by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Given that Cox Cable’s horrible change to “all-digital”
signals has made it impossible for me to record shows for later viewing (I could do that, but only in “the cloud” and only by paying
Cox yet more money on an already astronomical bill) about all I can do with the
conflicting Fourth of July programs is to do what I did both last year and this
— watch the first hour and a half of NBC’s show, which includes all the musical
performers, then just before they begin their display of fireworks over the New
York sky switch to the PBS A Capitol Fourth and watch their entire show, including the fireworks
over the Washington, D.C. sky. The NBC telecast was clearly aimed at a younger
demographic than the PBS one (no surprise there!) and featured Kelly Clarkson
holding forth at a big venue in New York City, Blake Shelton from the Grand Old
Opry stage in Nashville, a rock band I’d never heard of called American Authors
from a rooftop concert in New York City (I inevitably joked, “Do they think
that if they play on a rooftop people will think they’re the next Beatles?” —
and later, when a banjo featured prominently in their sound, “Do they think
that if they have a banjo people will think they’re the next Mumford and
Sons?”), Keith Urban (who sounded even less “country” than Blake Shelton did;
with his long dirty-blond hair he both looked and sounded like he was trying to
take over Tom Petty’s market slot now that the original is dead) from a venue
in Clarkston, Michigan (and no, I’d never heard of it before either!), Ricky
Martin from Las Vegas, and a show-closer from that rooftop with Hamilton cast member Brandon Victor Dixon and the Harlem
Gospel Choir (they were billed in the opening as the “World-Famous Harlem
Gospel Choir,” which led Charles and I to the same kinds of jokes we’d made
about the “World-Famous Glenn Miller Orchestra,” until we realized that in this
case “World-Famous” was simply a hyped designation and not part of the Harlem
Gospel Choir’s actual name).
The music was generally appealing but not great;
it began with arguably the greatest song of the night, Kelly Clarkson’s
Nietzschean anthem “Stronger” (as in “What doesn’t kill you makes you … ”),
which came out a few years ago and seemed to have a gutsiness missing in most
pop music these days. Then the show cut to Blake Shelton (his ability to get
the affections of far more charismatic, talented and sexy women than he — first
Miranda Lambert and now Gwen Stefani — never ceases to amaze me) and his song
“Honey Bee,” a nice novelty but also one whose rather sexist attitude towards
male-female relationships makes me think that’s why Miranda left him. Next up was American Authors
with a song called “The Best Day of My Life” that if they’d used a synthesizer
would have sounded like 1980’s pop-rock — in a way it came off as The Knack redux, which wasn’t a bad thing except that, like The
Knack, it meant the song was pure ear candy, a pleasant set of sounds that
didn’t really compel or move. After that they showed Keith Urban with one of
his neo-Tom Petty numbers called “Never Coming Down,” and then they trotted out
Ricky Martin for his signature hit “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” It’s still a fun
song, and though Ricky Martin is stouter than he was in his prime, his voice is
more gravelly and he doesn’t move as well, that didn’t matter much because he
was surrounded by an excellent chorus line in a quite spectacular Vegas
production that actually jump-started this old song into some life.
The next
song was a nondescript piece by Blake Shelton called “Gonna,” and then it was
back to the New York City rooftop for American Authors and a song called “Deep
Water,” considerably better than “The Best Day of My Life” largely because they
added some Black background singers (perhaps members of the Harlem Gospel Choir
waiting to perform “America, the Beautiful” later in the show?) and achieved a
beautiful church-rooted feel that helped their song rank with Clarkson’s quite
different “Stronger” as the best music of the night. Just about anything would
have seemed like an anticlimax, and in fact the show cut back to Clarkston,
Michigan for Keith Urban doing a song called “Going Home” that was sort of a
duet with Julia Michaels. I say “sort of a duet” because Michaels sang with
Urban on his record of it, so his live audiences would expect to hear her, but
since she’s apparently too big a star actually to tour with her (though I’ll
have to take that on faith since I’ve never heard of her before) Urban sang his
part live but hers came via a recorded voice and a film clip shown above the
stage. Then Clarkson — whom I admire not only for the strength of her voice and
the gutsiness of her songs but her willingness, like Adele, to appear as a
full-figured woman instead of starving herself to look like a
concentration-camp survivor — sang a song I originally thought I heard as
“Hate” (which I can imagine as a song title, especially about a breakup) but
actually turned out to be “Heat.” The show then cut back to Las Vegas for Ricky
Martin doing his other big hit, “Shake Your Bon Bon,” which got cut off early
as the technical people at NBC faded it out during the coda to his song to
hurry up and get the commercials in. After that it was back to Nashville for
Blake Shelton to sing a song reflecting someone else’s sexism — Jerry Reed’s “She Got the Gold Mine (I Got
the Shaft)” — an odd song choice for someone who’s recently been through a
highly publicized divorce.
That wrapped up the musical portions of the special,
though there were also some supposedly “inspirational” segments in which various
ordinary people (including the Italian-born inventor of the Philadelphia
cheese-steak sandwich) talked about what America meant to them — if President
Trump was watching he probably would have regarded these segments as more
examples of the “fake news media”’s bias against him, since they emphasized how
immigrants have built this country and made positive contributions to America.
A decade ago these would have been relatively uncontroversial sentiments for a
Fourth of July TV special, but in the modern era in which a regime
fundamentally opposed to this vision of America reigns supreme and
high-handedly separates children from their parents and threatens to reunite
the families only if they
self-deport, run by a President who wants his Homeland Security Secretary to
tell prospective immigrants, “We’re closed,” the idea that immigrants — especially immigrants of color — are actually good for this
country and don’t constitute, as this President has unforgettably called them,
an “infestation” (the sort of language that’s usually the first step towards
demonizing a minority group so the majority can be built up to hate them — the
final step in that process is all too often a genocide), is a classic example
of what George Orwell called oldthink, the sort of lingering trace of humanity the current rulers are trying
to eliminate from the population once and for all. Aside from the traces of an
older, more humanistic attitude towards immigrants as helping rather than hurting America, the NBC Fourth of July
special (the three-fourths of it I saw, anyway) was an engaging series of
contemporary music performances, none of it downright annoying (at least partly
because they blessedly avoided contaminating their program with any rappers,
thank goodness; is there anyone out there, aside from the shrinking number of
guilt-ridden white liberals with self-hatred complexes, who actually likes Kendrick Lamar?) but only two of which, Kelly
Clarkson’s “Stronger” and American Authors’ “Deep Water,” even approached greatness.
