While President Joe Biden’s inauguration was unlike any other, his messaging repeatedly spoke to a familiar theme: a return to normalcy.
And in a music special Wednesday night, he stressed it even more — with performances from Bon Jovi, John Legend, and Demi Lovato, which called for people to come together for a more hopeful future.
The event capped off a packed day — including executive actions and press briefings — for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who are moving swiftly ahead on their agenda as they retake the White House. Led by a somber Tom Hanks at the Lincoln Memorial, it also celebrated the labor of essential workers across the country, and featured a cameo from three former presidents.
Faced with daunting public health and economic crises, Republican opposition in Congress, as well as a significant segment of the electorate who still has questions about their victory, Biden’s administration has a lot of challenges to tackle as it gets underway.
7 key moments from President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration special
Wednesday’s event attempted to set an optimistic tone for how they plan to go about doing it.
“This is a great nation. We’re good people,” Biden said in his evening remarks. “And [to] overcome the challenges in front of us … requires us to come together in common love that defines us as Americans.”
We pulled together the evening’s most notable moments.
When celebrities came back to the White House
It’s hard to remember this, post-Trump, but it was once possible for a celebrity to present a performance at the White House as a politically neutral act. When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he entered amid the lingering controversy of Bush v. Gore, but Destiny’s Child played a concert for his inauguration weekend without backlash. “I wanna hear you say Bush!” called Beyoncé at one point.
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That era reached a pointed end in 2017, when Donald Trump took office. A-list celebrities, who had overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, boycotted the inauguration, with one celeb after another announcing that they would refuse to perform for Donald Trump.
But now, Trump is out of Washington. And in this brave new Biden era, Hollywood has re-embraced the White House.
Biden’s star-studded inaugural concert is a case in point of our new cultural landscape. Right now, the most powerful figures in popular culture are willing to ally with the most powerful figures in politics. It’s a mingling of soft power and hard power that sees both sides lending each other their cultural capital in service of a common aesthetic — and that aesthetic is, both traditionally and very much so today, one of a slightly cornball sentimentality.
It’s flagpins on your lapel. It’s Bruce Springsteen gently crooning above an acoustic guitar on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s Jon Bon Jovi singing directly into the camera in front of a seascape at sunrise. It’s the Foo Fighters solemnly instructing us to learn to love again. It’s Lin-Manuel Miranda and Joe Biden reciting Seamus Heaney together, in unison. It’s Katy Perry singing “Firework” as actual fireworks go off in the background.
That sentimentality can be a powerful force. For many, it’s profoundly welcome after the four years of intermittent rage and despair so many people experienced during the Trump administration. A bunch of powerful people who might have their flaws but would also like to champion some sort of basic decency and kindness is something we can surely all get behind. Who doesn’t like sunrises and beaches and Bruce Springsteen? Who doesn’t like calls for kindness?
At its very best, this sentimentality can create a moment of catharsis like Tuesday night’s national mourning for those lost to Covid-19, which featured Yolanda Adams singing “Hallelujah” and was our first nationwide public acknowledgment of the human cost of the pandemic. We need sentiment in moments like that, to acknowledge the terrible grief we are all experiencing. Or it can create a moment of pure ecstatic release, like John Legend channeling Nina Simone to sing “Feeling Good” on the National Mall on Wednesday night.