The band formerly known as The Dixie Chicks made the front of the New York Times Sunday Styles with a full-page photo under the puffed-up headline “Still Fearless.” Inside was a two-page spread with posed photos, “A Sisterhood Skilled at Ignoring the Static.” The text box: “Three women flourished in an industry that never really loved or defended them.” Fortunately for the “Chicks” (who recently ditched the “racist” part of their name but kept the “sexist” one) the gushing by the liberal press made up for it.
The online version came with the ironic headline, “The Chicks Are Done Caring What People Think.” So why did they just change their name?
Critic at large Amanda Hess was embarrassingly gushy:
The women formerly known as the Dixie Chicks have survived the good old boys of country music, a legal battle with their record label, a feud with a president and arguably the first attempted cancellation of the internet era....
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In 2003, if you’ve forgotten, American troops invaded Iraq, and [singer Natalie] Maines offhandedly told a London audience, “We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” The comment sparked a country radio boycott, album-burning rallies and a squabble with Keith, who staged concerts in front of an oversize doctored photo of Maines embracing Saddam Hussein. The Chicks appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly nude, with some of the names they’d been called printed on their bodies.
“The incident” also presaged the coming tide of celebrity activism, social-media cancellation and political harassment campaigns....
Many bands would love the kind of persecution the Dixie Chicks endured.
....In an industry that’s never really loved them or defended them, they became a testament to female self-reliance. They move with the energy of witches who could not be burned. If you were already a fan of the Chicks, the incident made you love them harder, seeding their pop-feminist anthems with real-life gravitas.
Yet Hess doesn’t talk much about the band’s actual songs, which makes one suspect the paper’s embrace is about ideological convenience. She also lets them off easy for sticking with their supposedly racist band name for decades.
The inertia of their success under that name always stopped the Chicks from taking action until recently, when they realized how hurtful the word was outside the context of their own experience....
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Country is more than a genre -- it is a culture steeped in conservatism, masculinity and whiteness. When C.M.A. viewers complained that Beyoncé was “not country,” it meant the same thing as when Billboard removed Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from the country chart....
When the group announced its name change last month, casting Dixie from their lives for good, supportive fans jockeyed for attention with conservative commentators on Twitter, who lashed out with an almost programmatic outrage. The Chicks staged dramatic readings of the most absurd takes over Zoom.
The Times has never tired of praising the Chicks’ self-righteous, (literally) performative liberal politics, portraying the group as free-speech martyrs, victims of a “patriotic fatwa,” while managing to avoid mentioning the scads of free, flattering publicity. Their win at the 2007 Grammy awards marked a “vindication” that struck “a blow for freedom of expression.” Back when liberals used to support such things.
