Rolling Country 2006 Thread

Anyway I'm not trying to pick a fight with David, who I respect and I honestly have nothing personally against; I'm more amused than anything else, just like I always am by critics who think a critic having different tastes than them is evidence of a moral failing, rather than just different ears or nervous systems. I mean, it's kind of silly to think that everybody who loves country music should by definition also love alt-country; one of the reasons those acts don't get played on commercial country stations is that they don't sound the same as the acts who do--which suggests that the fans of the ones who do, some of whom I'd assumed have listened to plenty of Bobby Bare during their lives, might *define* country differently. (And guess what? Not everybody equates indie-rock with rock, either.)

Like I said, David's parenthetical about most rock critics not liking twang is kinda dated, and a distraction from his point. If critics like Hermes are dismissing the key alt-country bands of the mid '90s (and I can't find his original quote either, but that seems to be the context) because they are nostalgic for the past, then Hermes, whether or not he likes the sound of country, really doesn't understand their relationship to the present context. He's just regurgitating what a lot of rock critics have always said about country, especially in the context of its supposed inferiority to forward-looking, more inventive blah dee blah rock music.

Anyways, I thought David's nihilism comment was uncharacteristically flip and wrong.

can we also talk about the dixies and the country charts, including singles, radio play and video, its got some views, and i love the new video, so the fuck country, fuck hix view ofthe band, and of the text seem to be failing, interestingly enough...

but i might be wrong?

its getting played 3 times a day, and i think is charting on canadian cmt, but 3 times a day is actually fairly low. the video is better then the song.

(speaking of which, the world video by brad paisley, with the kids, does it creep any one out at all?)

Anyways, I just watched the video: five times in a row. Wow. If that isn't oil Natalie is smearing all over her bandmates it may as well be. I really liked the single to start with, but seeing the visual climax--an explosion of inky oil like a Gulf War nightmare revisited--with the sonic climax and the "write me a letter saying I better shut up and sing or my life will be over" verse gave me freakin chills. Plus the chalkboard message: "To talk without thinking is to shoot without aiming," a not so veiled dig at the Veep.

That said, the album works for me and not because of the politics or even the anger but just because it seems to have unleashed Maines. She sounds terrific, supernatural really. Who else sings like this?

This'd be like Kool Moe Dee complaining that LL Cool J went out of his way to insult him.

Think the song lyrics are way too restrained (was hoping Natalie would sing "How do ya like me now, punk"); also that they don't engage the real issue, which isn't that the Dixies got a death threat (the poor things) but that they got blackballed, and if it happened to them it could happen to anyone.

But the death threat itself - shut up and sing or your life will be over - contains ambivalence. The guy wants her to sing, after all. And I wonder how much of the Dixie Chicks' popularity owes something to this basic ambivalence. I really don't know the country audience, which is hardly a monolith anyway, but I'd guess that some of the Dixies' appeal was that they came across as fresh and modern and not tied to the more pious and "traditional" tendencies in country; this could be attractive even (or especially) to someone who basically did feel himself aligned on the conservative side. The Dixies would represent potential freedom; but then when the Dixies act on this freedom, this same fan might be ready to throw them over (because he envies their freedom and is ready for them to go so far that he'll have to reject them). (But I'm not saying that this would be someone's main reason for liking the Dixies, if indeed it was ever anyone's partial reason.) I'd expect that some of you would have a better sense of the mainstream country audience than I do.

I think "shut up and sing or your life will be over" also applies to being blacklisted, and, surely the whole song does too. You don't have to read very far outside the text to get that it's also about not kissing and making up with country radio--at least not ready yet.

