Natalie Maines had every right to say what she wanted, just as John Rocker did.
Neither Rocker nor Maines was sent to jail. But thousands of people who USED to like them didn’t like them any more, and let them know it.
That comes with freedom of speech, too. You can say whatever you want, but you’d better be ready for backlash. If you’re not, then shut up and sing (or pitch).
I saw the movie today. I went in not being a huge Dixie Chicks fan; I’m not really a country music fan. I left the theatre having a lot of respect for them.
They never pretend to be experts on politics. Natalie freely admits that she only said what she did to get applause from the crowd. She just happened to be in the unfortunate situation of being a country music star (country just happens to be further right than other divisions of the music industry). It was interesting to watch how her simple statement got transformed into something it wasn’t. Before you knew it she was against the troops and hating america.
What really impressed me about them is how they dealt with it. In the first american show after the incident natalie gave the audience 15 seconds to do and say whatever they felt, it was pretty cool. I have immense respect for her now (not only because of that; she comes off very well in this doc).
They dealt with how a large group of country music stations essentially boycotted them. You get the perpective of one dj who basically says that we are just country music. If our listeners stop listening to us,we’re screwed but they have other options.
There is a lot to this documentary and I won’t go too far into it but it is definately worth the watch.
aside - between this and Little Children, this was a darn good weekend for me.
Interesting that you should put it like that. Hank Williams, Jr. once sang in Family Tradition, “Country music singers have always been a real close family/But lately some of my kinfolk have disowned a few others and me.” And it’s true. These folks tend to stick together and present at least a fairly united front. And like an honest-to-goodness family, there are hard feelings when one member of the family appears to loudly reject everything the family stands for.
Around the same time as the Dixie Chicks incident, Pearl Jam lead singer, Eddie Vedder, kicked over an effigy of President Bush (I think it was a Bush mask stuck on a microphone stand) on stage. About half of the audience responded by getting up and walking out of the concert. You’re correct; the incident received very little attention, despite Pearl Jam being considerably more than just some “random” alternative rock act.
It’s all about the audience you’re speaking to. Vedder’s display was like making jokes about how professional wrestling is fake in front of a group of Greco-Roman wrestlers, while Maine’s was like telling the same jokes at a professional wrestler’s convention.
The best I ever heard it put was, “You have the right to say anything you want, but I’m not obligated to provide you with a forum in which to say it.” heh Just ask a SDMB moderator 
The fascism, in sum. Thanks for explaining it better than I could.
It’s about social justice, not just the money. This is about propaganda . The Propaganda Wars… the defacing and devaluation of our liberty in action. Blind Bloodlust and unsound principle tearing our Country to shreds.
Not ignored at all. I agree with a number of things that RickJay said, but I find them irrelevant. The current political orthodoxy isn’t the issue, nor is the First Amendment. The fact is that many people are sick and tired of having Americans travel overseas and badmouth America. We have enough bad press already.
It’s not a red herring. It’s the entire point. Entertainers criticize politicians in the U.S. every day, and although it annoys me, it’s never angered me. This one did, because they left the U.S. to make disparaging statements to a foreign crowd about our government. I think that’s tacky, cowardly, and makes the U.S. look bad. And I see this coming, so I’ll head it off at the pass: it doesn’t matter whether the politician you’re attacking is making us look bad. That’s no excuse to provide more bad P.R. for the U.S. If you want to live here, step up and perform your political activism here. Try to fix the problem rather than whining about it overseas.
So if a radio station gets calls from listeners saying “please play this music” or “please don’t play this music” they aren’t allowed to listen to their customers? Or do they need to quiz each caller? “Why is it, exactly, that you don’t want to hear this music?” Should they also not pay attention when someone calls to request that music be played because the listener agrees with the musician’s politics?
And, BTW, the radio stations pay for that bandwidth.
But why? They’re not political experts. They have no unique insight. Why would debating them about Federal-level politics be of any interest? Now, if you’re talking about interviewing/debating them about the country music industry, that’s different. I’d listen to that.
You’re kidding, right? President Bush is criticized on virtually every TV network and radio network out there on a weekly, if not daily, basis–and I’m including the conservative stations there. Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter may not hit him as hard as CBS News or the New York Times, but they do hit him. Do you really think that the news media is trying to suppress the opinions of the Dixie Chicks? Do you really not classify Natalie’s comments as propoganda?
That’s a refreshing thing to hear. I meet a lot of right-wing conservative people who feel that death threats are fine and dandy if THEY are making them. They’re considerably less sanguine if their side doesn’t receive obsequious, punctilious respect.
