of celebrity authenticity, and the trickle of GB products that has found release since In the Life, suggest that Brooks is acting intuitively, and lend a convincing organic curve to the dynamic of his career.
Artists seldom know in advance what the theoretical exegesis of their work might be, and the evidence points out that Brooks’s career, fiscally structured as it has been, is driven largely by instinct. Brooks forged his vision of art and identity in the midst of the Reagan-era shift in the popular understanding of reality–from the unchanging ground of existence to a tacit consensus for hire. While fine artists like Jeff Koons, Eleanor Antin, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine continue to provide interesting and entertaining commentary on this paradigm shift, their revulsion for the narrow Rocky or Rambo parameters of popular symbolic vocabulary (not to mention their suspicion that the greatest practitioners in the medium aren’t from the world of fine art) keep them from plunging fully into the murky broth of free-radical signifiers. While academics are talking about the possibility of performative identities, and less immersed artists have been constructing demo versions thereof, Garth Brooks steadily has been incubating the real thing.