6/20/06
THE DIXIE CHICKS AGAIN
5 PAGES

Are people really still pissed at the Dixie Chicks?  Their new album, Taking The Long Way, came out a couple of weeks ago, and all over country and talk radio came the hot topic of “Should we play the new Dixie Chicks song?” and “Are you going to buy their album?”  I was surprised that this was still even a discussion.  But if the steady stream of phone calls was anything to go by, there is still a very large population in this country who is not only not ready to let bygones be bygones, but is still in fact so vigilantly anti-Chick that they have threatened to stop listening to any radio station that plays the band and think we should essentially send the entire trio over to Iraq where they can make out with their new boyfriend Saddam.  All week this went on. 

I was seriously speechless all week listening to this – save for the occasional outburst of, “Oh my god, you’ve got to be kidding me.”  It’s been over three years now since lead singer Natalie Maines made her now-notorious “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the president is from Texas,” comment, which brought the fiery wrath of all the red states down upon her head.  All over the south the backlash was swift and harsh.  Country radio stations, at the vehement urging of their audiences, simply stopped playing the Dixie Chicks’ music.  Callers to the stations all but appealed for the immediate and literal lynching of Natlie Maines and band members Emily Robison, and Martie Maguire.  I specifically remember hearing one man suggest that we strap Maines to one of our “Shock and Awe” bombs and drop her on Iraq.  Mobs of people who had once been fans of the band made regionally broadcasted spectacles out of smashing their CD’s and burning their posters.  During interviews, the three singers admitted to receiving death threats from people who sounded both just sane and deranged enough to be serious.

Even other country artists like Toby Keith got in on the dogpile, making nasty comments about the Dixie Chicks during their own concerts to thunderous applause.  All over country radio, the message was clear: “You said something we don’t like.  And now we’re going to punish you.”

It’s a punishment that shows no signs of letting up if the discourse on the radio was anything to go by.  Apparently the angered masses have not heard what they consider to be an acceptable apology from the band as a whole, and from Natalie Maines in particular.  And Maines did nothing to quell the ferocity when she said in a recent 60 Minutes interview that she doesn’t feel she has anything to apologize for.

As somebody who loves the Dixie Chicks… and as somebody who has always been in favor of the war in Iraq… and as somebody who voted for Bush this last time around… I am ashamed and embarrassed to be lumped in with these people (the angered masses that is, not the hapless Dixie Chicks) who are, for the most part, part of the God-fearing, Jesus-loving, red-state-voting, conservative-thinking demographic that I tend to agree with and consider myself a part of.  For the love of God people, it’s been three years!  Can we please find better things to get worked up about?

To be fair though, I really do understand the initial outrage and subsequent backlash.  Unfortunately for the Dixie Chicks, as near as I can see, it was simply a matter of bad timing.  The inciting comment, mentioned off-handedly during a London concert a few days before the start of the war, would most likely have been a non-story had it happened several months earlier.  Back when it still felt like the entire world was liberal.  I remember that’s how I felt.  The Clinton years were still fresh in everybody’s mind and it seemed like any point of view that didn’t come from a left-wing talking point was simply not a valid way of thinking.  There were way more liberal propaganda sites out there than conservative ones and during any online discussion amongst friends and acquaintances, pretty much ever conservative argument that got made was promptly cut down by at least three liberal counterattacks, backed up with “documentation” taken from MoveOn.org or any of its clones.  Whenever a celebrity was quoted as saying anything political, it was always for the liberal, anti-Bush, anti-war point of view.  I know it’s hard to believe now (when it’s not related to the Dixie Chicks, our short-term memory often proves to be incredibly short), but at the end of 2002 it felt very intimidating to be a conservative surrounded by an entire country who apparently disagreed with you, and was ready to tell you exactly how and why you were wrong. 

Then somewhere around March of 2003 right before the war began, the pendulum started to swing back the other way.  It was imperceptible at first.  And I’m not even sure what initiated it.  Maybe more people started listening to talk radio?  Maybe more people started watching Fox News.  Maybe it was just a collective grassroots movement of individual conservatives who were finally getting fed up with their liberal counterparts.  I can remember finally saying, “To hell with it,” after I’d gotten perhaps my twentieth annoying email forward from another one of my liberal friends about how we needed to stop President Bush, and not invade a sovereign nation, and sign a petition to the U.N. and blah blah blah.  I hit Reply-All, and what started out as a paragraph-long rebuttal turned into a two-page tirade about why everything the liberals were saying about this war was wrong.  I hit Send, fully expecting twenty irate people to write back telling me just how wrong and deluded and hateful I was.  But to my surprise the only one who responded was the friend who had sent the original email.  We broke email etiquette, Replying-All several times, venting our frustrations and convictions back and forth, and to my ongoing surprise, nobody rallied to my friend’s side during the entire conversation.  In fact after several exchanges, somebody finally chimed in by saying, “Wow, I never thought of it that way, but a lot of what Brian is saying makes sense.” 

