SHE WAS in her mid twenties, small and pudgy, with a face that could have been pretty were it not for the incessant chewing motion she made with her jaw and wild eyes that could not stay still. Pinned above her heart in handwritten script was a large laminated button that read, “Garth Sucks!”
These were fighting words here in Nashville this sultry and damp June week, as she and I stood among 24,000 other wildly devoted country-music aficionados at an annual festival called Fan Fair. The Garth condemned by her button is Garth Brooks, who is not only country music’s phenomenon of the moment but the biggest pop star in America too-the man whose vertiginous rise is the emblem of an explosion that has placed country at the forefront of American music.
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