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

xp: Or, to put it another way, if you're going to take the autobiographical angle, which everybody seems to be doing, probably because it's sort of inevitable at this point (though, I swear, it won't be inevitable to somebody seeing or hearing the song 10 or 20 years from now), does the song or video tell us anything about the Dixie Chicks or Natalie that we didn't already know? I'm skeptical that is shocks people's systems; to me, it's more or less what I would've expected. The video style tells the Triple A audience (many of whom probably had Dixie Chicks CDs on their shelves anyway) "It's okay to like us now, we're not hicks." Okay, okay, we get it already.

travelling soilder is about the gulf, but its coded in veitnam, the video for this one, with oil making white dresses and clean water filthy beyond repair, is uncoded, it reminds me of macbeth, you know out out damn spot...

it is a refutation of the violence done to them, the whole album is a refutation of the violence done to them, and also as their status as thinking femminists, like loretta ca the pill or rated x (though its less polemic even then those two songs)

It was on 60 Minutes. It was in the LA Times. It was in the NY Times. It was in TIME. Enough, already. They cannily used it as part of their promotional operation and it wound up being overdone, as usual. You could use Lex-Nex and I'm betting you'd find it in every feature on them in the western press.

.....

AP: "Taking The Long Way debuts at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 best-selling albums chart this week, with first week's sales of 525,829."

What kind of silencing? The Dixie Chicks have no trouble getting sympathetic publicity. It's been simple for them to get whatever they'd like to say into the press. Unfortunately, whether on purpose by them or by accident due to the professional practice of the media, it's deadening.

Being menaced or threatened for speaking your mind in public or being thought of as unpatriotic isn't particularly novel or unique, even for celebrities.

Yeah, but what other artists (besides maybe Linda Ronstadt) have been as publicly jeered, insulted and threatened as the Dixie Chicks? Just because they have "sympathetic publicity" in the Times and The New Yorker doesn't mean those threats were any less serious or sad.

the only reason why the chix are pitching this as A/A or whatever is that they are exiled by the political elite in nashville.

As well as reinforcing a "country fans=idiot rednecks" stereotype.

The Beatles after John Lennon said the Jesus thing.

I guess I'm missing what it takes to work up the empathetic sympathy after the press blitz. For better or worse, it's been converted into a sales pitch.

What a sneer by Martie. Limit what you can do? At the height of Garthmania, Mr. Brooks dropped 'We Shall Be Free' on his Wal-Mart shopping fanbase. When was the last time a hugely successful artist openly dismissed the majority of their fans as beneath them and embarrassingly uncool? Martie's limit comments sound more like when an indie rocker says 'We would never want to get too big'. They probably really do but know they wouldn't sell anyway even if they tried. Dixie Chicks already have what everyone strives for but seem especially unappreciative of success. Their extreme audience makeover seems to be working. Check this out:

[Amazon] Customers who bought {Taking The Long Way] also bought
Home ~ Dixie Chicks
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions ~ Bruce Springsteen
All the Roadrunning ~ Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris
Living With War ~ Neil Young
Surprise ~ Paul Simon
Goodbye Alice in Wonderland ~ Jewel
Wide Open Spaces ~ Dixie Chicks
Stand Still, Look Pretty ~ The Wreckers

Well, one obvious precedent is k.d. lang, isn't it? Didn't country stations boycott her since she wasn't friendly enough withe beef-farming industry (she had beef with big beef!), or is that only a myth? and i'm not sure about lyle lovett, mary-chapin carpenter, or (maybe even politix-wise) steve earle, all of whom had country hits in the late '80s/early '90s i believe. obviously country radio is always redefining itself; were any of them blackballed, per se? (and for that matter, how often does garth, even, get on country radio these days? hell, maybe even billy ray cyrus is worth a mention...)

Without the confines of the country market, lang was also able to come out as gay. Country music, she told Rolling Stone in 1992, "didn't want to accept my viewpoints: vegetarianism, lesbianism, things that don't suit the stereotypical role of the female.... Looking back, it was perfect. I had success, like the Grammy, and yet never had airplay, so you had this huge contradiction--which I thrive on."

As much as I hate the "country fan=bigoted redneck" stereotype, a lot of the big country stations don't really help themselves out much with the stunts they pull.

was it?? i thought she actually had country hits. (i'm no fan, have never liked her much, but i was definitely under that impression.)

AMG says she did okay on the country *charts*; not sure if said charts were more aligned with radio in the pre-soundscan age or not:

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:8uq6g40ttvoz~T5