The Dixie Chicks and Barbra Striesand get nailed to the wall weekly for voicing opposition to the war and stating their displeasure with the current administration, meanwhile The Black Eyed Peas release a song called Where Is The Love. Here are a few excerpts:
Overseas, yeah, we try to stop terrorism
But we still got terrorists here livin’
In the USA, the big CIA
The Bloods and The Crips and the KKK
and later in the same song we have:
Makin’ wrong decisions, only visions of them dividends
Not respectin’ each other, deny thy brother
A war is goin’ on but the reason’s undercover
The truth is kept secret, it’s swept under the rug
If you never know truth then you never know love
Know what happened to The Black Eyed Peas? They got nominated for a Record of the Year grammy for this very song.
Why? Are the lyrics too subtle? Does the rest of the country only care if women diss the administration? Or maybe it’s because it’s a rap song and everybody’s just glad TBEP aren’t telling everybody to shoot cops?
I’m really curious as to why there was no protests about this song. What’s your take?
The people who complained loudest about the Dixie Chicks were country music listeners. They don’t listen to rap, so probably didn’t even know the song existed.
Plus, somehow it’s almost expected for a group of black performers to decry the hypocrisy of government leaders. Group of pretty white women, tho? How dare they.
As Chcuk noted, it’s all about the audiences. Find a rap group who has a priamry fan base of republicans and Bush supporters. Then have them right a song like BEP just did. I’d imagine you’d see the same thing.
Jeebus. I’ve gotten out of the habit of correcting typos in my posts but that is just plain awful. Trying to do two things at once, excuse the stoopidity.
[list=A][li]Yeah, it’s the audiences.[/li]It’s also racism, in that the mainstream media doesn’t take black artists seriously enough to care *what * they’re saying.[/list]
actually, as a conservative who kinda bopped along whenever Where Is The Love came on the radio, I had no idea those were among the lyrics! L
Now, I thought some of my fellow Righties made too much fuss over dumb Dixie Chicks dissing Bush, as if dyed-blond bubbleheaded celeb comments meant something- but one can get away with a message hidden in a catchy beat while blurting it out loud in a foreign country will get one’s butt kicked quite swiftly. Natalie Mains coulda sung about being ashamed of Bush in a catchy twangy tune & nothing would have happened.
Perhaps, but there were plenty of left-wing (presumably) New Yorkers who booed Sinead O’Connor because she tore up a picture of the Pope.
There are a lot of people, both left and right, who give lip service to freedom of speech, but who are very uncomfortable with the concept if the speech isn’t something they approve of.
I second this theory. Put it in a catchy tune or with a catch phrase, and no one pays attention to the lyrics. Look what happened with Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A”, it was hardly a patriotic song, mostly about lack of job opportunities and the treatment of vets after the war:
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
…
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man
…
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand”
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all gone
…
Not exactly an ode to patriotism, and yet it was used as a campaign song by Reagan and other conservatives, because of the catchphrase “Born in the U.S.A.”
I mean, you can’t, like, you know, expect us to actually read all the lyrics, right? :rolleyes: (No slam on Friar Ted, I mean people in general.)
Is anyone besides me repulsed by the song? It sounds like something a group of bright-eyed twenty-somethings would sing to eight-year-olds at a grade school assembly. Do they follow it up by doing a puppet show that illustrates why we shouldn’t hurt other people’s feelings?
(Any errors are my fault because I didn’t feel like searching for the lyrics to this idiotic, saccharine piece of crap.)
I mean, it sounds like something Dr. Seuss would have written while he was high. Not that Dr. Seuss was as stupid and simplistic as these morons, but it comes across like the intended audience is mildly-retarded schoolchildren. It’s the most pointless, gutless blow against the evil of the world that I could imagine. The most unoriginal, trite, mindless, thing I’ve ever heard on the radio. It makes Justin Timberlake sound sophisticated. Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” seems like an epic poem compared to this. Jessica Simpson’s saddest moments seem like Shakespeare compared to this mind-numbingly worthless wailing. The song is so simple-minded and sweet that I feel like I shouldn’t hate it, but I do. Like that kid in the fifth grade who smelled kinda funny but really wanted to be your friend. It disgusts me.
The Black Eyed Peas aren’t a bad group at all, but I don’t like the song either. It sounds like someone else wrote it for them (not sure if that’s the case), and it’s the kind of overly-positive, overly-syrupy-sweet song designed just to get nominated for Grammys. And guess what, it worked. I wouldn’t judge their musical/lyrical abilities just by “Where Is the Love,” but I agree that it comes across as sappy and trite. Also, believe it or not, that’s Justin Timberlake singing on the hook.
In addition to the comments made above about audiences, there are a number of other factors:
a) The Dixie Chicks spoke their comments (at least the ones they were “nailed to the wall” for); they didn’t sing them. People give artists a little more leeway, I think, when their “offensive” political views are sung rather than said in a speech.
b) The Dixie Chicks made their comments to an audience in London. This was considered worse than making them to an American audience, as it was seen as a poor representation of the US abroad. Politics stops at the water’s edge and all that.
c) I haven’t heard the song in question, but rap is frequently difficult to understand (in terms of hearing what the rapper is saying), I would say more so than rock. For those who have heard it, are the lyrics said clearly?
d) Black Eyed Peas are decidedly political in orientation, aren’t they? Nobody bitches when Rage Against the Machine releases a silly leftist rant album. It could have just been what was expected from an openly leftist political rap group.