It seems the closer I get to concluding The People’s Albums — my journey through the 50 best-selling albums of all time — the farther away it feels. It’s pretty hilarious that in the intro to my last entry, the late ’90s flipside to this entry, Come On Over by Shania Twain, I expressed optimism over my then-current pace. Well, here we are a year-and-a-half later with no progress in between. But don’t worry! I’ll explain.
Album: No Fences
Artist: Garth Brooks
Release Date: August 27, 1990
Copies Sold in the U.S.: 18 million
Why Was This Popular?
Because America Thinks It’s The Good Guy (Even When It’s Not)
So, a funny thing happened. Last summer, I started listening to Garth Brooks’s No Fences and did the light research I usually do in preparation for the decade-plus journey that has been these People’s Albums pieces. Then, for whatever reason, I never ended up writing the piece even though I had written down a whole outline and various thoughts I wanted to use about this album that I, quite frankly, am surprised I was able to have so many thoughts about. Then, after a bit of procrastination, news came out that Brooks had been accused by a former hairdresser of sexual assault and the narrative I’d landed on of painting Brooks as a generally nice guy felt impossible to back up. So I put it on the shelf for a while.
Returning to this album many months later, in the context of getting to the bottom of why America loved this man and this music feels a bit different. Obviously, when I write these reviews, I’m writing about past moments in America’s pop history and how music can tap into the feelings of the times they were created in. But at the same time, these are albums with lasting appeal, so it’s not a stretch to say that they surely must have something to say about the times we’re currently living in. Considering the way that all of our perceptions of America have changed in the last 6 months or so, that couldn’t help but change the way I think about American music, much in the way it happened after the 2016 election or the 2020 election or really any presidential election.
This time around, the first thought I had after the 2024 election could also be applied to how I think about Garth Brooks now. The thought I mostly had in mid-to-late November of last year was that America just isn’t as great as it thinks it is. We think we’re the good guys, the scrappy newcomer to the world stage, the big charismatic personality with a heart of gold that everyone wants to party with. But now, it’s hard not to feel like our country is built on top of just as much evil and greed as it is on hope and optimism.
I had a bit of a similar reaction of deep cynicism after hearing the news of the Garth Brooks allegations after convincing myself that Garth Brooks was a decent enough guy, even if his music never really appealed to me and the kinds of people who listened to him were never my people. But now, it’s hard for me to believe anyone that rich and famous could possibly be a good guy. Trust is hard to come by these days, and it’s hard to trust that anyone could possibly be depended on to be resolutely decent. Again, I don’t want to assume that the allegations against Brooks are undeniably true without due process, but it’s also the kind of thing that makes you want to just throw up your arms and declare that everyone must suck and no one deserves the benefit of the doubt.
But let’s go back a bit farther to a decade known as the 1990s. The decade where Garth Brooks reigned over country music like pretty much no one had before. I’ll admit that I was just a little too young to have much recollection of Garth-mania at its peak, but I do vaguely remember him being a big deal when I was a kid. However, I don’t feel like I grew up in the right part of the country for Garth Brooks to be a foundational figure in the type of music I heard in the background of my life. I also don’t think I was able to name a single Garth Brooks song until much later in life, which happened to be Mr. Brooks’s big break-out single from this album, “Friends In Low Places”.
Despite No Fences’s record sales being a product of a more simple time in music consumption, you could still look at Brooks’s popularity through the lens of our currently fragmented culture. I’m sure it was very easy for plenty of kids who didn’t grow up in “country” households to not have much perception of the man. After all, I was having a conversation with my fiancée a few months back about Garth Brooks and she honestly did not know who he was. I was a bit baffled by this at first, but then struggled to explain exactly who Garth Brooks was or why he was popular, probably because I also didn’t grow up in the part of the country that cares about Garth Brooks.
The thing is, there are lots of country artists these days who are also very popular that I have little perception of (I’m still only vaguely aware of Morgan Wallen), but I have to imagine that in the ‘90s, most non-country-listening music fans at least had heard a Garth Brooks song or two. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe the monoculture wasn’t actually that pervasive, since we currently live in an age of algorythm-feuled, massively popular artists. But if an artist doesn’t represent the types of people you associate with, it’s still easy enough to avoid them.