Case in point: when Clinton was elected, a pro-business mainstream centrist Democrat, before he even took office I heard several bitter people discuss killing him to prevent him from ruining the economy. This was long before Monicagate. These are the same people who are now aghast – aghast! – if they perceive that someone doesn’t “respect the office” of George Dubya. In between then and now, they forwarded all the Clinton jokes their email box could hold. They cheered or smirked when Ann Coulter sentenced Supreme Court justices to death for political expediency. They talk about killing all kinds of real and perceived enemies.
So it’s nice to meet that rare bird, someone who thinks death threats uttered to enforce “respect for the office” are “out of line”. Not evil, not vile, and certainly not terrorism…of course it’s only terrorism when a foreigner or a poor person makes a death threat…just “out of line”.
There may be hope yet…if Ann doesn’t have me killed for writing this.
Sailboat
Well, that’s a good question. I personally am not too interested in what they have to say. But from what I hear on talk radio, I would imagine that the left-wing pundits would want to have them on so they could all congratulate themselves on how smart they are, and talk about how fascist the conservatives are. And the right-wing pundits would want to have them on so they could take advantage of the fact that they are not political experts, and try to make them look as dumb as possible. In other words, they would have them on to try to get ratings, which is the same thing the music stations are trying to do. This is why I don’t see debate as being stifled…the reason this would get ratings is because at the time, this was a huge news story, and everyone was talking about it.
As jlrepka pointed out, we’re not talking about a popular groundswell that forced the Dixie Chicks off the air. We’re talking about a corporate decision made from the top down, by corporate executives seeking to curry favor with the Administration. Do you see the difference?
I can, except that as jlrepka also pointed out, that is nothing but “paranoid speculation.” There is no particular evidence that this was anything but damage control. I work in market research, and I can assure you, these media outlets know their customer base INTIMATELY…they knew right away that there was a groundswelling of negative reaction from country music fans. As pointed out by Phase42, Pearl Jam was also making a lot of anti-Bush noise at their concerts, and also had anti-Bush songs on their albums. REM and other bands were also vocal in their opposition to Bush and the war. However, none of them experienced the same degree of backlash, either from their fans or from the radio stations who play them. Why would this be? In a lot of cases, I’m sure the radio stations are owned by the same conglomerates who own the stations the Dixie Chicks are played on, and even if they weren’t, wouldn’t all these radio stations have equal interest in currying favor with the administration? The only reason I can think of is the expected audience reaction. Dixie Chicks fans are typically patriotic, “love-it-or-leave-it, my-country-right-or-wrong” types. Pearl Jam fans are typically anti-establishment types. I heard that they had people walk out of their concerts (not sure if it was as many as half), but I think overall their fans are simply not as inclined to get bothered by that brand of political statement, and therefore, it is not as much of a threat to the radio stations’ ratings.
Exactly. Would be nice if the movie showed the alternative point of view in that just because you can sing and play the fiddle doesn’t mean your views have to be respected any more than ANYone elses.
As another poster said, it’s a neat encapsulation of the 1st Amendment. I always got the impression that the Chicks were painting themselves as the martyrs but maybe I am wrong.
I hope you’re not foolish enough to believe Clear Channel et al. made the latter decision in this case.
So NBC (a private corporation), in your view, is required to air controversial viewpoints and advertise movies expressing their views? So much for freedom of speech.
Would you feel the same way if the controversial movie NBC didn’t advertise was made by the KKK? Who decides what viewpoints a private entity must advertise?
:dubious: Well, no. No more than Michael Moore’s outburst at the 2003 Oscars was propaganda.
You don’t think people are sick and tired of having Americans travel overseas, starting disasterous wars and otherwise imposing our will? And why the persistence in equating George W. Bush with America?
I get the impression you have no idea what Natalie actually said, which was, “We’re ashamed George W. Bush is from Texas”. No mention of America. She was expressing her personal distance from Bush in trying to reassure their audience that they, for one, are not right-wing warmongers who would bully the rest of the world.
There is no longer any separate realm of “overseas”, only citizens and non-citizens of the American Empire. Because they’re from Texas, the Dixie Chicks bear more responsiblity than most for what is happening in Iraq. They felt they owed their audience an apology and that’s what their remark was, an apology.
And I hope you are not foolish enough to believe they made the former.
