What a difference eight years makes. Two days before President Obama was first inaugurated, the moment was celebrated with We Are One, a massive concert at the Lincoln Memorial attended by an estimated 400,000 people. It was a beautiful event, with readings and spoken interludes by the likes of Tom Hanks, Tiger Woods, Denzel Washington, Marisa Tomei, and more. The music came from a staggering lineup of stars: Bruce Springsteen, Mary J. Blige, James Taylor, John Legend, John Mellencamp, Herbie Hancock, will.i.am, Sheryl Crow, U2, Beyonce, and many more, performing a mixture of their own hits and carefully chosen classics.
Today, there’s the Make America Great Again inauguration concert:
The performers who are scheduled to play at the Make America Great Again concert include Toby Keith, Jon Voight, Jennifer Holliday, The Piano Guys, Lee Greenwood, RaviDrums, 3 Doors Down, and The Frontmen of Country. Military bands and a fireworks show by Grucci will also be featured during the concert. President-Elect Donald Trump will speak.
Except, whoops, Broadway singer Jennifer Holliday shouldn’t be on that list, because she backed out, choosing instead to stand with her LGBT fans. So what about the rest of this list? Who is RaviDrums? Apparently, he’s:
… a self-styled futuristic solo drummer and DJ whose claims to fame include a cameo in The Matrix Reloaded’s party scene, a role on Howie Mandel’s short-lived NBC variety show Howie Do It, and, most internet-famously, a 2008 Wii Music demonstration that many took as unintended comedy.
Okay, then. He will surely electrify the crowd. As will The Piano Guys, a Utah-based group who went out of their way to explain how they “abhor and decry bullying” and respect women.
But the lineup of country musicians may be the most telling.
This isn’t trying to make a cultural point about how Trump’s event features country musicians and this says something about rural culture and race. Obama’s concert had country musicians, too. But where Obama had Jennifer Nettles, who was at the time regularly at the top of the country charts with her band Sugarland and had also topped country charts with a Jon Bon Jovi duet, and Garth Brooks, the best-selling solo album artist in U.S. history, Trump has Toby Keith, who never had anything like Brooks’ success and whose career was on a clear downward trajectory by the time of Obama’s first inauguration. By now, Keith is firmly in has-been territory. And yet he may be the biggest name on Trump’s roster. In the country category, he is joined by “the Frontmen of Country,” a trio of members of has-been country groups that never had Keith’s level of success and have been over the hill for longer than he has. Then there’s Lee Greenwood of “God Bless the USA” fame—while the song has had recurring success in moments of nationalist fervor, Greenwood is a one-trick pony for audiences not deeply familiar with 1980s country music.
The artists who came out for Obama were a mixture of American musical legends and people at the top of their game. People whose songs were part of the fabric of American life and ones who you would have heard in any hour scanning through radio stations in your car radio. Trump’s lineup—at its peak—reads like a “where are they now?” And in some cases—DJ RaviDrums, anyone?—that question would never be asked.
But hey, Donald Trump is going to tell us what an amazing lineup of celebrities they’ve got—or else that celebrities don’t matter, depending on his mood—and that’s what matters. To him. But in reality, the comparison between Trump and Obama is a thousand times more stark than the comparison between their respective concerts.