I was floored.  But more than that, I was motivated.  After that, I just couldn’t leave well enough alone anymore, and anybody who mass e-mailed another “Bush is Bad” forward to my inbox got a stern, and long-winded, reply… as did everybody else on their Sent To list.  And little by little, more and more people started speaking up on my side of the argument.  The conservative side. 

In January of 2003, the overriding rally cry all over the country was: “No Blood for Oil!”  By March, it had become: “Support the Troops.”

What started out as an imperceptible change had become a full-fledged swing from the left to the right as conservative America suddenly realized that we weren’t alone.  Again, I know this is hard to believe now, and I’m sure there are people who have already forgotten, but in the span of less than a month it was like several million individuals suddenly realized that they were actually part of a group.  An incredibly large group.  In fact, what we realized was that there were in fact more of us than there were of them.  I can’t even begin to describe how empowering that was to suddenly be part of a group who was no longer afraid to speak its mind and stand up to the left-wingers who had intimidated us for so long. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before we conservatives started putting to work all the worst methods that the liberals had used before on us.  We quickly started making it clear that anybody who thought differently from us was uncompromisingly wrong.  We said it was un-patriotic to be against the war.  It was un-American to question the president.  It was un-supportive of the troops to say we were in Iraq under false pretenses.  Almost overnight, the tone of the media changed from very liberally slanted to overwhelmingly conservative.  A lot of people on the left claim that there is a vast right-wing conspiracy in the media, that all the news organizations are somehow in bed with the Bush administration.  I personally think it’s less sordid than that.  I think the people who run the networks are, above all, business people and it’s always in their best interest to keep the largest audience possible.  They too suddenly realized that the bulk of their viewers was conservative and in turn altered their programming to cater to this newly realized demographic. 

Unfortunately for the Dixie Chicks, it was right at the starting point of this nationwide shift that Natalie Maines made what should have been an insignificant comment.  I truly think if she had made the same comment even two months earlier, it would have at best been ignored outright.  But even if it had come to light, the conservatives who she ultimately angered would likely have just bitten their tongues.  After all, they’d heard every celebrity from Susan Sarandon to Sheryl Crow throw stones at a president who they themselves admired.  They lived in a country where their opinion was in the perceived minority.  There may have been some grumbling under their breath, but there certainly wouldn’t have been the massive anti-Chick movement that occurred that March.  By then conservatives had realized that we had, in effect, the strength of a mob.  Natalie Maines made her comment at almost the precise moment that this collective realization occurred and we pounced.

All the other actors and musicians who had been making political comments had a fan base that was made up primarily of teenyboppers who didn’t care about politics, or else New York / L.A. / East Coast / West Coast liberals who agreed with them.  What good would a boycott against them do?  But with the Dixie Chicks, their audience came primarily from conservative America.  The Bible Belt.  The southern states.  The red states.  And we’d had enough of Hollywood telling us what to do.  Why should an actor or a singer, somebody with no more education in politics and foreign policy than us, have the right tell us what is right and wrong?  We were sick of it.  And a message had to be delivered.  And at last, here was somebody we could actually deliver a message to.

Personally, I never really went along with the whole boycott thing.  I was annoyed, for sure, at Natalie Maine’s comment, but only because it was yet another pot shot from an already overwhelming liberal peanut gallery.  But I quickly got over it when I realized just how silly and meaningless the comment was.  Eleven off-the-cuff words mentioned during a concert that wasn’t even on American soil.  The Dixie Chicks weren’t mindnumbingly vocal activists.  They weren’t all over the TV conducting press conferences and railing about this issue and that issue.  They said one thing, eleven words, that had been on their mind to a private audience.  Somebody just happened to report it.  After that, everything remotely political they said was only as the answer to questions from countless reporters interviewing them about the fans who were not only boycotting their music but also threatening to kill them. 

So I forgave rather quickly.  Actually, forgive is the wrong word.  That would indicate that they did something that required forgiveness.  But saying you don’t like the president hardly qualifies as a hell-worthy sin.  It wasn’t long before I had my Dixie Chicks CD’s playing again.  In fact a month later while I was in Louisville, Kentucky for work, I brought my entire Chicks collection with me.  Louisville was a city whose radio stations were still refusing to play anything Chick-related and so I decided to make a not-so-subtle point by driving around the city, with the top down on my convertible rental car, blasting the Dixie Chicks as loud as possible.  I don’t know if I changed anybody’s heart or mind, but it certainly made me feel better.

