Bryan Adams: The Canadian Riff That Unites a Fractured World, One Power Ballad at a Time

Bryan Adams, a Canadian who once screamed into a studio microphone until it surrendered the riff for “Summer of ’69,” has become an unlikely UN-approved cultural export. While diplomats in Geneva haggle over carbon credits and pretend PowerPoints are binding treaties, Adams is quietly doing what soft-power theorists only fantasize about: getting entire continents to hum the same three chords in traffic jams from Jakarta to Johannesburg. If you think that sounds trivial, consider that the last time humanity agreed on anything this unanimously, smallpox was still fashionable.

The numbers are almost indecent. Spotify reports that Adams racks up north of 20 million monthly listeners—roughly the population of Sri Lanka deciding, en masse, that the perfect soundtrack for inflation, wildfires, and general geopolitical nausea is a man rasping about photographic memories and cheap guitars. Meanwhile, TikTok teenagers who’ve never seen a cassette tape are lip-syncing “Heaven” while their parents file for divorce in the next room. Globalization, it turns out, is less about supply chains and more about shared heartbreak over a four-minute key change.

Of course, nothing this successful escapes commodification. In 2022, the Chinese streaming service NetEase briefly geo-blocked Adams’ catalog after he tweeted support for Taiwan’s freedom. The ban lasted exactly 36 hours—roughly the time it took for Beijing’s censors to realize that millions of gym memberships depend on treadmill playlists containing “Run to You.” Soft power met hard economics, and economics won, humming the chorus. If Clausewitz were alive, he’d update his maxim: war is just diplomacy by other means, but diplomacy is now karaoke.

Then there’s the merch calculus. The official Bryan Adams tour shirt—black, predictably—outsells maple syrup in Canadian airport gift shops, which is like Saudi Arabia running low on sand. One factory in Dhaka cranks out 40,000 units per month, each tagged “Designed in Vancouver, Made in Bangladesh, Ironed in Despair.” The workers earn roughly the price of a single arena beer per hour, a wage gap so lyrical it could be its own power ballad. Adams himself has lobbied for better conditions, proving that even aging rock stars eventually feel the gravitational pull of conscience—or at least the optics department.

Europe, ever the moral super-ego of the planet, has turned Adams into an environmental test case. His 2023 tour pledged carbon neutrality via “reforestation offsets” in Portugal—because nothing says ecological penance like planting saplings to compensate for 18-wheelers hauling speaker stacks and ego. Critics sniffed; ticket sales soared. Turns out Europeans will forgive almost anything if you give them a sing-along and a tote bag that says “Please Forgive Me.”

The darker joke lies in the timing. Adams’ anthemic nostalgia surges whenever the present looks especially flammable. During the 2020 lockdowns, “Cuts Like a Knife” trended worldwide, presumably because nothing captures the tender intimacy of a pandemic like a metaphor for surgical steel. Similarly, when Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv, streams of “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” spiked in Poland and Romania—presumably a sonic shield against existential dread, or at least a distraction while queuing for iodine pills.

To call this mere escapism is to miss the larger, bleaker poetry. In an era when international consensus is as rare as an honest tax haven, Adams’ catalog offers a low-resolution but universal language: yearning, regret, the vague promise that guitars—unlike treaties—stay in tune. It’s not peace, love, and understanding; it’s peace, love, and a C-major chord repeated until the bar closes. Which, given the alternatives, is practically utopian.

So raise your lighters—or your phone flashlights, because who owns a lighter anymore—to the man who proved that soft power can wear denim. While the world’s parliaments bicker and the permafrost melts, at least we can agree on the opening riff of “Summer of ’69.” For four minutes and forty seconds, the planet hums in battered solidarity, pretending 1984 was only 39 years ago and not a perpetual present. Then the song ends, the lights come up, and we shuffle back to our respective crises—slightly hoarse, slightly hopeful, and utterly, predictably human.