Joe Biden Inauguration Music: J-Lo Is No Aretha Franklin

National Catholic Register, 22 January 2021

The music chosen to celebrate President Biden’s inauguration stands in stark contrast to one the president-elect participated in just 12 years prior.

After Garth Brooks sang Amazing Grace at the inauguration of President Joe Biden yesterday, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, chairman of the ceremony, curiously observed that “in our culture [that song] is as close to both poetry and prayer as you could possibly come.” 

A strange thing to say, because any hymn is precisely that, a poem that is a prayer set to music. U.S. culture has tens of thousands of them.

It is possible that the senator was simply flummoxed after the earlier musical performance of Jennifer Lopez, easily the worst ever in inaugural history. Was it a folk classic? Was it an anthem? Was she plugging her 20-year-old party song?

All of the above. For reasons unexplained, Lopez opened with a verse of This Land Is Your Land, then shifted into a verse of America the Beautiful before the mash-up diverted into a shouted line from the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, rising to a crescendo with her bellowing Let’s Get Loud!, the pop hit from her 1999 album. 

America the Beautiful does not need — least of all at an inauguration — help from Woody Guthrie; to scream “Let’s Get Loud” turns a patriotic hymn into a vainglorious marketing plug. It degraded the moment. 

Music at inaugurations is usually carefully chosen, though one expects that President Biden did not envision that J-Lo would update “God-shed-His-grace-on-thee” to “everyone-please-look-at-me.” 

I imagine that President Barack Obama was thinking that they got it right in 2009, at his first inauguration. I was there, at the Capitol, covering it for the Canadian press. The most memorable moment was not the oath of office, nor even the inaugural address, which was strangely flat given Obama’s rhetorical prowess. It was the music. 

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