And now here we are, three years later…  And still no water has passed under the proverbial bridge.  Former fans aren’t ready to forgive, and the Dixie Chicks aren’t ready to apologize.  In fact, in her 60 Minutes interview, Natalie Maines took it one career-suicide step further by indicating that country music and its listeners had turned into a bunch of ignorant rednecks.  I hadn’t seen the interview, but when I heard about it a few days later on talk radio, I actually felt myself getting pissed at the Dixie Chicks again, thinking maybe country music fans were in fact right for keeping vigilant in their boycotts of a band that just didn’t know when to keep their mouth shut.  But before I passed judgment, I went online and looked up the full interview.  Taken by itself, that quote certainly sounds bad and hateful and worthy of the continual lesson country music fans have been teaching the Dixie Chicks.  But actually reading the quote in context put everything in context for me.  What the Dixie Chicks are actually saying now is that they are fully aware of what sticking to their guns is going to cause.  They know that they are alienating a large part of their fan base.  But as far as they’re concerned, they’re content to let the close-minded, angry, intolerant rednecks go.  They’re willing to take the pay cut if it means the fans they do keep are true and loyal and will allow them to be themselves in philosophy and in art.

What solid steel balls on those Chicks!  The respect I had for them as artists and as human beings increased a hundred times after reading that.  These girls aren’t sitting around whining like other celebrities I could mention about how conservatives aren’t letting them work, aren’t letting them say what they want to say, aren’t letting them make money.  Three years ago Conservative America (which I am still very much a part of) hit the Dixie Chicks in the only place it could: the pocketbook.  They said, Do what we want, or we’ll take your money away. 

The Dixie Chicks have now come back and said, in effect, Fine, keep your stinking money.  We don’t want it.  If you don’t like what we have to say then, by all means, don’t buy our stuff.  We’ll happily forgo your dollars if it means not putting up with your petty dumb bullshit.

People who speak their minds are rarely surrounded by mobs of friends.  In fact they tend to make more enemies because they create ripples in the water and refuse to conform to one idea of what’s right, cool or acceptable.  That’s the way it goes.  And if you’re planning on speaking your mind, you just have to ask yourself if it’s worth it.  Do you believe in something strongly enough to alienate the people around you, keeping only the ones who love and support you no matter what?  The Dixie Chicks have apparently asked themselves that question and decided it was worth it.  Worth having less money, less popularity, and less fair-weather friends in favor of a small core group of faithful and devoted fans. 

If country music were a high school, Toby Keith would be captain of the football team,  the fans would be the in-crowd, and the Dixie Chicks would be, maybe not the cheerleaders, but certainly the editors of the yearbook.  Then one day, one of their friends caught the Dixie Chicks hanging out with all the art fags after school.  All the cool kids started making fun of them, fully expecting that they’d just kowtow and stop hanging out with the uncool kids.  The football team even started a nasty rumor about who the Chicks had been screwing underneath the bleachers.  But finally the Chicks did what we all want the heroine in a cheesy teen movie to do.  They stood up to their mob of “friends” and said, “You know what?  To hell with all of you.  I’ll deal with being less popular if your ‘friendship’ is this fickle.  I’ll hang out with the people who will like me for me, even if we don’t agree all the time.”

So in light of everything, both because of and in spite of things they said, I am yet again a confirmed Dixie Chicks fan.  I know we disagree politically, but that’s okay.  I’ll just agree to disagree because I love their music too much.  And as my act of defiance against all the close-minded rednecks of Conservative America, I went out on the day after the new Chicks album Taking the Long Way was released and bought it at full price.  I usually wait a couple of months until an album has dropped a buck or two, but I wanted to let my voice register loud and early: 

“I’m still with you, Chicks.  I don’t care what you believe or who you vote for.  If you can keep making music the way you do, I’ll always be there to listen.”

Taking the Long Way is a great album with great songs (especially the first vitriol-filled single, “Not Ready to Make Nice”), performed by a trio of girls with great musical talent, and led by the loudmouth Natalie herself with her whiskey-and-velvet voice that stole my heart the very first time I heard it.  As far as I’m concerned, all the rednecks who are still letting righteous anger push them into a frivolous boycott frenzy are only screwing themselves in the end.

Their loss, I say.  So FUTK 'em.