To its credit, the Concert for Valor was as reverent as a Catholic Mass. The downside? It was as reverent as a Catholic Mass.  The Veterans Day event, held on Washington DC’s National Mall before an estimated crowd of 800,000, was festooned with luminaries and celebrities including Barack and Michelle Obama, Meryl Streep and Steven Spielberg, who honored brave veterans in a series of moving video packages. The crowd was silent during the tributes, and for good reason. The selected veterans represent the best of America’s resiliency and mettle, and were well-deserving of the reflective moments.  The thing is, The Concert for Valor was precisely that – a concert – but most of its musical performances were marbled with the same veneration given to a video package about an injured soldier. The troops deserve all the respect they receive, but The Concert for Valor had such a mirthless, self-serious tone, it was a tribute to American’s veterans that failed to capture their raucous energy.  There’s a reason we say someone “curses like a sailor”. Military personnel are brave, brash and fearless. Not that you’d know it from the performances in the three-hour show, which often felt so elegiac, it was hard to remember it was a Veterans Day concert rather than a Memorial Day concert.  Take Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, who performed stripped-down, acoustic versions of My Hero and Everlong to an audience so quiet you could practically hear their phones vibrating. The slow-and-low trend ran through the evening, with the typically energetic Jessie J and Rihanna trotting out glacial ballads. Even Bruce Springsteen, who also played a solo, acoustic mini-set, managed to drain the joy out of Dancing in the Dark.  The Zac Brown Band and the Black Keys fared much better by mostly sticking to what they knew and ripping through electric sets featuring their best-known hits. It was during these sets that The Concert for Valor started to represent a USO show, in which it is better understood that the best way to honor the military personnel is to entertain them.  No one understood that better than Metallica, who put on the best set of the night, energetically shredding through hits like Enter Sandman and Master of Puppets. In a masterstroke, the band set up rafters behind them and filled them with a platoon of veteran superfans to thrash and pogo behind them. The Metallica set was the first time in the show anyone seemed to be having any real fun – including the concert’s director, who played with a mini-camera mounted to Lars Ulrich’s drum kit and swooped over the invigorated crowd with crane shots.  The second most rapturous response of the night came for – surprise! – British comedian John Oliver, who won laughs by honoring the troops the way comedians honor people – by roasting them. Oliver picked at the American military’s infamous inter-branch rivalries. “Everywhere I went in Afghanistan, it was the army and the navy talking shit about the air force,” Oliver said, recalling his time entertaining the troops with the USO.  Eminem also understood his audience, unleashing over a dozen f-bombs during his closing set, including his wish for the crowd to have a “Happy motherfuckin’ Veterans Day”, which sounds awfully close to something a veteran might say.  There was Twitter backlash over Eminem’s profanity – though somehow very little mention of Grohl’s gum chewing – but the live audience was receptive, and it was no surprise. Unlike most of the evening’s performers, Eminem understood that what the veterans needed most was a good time.
Even Rihanna seemed subdued at a concert that, Metallica and the Black Keys apart, was more like a memorial service than a tribute to the troops, writes Joshua Alston