Music for Many Firsts at Inauguration Events

NYT
January 22, 2009
Music Review
Music for Many Firsts at Inauguration Events
By JON PARELES

President Obama danced his way through 10 official inaugural balls on Tuesday night to the song “At Last,” which was a hit for Glenn Miller in 1941 and, more influentially, in 1961 for Etta James. Her version made the song, written by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, an R&B standard and a wedding perennial. It has been revived and recorded steadily ever since by performers including, most recently, Beyoncé, who sang it for Mr. Obama’s first public dance as president at the Neighborhood Ball, broadcast on ABC.

A good campaigner wields symbols deftly, and Mr. Obama chose brilliantly with “At Last.” It’s an adoring, slow-dance love song with a title that can evoke far more. Politicos can take it to mean the end of the Bush administration and the Democrats taking control. And Americans of all ethnicities can take it as a clear reference to Mr. Obama becoming the first African-American president: a decisive turning point in a history of slavery and racial discrimination. The song treats the moment not with self-righteousness or resentment, but as a long-awaited embrace: “Here we are in heaven/for you are mine at last.”

Music had long anticipated this moment. African-Americans repaid the historical injustice of slavery with generous and profound cultural gifts, making American music a free-for-all where fertile, powerful ideas — like swing, call-and-response, the modes and phrasing of the blues, the drive and dynamics of gospel and the immediacy of hip-hop — could triumph in the marketplace and on the dance floor.

For performers of every background, American popular music (and much of the world’s popular music) is, unmistakably, African-American music. Americans have long accepted black musicians as stars; sooner or later, politics had to follow. And Mr. Obama’s inaugural events, which strove to involve everyone, were suffused with African-American soul like the rest of American pop culture. Aretha Franklin, wearing an outsized, glamorized church-lady hat, sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the swearing-in ceremony with the flamboyance of a gospel hymn: “Let freedom ring, let it ring!”

The evening before, at a concert to mark Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Ms. Franklin treated her free concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts like a gospel service, including only one secular song (“Chain of Fools”) and hurling her voice skyward while promising to praise Jesus everywhere. “I’ll stand up and tell it in the White House!” she declared.

The language of gospel, blended with secular American optimism, emerged in Mr. Obama’s campaign slogans, like “Change you can believe in.” Now, savoring the outcome of that campaign while considering the state of the nation, the inaugural music drew on another cornerstone of African-American tradition: the determination to face troubles and hard times with hope. The inauguration’s official face was bookended with those two aspects of the music, moving in two days from a somber introduction to a joyful finale.

The earnest opening ceremony televised on Sunday from the Lincoln Memorial, which HBO telecast free for cable and satellite viewers, was more than aware of the symbolism of Lincoln as emancipator and of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington.

The chords and choirs of gospel music were used by Bruce Springsteen (with “The Rising”) and even the country singer Garth Brooks to sing about striving for better times. Stevie Wonder (with Usher and Shakira) sang his socially conscious “Higher Ground” at the Lincoln Memorial, then returned at the determinedly upbeat Neighborhood Ball, with an all-star singalong on his “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours.”

Song titles told the story at the Neighborhood Ball: Sting (with Mr. Wonder on harmonica) with “Brand New Day,” Shakira singing Van Morrison’s “Bright Side of the Road,” Mariah Carey with “Hero.”

Bill Clinton’s 1993 pre-inaugural concert showed his baby-boomer taste, for good and bad. Bob Dylan performed “Chimes of Freedom” on the Lincoln Memorial steps, followed two days later by an Inauguration Eve concert filled with presumably reassuring 1970s soft rock from Fleetwood Mac and Barry Manilow. Political differences offered George W. Bush less of a talent pool; Wayne Newton, the country duo Brooks & Dunn and the Latin pop singer Ricky Martin (who would later turn against Mr. Bush over the Iraq war) performed at his pre-inaugural event.

Stars who had shunned the politics of the Bush administration happily flocked to Washington for Mr. Obama’s inauguration. “Today is the beginning of no more separation, no more segregation!” Mary J. Blige exulted at the Neighborhood Ball before singing her own “Just Fine,” a song about hard-won self-esteem. (Two days earlier, at the Lincoln Memorial, she had poured emotion into Bill Withers’s comforting song “Lean On Me.”)

While it was a gospel and soul inauguration, it was also a hip-hop inauguration. Rappers who are charismatic, articulate, self-made successes may well see Mr. Obama as one of their own; he also gives them someone to boast about besides themselves.

Jay-Z, who performed his “History” at the Neighborhood Ball, also headlined a premium-priced concert on Monday night at the Warner Theater, a few blocks from the White House. Among his guests was Young Jeezy, who has a song called “My President Is Black”; Jay-Z added verses of his own: “My president is black/In fact he’s half white/So even in the racist mind/he’s half right.”

It continued, “My president is black/but his house is all white.”

The Youth Ball, an official inaugural event telecast on MTV, featured Kanye West — a Chicagoan, like Mr. Obama — who rewrote his song “Heartless” to pay tribute to the new president: “From miles around they came to see him speak/The story that he told/to save a country that’s so blue/that they thought had lost its soul/the American dream come true tonight.”

Other constituencies presented unofficial events, celebrating their new sense of inclusion and, perhaps, reminding the incoming administration of their clout and attention. There were musical celebrations from Chicago independent rockers, from the voter-registration group Rock the Vote and from the gay, lesbian and transgender voters of the Human Rights Campaign. At a Latino Inaugural Gala on Sunday night, more than a dozen legislators and two cabinet nominees turned out along with salsa, pop, mariachi and Latin rock bands to celebrate a Hispanic turnout that voted 2 to 1 for Mr. Obama, which provided the margin of victory in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico.

In pop as in politics, self-promotion is never off the agenda. Michelle, Sasha and Malia Obama were dancing in the front row at the Kids’ Inaugural on Monday, telecast on the Disney Channel, where Disney-nurtured stars of tween-pop including the Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato sang their peppy hits about “burning up” and breaking up. With sublime shamelessness, Miley Cyrus looked at Mr. Obama’s daughters and said, “Girls, I know you guys must be awful proud of your dad, and so am I,” then brought her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, onstage to sing.

While the new president’s politics and identity were the overwhelming draws for so many musical celebrants — bringing out countless performances electrified by the moment — he also has a musical ace in the hole: his name.

The percussive “Barack” followed by the three open-voweled syllables of “Obama” give him the most singable name in presidential history, and from the National Mall to the inaugural balls, amateurs and stars alike kept finding new ways to chant, sing and shout it.