Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing
Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas - Natalie Maines

Country music has historically been white people’s blues. Its focus until recent years has always been the pains and problems of ordinary, blue collar America. Young people might have rock-and-rolled with Elvis, but when you are sitting at the bar, wondering where your life went wrong, you listen to Johnny Cash. Women with big hair and men who looked like they had spent one too many evenings sleeping in the back of the tour bus, sang about what made their hearts ache. Then country became cool and, like a flock of locusts, the himbos with their six-pack abs and the honeys with their only seeming talent being that they could fit into incredibly tight jeans descended on Nashville. The pop music of the 1980s became the country music of the 1990s. Its soul was replaced by several pelvic thrusts. Songs could be used for packing material they were so filled with fluff. As fat girls two-stepped, I packed up my John Prine, George Jones, Jerry Jeff Walker, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, David Allen Coe, Bob Dylan, and Hank William Jr. and moved onto other musical fields. Occasionally while in the car, I’d turn the dial on the radio to a country station, like stopping by a friend’s house you hadn’t seen in years, but after a few minutes I would be thinking more about what the hell happened to Bobbie Gentry, and what did Billy Joe and she throw off that bridge in the popcorn ballad I was listening to. So, I must admit, the whole Dixie Chicks phenomena passed me by. They seemed to be just another brain dead trio of harpies who sang their girl power ballads and were going to last two or three albums or until one of them got their first wrinkle, whichever came first. Boy was I wrong. Natalie Maines, the lead singer who joined the group just prior to their becoming a national sensation, opened her mouth and all hell broke loose.
The Dixie Chicks (Emily Robinson, Martie Maguire, Natalie Maines) were the darlings of country music. Their first album, Wide Open Spaces, sold 12 million copies, making it one of the 50 most successful albums of all time. As if to prove their success was no fluke, their next album, Fly, sold 10 million. Their third album, Home, without a major label behind it, sold an amazing 6 million copies and dominated the 2003 Grammy Awards. Now a general rule of thumb is when you are that popular, you don’t do anything to make waves. A little over two weeks after the Grammy Awards, while on a London stage and as the United States was gearing up to invade Iraq, Maines, a Texas native, told their British audience “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” It was just something she threw in between songs. It seemed almost harmless. She hadn’t taken out a newspaper ad, joined Sean Penn in Baghdad, or said something as psychotic as Ann Coulter probably mouths on her way to the bathroom in the morning. A reporter from The Guardian wrote down her words in a review of the concert. The U.S. media and right-wing pendants picked up on her words like a shark smelling blood in the water. Boom! How dare she criticize our Commander-and-Chief in a foreign country while our boys are about to kick a little butt. The left has Hollywood. The right has Nashville. (Never mind that most of the greatest country performers, until the beef cake boys came to town, were Democrats, especially in the 1970s.) What was one of their chicks doing sounding like one of those liberal elite? She needed to just shut up and sing. DJs across the nation started organizing boycotts of the Chicks music. At first Maines defended herself by stating, "I feel the President is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world." Two days later, with their careers on the line, she issued the following apology: “As a concerned American citizen, I apologize to President Bush because my remark was disrespectful. I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect. We are currently in Europe and witnessing a huge anti-American sentiment as a result of the perceived rush to war. While war may remain a viable option, as a mother, I just want to see every possible alternative exhausted before children and American soldiers' lives are lost. I love my country. I am a proud American."
Now that should have been enough, but the Chicks had shown they wore pink underwear (a Richard Nixon reference) and conservative America wanted their pound of flesh. Right-wingers organized the burning of the trios CDs in massive bonfires and, in one of the more famous instances, crushed their CDs with a bulldozer. The flames of hysteria were such that these girls started to fear for the lives of their families and themselves. By the end of April, the girls had had enough. They did an interview with Diane Sawyer where Maines maintained that she was proud of what she had said. The girls also stripped down to their birthday suits for the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Their bodies covered with words like Dixie Sluts, Proud Americans, Free Speech, Saddam’s Angels, and Traitors. If they were going to go down, they were going down as martyrs. President Bush seemingly encouraged the boycott of the girls by saying on national television, “They shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out ... Freedom is a two-way street.” Sometime during this period, the Chicks privately offered a $1 million donation to the American Red Cross. The organization refused the gift. Yet, the girls were not prepared for the reception they got on May 1st when they killed off their national tour. Steeling themselves to be booed off stage, the sell-out crowd of 15,000 cheered wildly. For the most part, their fans just wanted to enjoy their music and didn’t care what they said in-between lyrics. While there were some minor bumps in the road, by the fall, the Dixie Chicks could even make a tongue-in-cheek joke about the boycott in their Lipton Original Iced Tea commercial. In October, they headlined concerts organized by liberal groups like MoveOn.org and actively campaigned for John Kerry. Yet, there was still a certain amount of nervousness about their futures in country music. Anyone who thought these girls would remain quiet, need only have waited to the release of the 2006 album, Taking the Long Way. The first song they put out before the album was released told critics everything, Not Ready to Make Nice. Despite many of the mainstream country radio stations still refusing to play their music, the Chicks newest CD debuted at number one, selling an amazing 526,000 copies in the first week. Thus setting a record by being the first female group in the history of the industry to have three albums debut at number one. Their newest venture, produced by Rick Rubin (Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys), showed a remarkable departure from their country roots. This documentary lends some insights into what this group has been through the last 3 years and where they might be heading. More importantly, my ipod just gained 15 new songs and I get to admit I was wrong about something.

Verdict: Chicks Rule