But Garth Brooks was never satisfied by the cozy confines of his chosen genre. This was the man who kicked off the pop-country era with the mission of selling out stadiums in the same way that pop and rock stars did. I’m sure there are plenty of writers more knowledgeable about the leap that country music made in terms of mainstream popularity when Mr. Brooks stepped on the stage, but when looking broadly at all the other popular artists that followed in Brooks’ footsteps – from Shania Twain to the Dixie Chicks to Taylor Swift — you get a sense of the paradigm shift that happened here.
Of course, Garth Brooks’ appeal is a bit harder to explain than the other massively popular artists of the ‘90s (country or otherwise) because he just seems so… ordinary. There’s absolutely nothing flashy or provocative about Garth Brooks, to the point that he had to create his own “edgy” persona in Chris Gaines just to see what it felt like to be the bad boy for once. But in this everyman persona, you can see a bit of America’s nationwide politics of the time. Much like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he seemed like the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with. Why was this type of persona so massively appealing back then? I honestly don’t feel like I have enough nuanced memories of what it was like to live through the 1990s to answer that question. But I think it perhaps speaks to the economic comfort of that era, and the fact that middle America was happy to follow someone who wasn’t looking to rock the boat too much and instead keep on truckin’.
Did This Deserve To Be Popular?
I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting from this album. It ranked among one of The People’s Albums that I was curious to hear but would have probably gone my whole life without hearing if not forcing myself to for the sake of this gal-darned website. My will to listen to it also wasn’t strengthened at all by the fact that Garth Brooks, ever the shrewd businessman, doesn’t have his music on Spotify or iTunes. Opting instead to bestow his tunes to another wealthy bald man by inking an exclusive deal with Amazon Music. He recently explained that this was because he prefers physical music since it’s better for artists economically, and unlike Spotify and Apple, Amazon actually sells physical music. This is a fairly typical instance of Brooks seeming like a good dude while also raising suspicions about the idea.
Anyways, after spending some time with this album by acquiring it by non-Amazon means, I would say I was a little surprised by how modest its ambitions are. After having the perception that Garth Brooks blew up country music to a volume as loud as his freshly-starched shirts, I was surprised to find that this still very much sounds like a traditional country album. Sure, some of the instrumentation and production is a little slick (you’ll hear a ‘90s synth here and there), but this is quite a ways from the country-scented pop that Shania Twain would close the decade with. Perhaps that speaks to where pop-country was when Brooks introduced the idea to Nashville at the start of the decade in comparison to where it would end up.
That said, there are still moments where you see Brooks wanting to reach beyond the limitations that country music tends to impose. The album-opener, “The Thunder Rolls” sees Brooks looking for a cinematic approach by setting a scene and delivering drama in a way that certainly shows that Brooks had grown up listening to rock artists. Now, is the song a little corny? A little bit, but at least it’s going for something.
It’s this song and the album’s other big single “Friends In Low Places” that tap into Brooks’ appetite for bigness, with “Low Places” being the kind of song that you can see large groups of drunk people singing in unison at concerts, karaoke nights, weddings, and everything in between. Meanwhile, the rest of the album is a little more low-key, but honestly, I didn’t hate that about it. You do get the sense that Brooks respects the world-weariness of country music’s greats even if he seemed intent on leaving them behind for greener, more lucrative pastures.
Would I Spend Money On this?
This is not an album that I could ever really see myself buying. That said, the thought did enter my brain when weighing the fact that I’d have to listen to this album somehow in order to write about it despite the fact that I sure hate Amazon. I’m honestly surprised that it has taken me this long to talk about the fact that I hate Amazon on this blog, but here we are. Anyways…
Apart from Brooks’ Amazon ties, I just feel like there’s so much good country music out there that I haven’t bought on vinyl, and Garth Brooks just feels so far down on my list of priorities. Still, this album was perfectly listenable, which perhaps gets at why this man was so popular. He wasn’t out there looking to offend your tastes. He just hoped that everyone, whether they were in a high or low place, could just have a good time.
Next Time On The People’s Albums: Do you know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby. And you’re going to see what thoughts I have about Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction.