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Shut Up And Sing Reviewed by Rich Drees
It’s with that seem attitude that I greeted the flurry of protests that sprung up among country music fans following an off-the-cuff remark about being that Natalie Maines of the vocal group The Dixie Chicks made about President Bush on the eve of our country’s invasion of Iraq. Sure they may have disagreed with Maines, but how could that rationalize essentially turning their backs on the years that they enjoyed the Chicks music by burning their CDs?
The new
documentary Shut Up And Sing, which chronicles life for the
Dixie Chicks after Maines’ fateful remark, doesn’t answer that
question. Instead, it asks the viewers to contemplate the nature of
free speech and how tolerance for differing opinions has broken down
in the current political clime. In on-camera interviews, country
music station programmers claim that the sudden lack of airplay for
the group’s music following the reportage of Maines’ remarks was due
to listener demand and not due to any mandate from their media
conglomerate corporate owners. The film juxtaposes these statements
with footage of fans which in turn both support and refute the
allegation that the group’s sudden disappearance from the airwaves
was due to corporate fiat more than audience request.
Interestingly, while Maines’ remark had been widely reported, this appears to be the first time that the actual video footage of her making the remark that they were “embarrassed that President Bush was from Texas” has actually been seen. As such, viewing the video helps place the remark in context, with Maines looking as surprised as anyone that she said it. But what turned out to be even more surprising was the resultant storm of controversy that raged with the Dixie Chicks at its center. While the group’s management attempts to figure out the best way to spin the story for the band’s benefit, numerous other swarmed in to glom a few minutes of television face time for their own benefit- from conservative commentators who had a field day with the story to country-singer Toby Keith who used the controversy to drum up publicity for his own career.
Ultimately, Shut Up And Sing is a well-crafted examination of a media event that raises questions about the relationship of free speech, business and politics. Can the three co-exist peacefully? The film knows that no easy answers are in the offing, but leaves one hoping that in the future people will have learned the lessons of the past. |
I’ll never forget the time I came home on winter break after my
first semester of college. Some high school friends and I got
together and the ones who went to school closer to filled the rest
of us in on the local gossip about the rest of our high school
class. He big topic of discussion turned out to be that one of our
classmates had come out of the closet a few months earlier. While
some of my former-classmates seemed scandalized and perhaps a little
repulsed – this was nearly 20 years ago and we had attended a
Catholic high school – I greeted the news with a shrug of
indifference. To me, it didn’t matter one bit what his sexuality
happened to be. He was still the funny guy at a lunch table full of
funny guys who had made all of us laugh on numerous occasions.