Goo Goo Dolls perform Slide as America marks 250th birthday

The Goo Goo Dolls performed “Slide” during CBS’s three-hour primetime special marking America’s 250th birthday, a broadcast built to feel less like a concert than a national memory exercise. Hosted by Tony Dokoupil and Nischelle Turner live from the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., the July 4 event placed late-1990s radio familiarity inside a semiquincentennial celebration meant to unify viewers through entertainment.

CBS aired “The Great American Block Party 250” from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET, billing it as a celebration of America’s 250th birthday. The network and Paramount Press Express said the special featured exclusive performances by the Goo Goo Dolls, Zac Brown Band, Jon Batiste and The War and Treaty, with more performers still to be announced at the time of the lineup rollout. Organizers also said the program would culminate in what they called the largest fireworks show in history over the skies of Washington, D.C.

The choice of “Slide” sharpened the nostalgia. The song was released in September 1998 as the lead single from Dizzy Up the Girl, the Goo Goo Dolls’ sixth studio album, giving the performance a clear generational marker for viewers who came of age before the new century. In a moment when the country’s politics remain deeply split, CBS leaned on recognizable pop-rock, roots music and jazz to build a broad, family-viewing version of national consensus.

America250 said July 4, 2026, marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That framing gave the broadcast its historical spine, but the television packaging did the rest: a live national stage, a lineup chosen for cross-genre appeal and a fireworks finale pitched as record-breaking. The result was a holiday special that used entertainment as civic glue, turning the semiquincentennial into a mass-media nostalgia event as much as a commemoration.