Brooke Hogan's Country Music Comeback Is Going All Right
EntertainmentThe most specific cheers at Brooke Hogan’s performance Friday afternoon at the Hard Rock Cafe stage at CMA Fest in Nashville, it must be said, were for Josh, her guitarist, who had several fans (family members) in the crowd waving signs for him.
“Wait, who is this again?” a dude behind me asked his girlfriend. “Brooke Hogan?” she replied, her hesitation clear: Hogan’s fame is not entirely her own, but originated with the fame of her family, a family that has a currently fraught entanglement with Gawker Media.
In order to launch her music career the first time, Brooke did a reality television show with her father, Hulk Hogan, Hogan Knows Best, as he explained to Larry King in 2005.
Well, Larry, it actually came about four, five years ago, when “The Osbournes” got real hot. They wanted to do a thing with Hulk Hogan and Hulk Hogan making his comeback to wrestling. And we weren’t up for that at the time, losing our privacy and having the whole crew in the house 14 or 15 hours a day. And then when we started with Brooke’s career, you know, shortly after that, which has been going on for four, five years, beating the music business up, we were trying to find an even playing ground with Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Duff and the Jessica Simpson and Ashlee Simpson girls. They all had to have a vehicle to get a jump-start…
KING: So this is for her?
Well, that’s the way it started. You know, we thought, this would be a great way to give Brooke an awareness, to make people know who she was. It started as that, and it’s shoe- stringed through the whole episodes, her music career, but it’s basically about the whole family now.
(Though both Jessica and Ashlee had reality television shows of their own, Ashlee’s was the one that was actually created with the intent of getting her own music career off the ground.)