I may be wrong (and I invite jlrepka to correct me if I am), but I read his post differently. He indicated that one paragraph was based on paranoid specuation: the paragraph that laid out the motives for the top-down corporate decision as being to curry favor with the Administration. I don’t think he was saying that the original assertion that it was a top-down decision was in question.
Okay, you seem to be asserting that jlrepka is mistaken as to the genesis of the “groundswell”; that it was organic, and the conglomerates’ decisions were a response to it. Just trying to keep the assertions lined up with who is making them.
As a marketing professional, you probably also have an idea of which demographic is more likely to respond reliably to the corporate attempt to convert an initial negative reaction into a massive groundswell. Would you expect it to be the NASCAR crowd, or the grunge rockers?
It’s nice to see so much hopefulness being displayed around here. It gives me such a – I dunno, a warm, hope-y feeling inside.
Right, but my assumption is that the top-down decision was a damage-control move, as I said, rather than an attempt to curry favor with the administration. jlrepka gives no evidence that the latter is the true motivation, other than paranoid speculation.
I think these things tend to happen pretty much simutaneously, and quickly, and that it’s very difficult to discern what is a reaction to what. It may very well be that the decisions were made in an attempt to mitigate what was expected to be the reaction, rather than the reaction itself (based on what they already know about their audience). I would not deny that the decisions made at the corporate level likely had some effect on the intensity of the reaction by the fans, but that doesn’t mean that the decision was made with the intention to censor anyone or to encourage the boycott.
Please list some examples of “having Americans travel overseas and badmouth America.” Is there a special tour package? If so, sign me up. I’m hardly famous, but I’d gladly sit in a pub & explain exactly what *this * Texas woman thinks about Bush.
And I’ll explain once again (as others have)–the radio stations did NOT so much as bow to the wishes of their listeners as tell them what to think. A few DJ’s whined about Natalie dissing Our Popular Wartime President & the credulous listeners eagerly fell in line. Those are the same fans who accept corporate radio’s watered-down vision of Country Music, so it’s obvious they are easily led.
The “market research shows” argument is reductionist. Not all C&W fans are flag-waving, my-country-right-or-wrong types who are also NASCAR fans and prefer Heinz over Hunts and corn flakes over Rice Crispies.
The cable broadcast of the 2004 Vote For Change Tour included man-on-the-street interviews with attendees who made it clear that they absolutely intended to vote for Bush but that they couldn’t pass up the concert, knowing that they would be inundated with political messages for the entire show.
People walked out of Pearl Jam shows and Streisand had someone throw a cup of soda at her last night when she “disparaged” the President. Those people presumably knew how Eddie and Barbara felt before they went to the show, and they went anyway. In general the number of people who are going to boycott an act because of politics is small. The number of listeners who are going to stop listening to station KXYZ-FM because they played a cut from the new album or promoted the concert would fit in my dentist’s waiting room (ok, it’s a larger-than-average waiting room, but still…).
I’ve gone to movies that feature Gary Oldman, Ron Silver, Bruce Willis, Arnold (though I won’t vote for him), even though I disagree with their politics.
I contend that “market research” would show that, in 2003, there were (was?) a significant minority of Dixie Chicks fans who agreed with the band’s politics. Put that together with the group who might not agree, but still like the band well enough to buy the album and to see the show, and you’ve got a market. If I recall correctly there were no concerts cancelled in the 2003 tour, and attendance was good at all of the shows.
Any musical act that “comes out” politically (or any other way, for that matter) is going to lose a segment of its audience, and that is something for which they should be ready and willing to accept responsibility. But this group has been isolated from a large segment of their audience by a few corporations. In 2006 the banning of the group from C&W airwaves is not a boycott, it is a blacklist.
As I said earlier, it is perfectly legal for these companies to do this but arguing that the decisions are being made on pure economic grounds are weasely (weaselly? weasel-ly?) at best. This is politics.
And, to reiterate my point from earlier, the meta-story here is not about the Dixie Chicks, or about what music most Americans get to hear on the radio. It is about fewer and fewer media companies, with larger and larger shares of the media pie (much of which consists, again, of a publically-owned resource), able to make decisions about what information the public has access to (and telling us, despite evidence to the contrary, that choices are being made on a rational economic basis, not a political one).
(by the way, I work in physical science. The “paranoid speculation” crack I made was my inelegant way of saying that I can’t demonstrate my assertion beyond all doubt – it seems pretty obvious to me. Those who think all of these decisions are being made by cool heads who are unmoved by political considerations or alliances seem to be speculating as much, if not a great deal more, than I am…)