December 27, 2006 -- “Shut Up and Sing” is the best documentary I've seen this year. It is about the virulent reaction by country music fans to an offhand remark made on stage by a member of a band called “The Dixie Chicks.” Natalie Maines, the group's lead singer, said to a largely anti-war crowd in London during a world tour “Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” This seemingly innocuous remark led to an organized boycott of Dixie Chick's recordings and concerts, costing the group millions of dollars in revenue and forcing them into an extended hiatus. Country-western music radio stations, bowing to pressure from listeners, banned their music from the airwaves. Dixie Chicks recordings were burned and smashed during protests.

This would make no sense today, when President Bush's approval ratings are down around 30 percent after the Iraq and Katrina fiascos, but this happened in 2003, when Bush's approval ratings were high. This was a fairly nutty time. People actually still believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, that Iraq had something to do with the 9/11 attacks, that the war was going to be quick and cheap and not cost too many lives. People even believed that to question the wisdom or competence of the president in a time of war was anti-patriotic. What many people believed in those days turned out to be utterly false, but they still believed (a few still do). So when the Dixie Chicks said something against Bush, they were portrayed as unpatriotic and against the troops, even though Maines clearly said she was patriotic and she supported the troops.

The film shows that the Dixie Chicks never backed down and they stuck together as a unit. They maintain to this day that the boycott was the best thing that ever happened to them. That may be true. Relieved of the pressures of constant touring, two of the Dixie Chicks had children, one had twins, after years of problems with infertility. They took the time to write a new album and launched it very successfully in 2005 despite the continued boycott from country radio stations and fans in the South. Their new album seems to have reached a new high water mark for the band in terms of originality and creativity. Maines, particularly, channeled her anger into her music. She feels the band was betrayed by its country-western fans and she still hasn't forgiven them. The band always stood up for country-western fans, but those same fans abandoned them.

What happened to the Dixie Chicks, one of the most popular bands in the history of the United States, is a reminder of how fleeting fame is, even for a band as talented an popular as the Dixie Chicks. It is reminiscent of what happened recently to popular actor and comedian Michael Richards when he blew up at some hecklers during a live show and yelled racial slurs. What he said on stage may have ended his career. It is also reminiscent of when John Lennon once famously said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. People got mad and burned Beatles records, but it didn't end the Beatles careers. They had less trouble with that controversy than the Dixie Chicks did. I guess it doesn't matter so much if you disparage Christ, but saying something considered vaguely unpatriotic is a whole lot more serious, in the United States, at least.

There is also some discussion in the movie about the effect that a relatively few corporate owners of thousands of radio stations in the U.S. had on the decision to ban Dixie Chicks recordings from radio stations owned by the companies. Congressional hearings into the effect of oligopoly ownership patterns in radio and the role politics played in the boycott are part of the film. At the heart of the film is the question of whether or not we should be alarmed at how freedom of speech can be stymied by economic pressures. This isn't the first time it has happened in recent years. Comedian Bill Mahr was ironically forced off his late-night “Politically Incorrect” television show when he made remarks deemed unpatriotic. A television miniseries about former President Ronald Reagan was removed from the CBS schedule due to complaints about it from Reagan supporters, and a network miniseries about the 9/11 attacks was modified after former President Clinton and others complained about how Clinton's administration was portrayed in the show. Disneyland and Disney World were the target of a boycott by various religious groups. The effectiveness of these kinds of boycotts seems to be proportional to how much industry resists the pressure. Disney, for instance, has successfully ridden out the religious boycotts by refusing to cave in.

The moral of the story of the Dixie Chicks is that great harm is done when good people stand by and do nothing when an injustice is being done. Not being a country-western music fan myself (at least what passes for country-western music since the deaths of Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins and Hank Williams) with the exception of the legendary Johnny Cash, I hadn't heard any Dixie Chicks music. What impressed me most in the film is how talented these women are as musicians and how well they stick together. A lot of groups would have fallen apart under this kind of pressure. Not these women. They are tough. I felt I got to know them pretty well by the time this film was over. You go chicks! This film rates a B+.

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Copyright © 2006 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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