But as I watched McBride last Friday night at Radio City Music Hall, none of my reservations mattered a damn. Her voice remains one of the wonders of contemporary pop music. As powerful as it is on CD, it’s that much more powerful live. And when she hunched over at the end of “Broken Wing,” slowly rising until her head was thrown back and her arms extended for the sustained final note, you weren’t seeing a diva pose but a physical expression of the progress of the note, the journey from the ground to the clouds. One of the pleasures of music — whether soul, country (which amounts to white soul), or opera — is the chance to be bowled over by a powerful voice. At her most astonishing moments, McBride offers you the joy of surrender.
Dressed all in black — slim flared trousers, bejeweled lacy top, fitted swallow-tailed tuxedo coat — she projected a tougher, leaner look than usual. It felt exactly right when, for the encore, she leapt happily into Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” During the terrific cover of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man,” the sneer that crossed her face on the withering line “After all, he’s just a man” told you that she really gets that often misunderstood song. (Something that couldn’t be said for the yob in the front of me who raised his arms in triumph whenever she sang the title.) “Independence Day” remains the closer — nothing can follow it. But any possibility that it had become rote was denied when McBride threw her microphone stand across the stage and the anger in the song came to life.
You could hear the difference between the rock-derived adult contemporary sound that we now call country and the lush sound of classic country when she performed selections from her 2005 covers album, Timeless, and Wayne Dahl’s wonderful lap-steel playing came to the fore. And though she has long tried to keep her politics private, she has attempted to put some social content in her music. At worst, that’s resulted in the mawkish child-abuse ballad “Concrete Angel” (performed with the godawful video for the song projected behind her). But at Radio City, she was putting a country audience face to face with what country performers usually shield their audiences from. The montage of female faces shown during the upbeat-girl power hit “This One’s for the Girls” featured women of ethnicities and personal styles who were nowhere to be found in the audience. You could say that “Love’s the Only House” is another social-problem song that sells love as the answer and wouldn’t ruffle anyone; you could say the same thing about “In the Ghetto.” As with the Elvis tune, it’s the performance that gives it its real sting.
So it isn’t just that in a crowd where I heard snide remarks about the Dixie Chicks, McBride was singing about the propensity to ignore the divide between rich and poor, about expressing empathy for kids who carry guns, and suggesting that the reason people can’t afford food isn’t because they’re too lazy to work. That would be to praise the song because it was a scolding. What was exhilarating was the force that she put into the exclamation “Come on down to my house!” Softly spoken in the studio version, it was here the shout of someone who sounded ready to take on whatever burden she could bear, and the overt message that it was her duty to do so because she’s been damn lucky. It was a declaration of inclusion. At moments like that, whatever may be lacking in McBride’s songs is nowhere near as important as what’s there.
