Chicks against the machine

"It's all about being country-music artists," Maguire told Entertainment Weekly. "And [country radio not playing our music] is proving that it is about country music." Maguire told Sawyer of their colleagues in country music, "I was surprised at how many would come forward but didn't want to come forward publicly." Among the things reported in the Entertainment Weekly cover story was the fact that Vince Gill has had his patriotism questioned for saying it was time to lay off the Dixie Chicks. EW also reported that Toby Keith projects a doctored image of Maines with Saddam Hussein during his stage show, and that Travis Tritt, that mullet that passes for a man, has called the band "cowardly."

On March 20, RCA Nashville publicity sent out an e-mail headed "Sara Evans Voices Her Views in Glamour Magazine," in which the country singer is quoted as saying, "I trust [President Bush] to do whatever is necessary to protect our nation from al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and other terrorists. It's disheartening to me to hear negativity about our President during this highly critical time -- and it is especially disheartening to hear comments made outside the United States. Republican or Democrat, we have an immediate duty as Americans to rally around our President and troops." Wonder who she was talking about?

For all the talk about how the Dixie Chicks have destroyed their career, people haven't pointed out (or pointed out tangentially, as Sawyer did) that "Home" is still No. 3 on the country charts and selling about 33,000 copies a week, and that most of the shows on their upcoming tour have sold out. It makes no business sense for country radio to ban the band, but I think that the boycott was just the excuse that country radio was looking for to stick it back to the Dixie Chicks. The trio had already challenged the format with "Long Time Gone," the first single from "Home." One of the verses went "We listen to the radio to hear what's cookin'/ But the music ain't got no soul/ Now they sound tired but they don't sound haggard/ They got money but they don't have cash/ They got Junior but they don't have Hank."

Since the Chicks were the biggest stars in country, country radio had no choice but to play a single that slammed most of the music it played as prefab and anonymous. "Country music doesn't need the Dixie Chicks," said one caller to a radio show heard on "Primetime." But since the band has proved a huge crossover success, and did it with an album more "country" than their previous two, country music may find that it needs the Chicks more than they need it.

Given their huge success -- which shows no signs of dissipating -- you have to be a special kind of ass to claim, as some have done, that all this has been a bid for publicity. The biggest stars in country music didn't need publicity, especially coming off an album that debuted at No. 1 on the pop charts and stayed there for weeks. You would have to be very cynical or very stupid to believe that anyone would choose the kind of publicity that would bring them death threats.

Still, it seems to me that the Dixie Chicks are operating now less in the realm of country music than they are in the realm of punk, which, in his book "Ranters & Crowd Pleasers," Greil Marcus called "infinitely more than a musical style, period ... an event in a cultural time [that was] an earthquake ... throwing all sorts of once-hidden phenomena into stark relief." The Entertainment Weekly cover, another example of how the band has refused to affect the demure pose that would prove they are backing down, appropriates the tactic used initially by the Riot Grrrl bands, who appeared onstage with words like "Bitch" and "Slut" scrawled on their midriffs. Again, it is impossible to divorce the courage of the Dixie Chicks' stance from the place they occupy in mainstream pop.

I don't mean to lessen the determination to find their own voice that characterized riot-grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, and Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, and that still characterizes Sleater-Kinney. But the fringe offers a safer place for people to pursue that voice. As the Dixie Chicks have seen, there is more at stake for mainstream performers who decide not to play by the rules. Implicitly, they call everything around them into question. And so it seems a harbinger when you go back and listen to "Home" and hear Natalie Maines sing "You don't like the sound of the truth/ Coming from my mouth ... I don't think that I'm afraid anymore to say that I would rather die trying," or see the roadside sign on the back of the CD booklet "We Are Changing the Way We Do Business."

But it's not just the terms of their own success, or even the terms of pop music, in which the Dixie Chicks are causing tremors. It's the very terms in which public discourse is conducted -- or not conducted -- in America at the moment. "The people who are calling for a boycott are also exercising their right to free speech," some are bound to write to me. Of course they are. But I question anyone's dedication to free speech when they express it by trying to shut down other voices -- not by engaging them or debating them or making a case why they're wrong, but just trying to shut them down. "In wartime only the clandestine press can be truly free," Marcus wrote in an earlier essay about punk. For all the willingness of the mainstream press to roll over and frolic at the feet of the Bush administration, for all the ways in which Bush and Ashcroft are using the Constitution as a piece of toilet paper, I do not believe that a fascist takeover is imminent in America. That is an excuse to shy away from the work that needs to be done to defeat Bush and restore the civil liberties he has trashed.

What I do believe is that for all the fear in the air, fear of the terror without and the repression within, there is also open to us at this moment the chance of exhilaration. Freedom may never seem so alluring as when it is most threatened, when the Republic reaches a moment where, as Norman Mailer wrote in 1968, it can bring forth "the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known ... or a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild." There's exhilaration in any moment when the country has the choice of living up to either the best or the worst version of itself. I'm grateful to the Dixie Chicks for reminding us of that exhilaration, for carrying on, aware of the social limits that have been placed on doubt and dissent, and still insisting that questioning and digging for facts are the mark of patriotism.

That was the freedom offered by the civil rights movement, and it's one of those voices I hear now, the voice of Fannie Lou Hamer, delegate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, addressing a committee at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., to challenge the seating of the state delegation elected under the system that prohibited many blacks from voting. "Is this America?" Hamer asked. "The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily?"

The comparison only goes so far. As rich pop stars, the Dixie Chicks have security options open to them that were not open to Hamer and the other people working for voters rights in Mississippi. But when people fantasize about strapping Natalie Maines to a missile headed for Baghdad, when a state legislator suggests that anyone who thinks about going to a Dixie Chicks' concert better be "ready to run" (from what -- a lynch mob?), when it's held that you cannot question a war and still desire the safety of the troops, when you're told that it's OK to question policy but not the president, Hamer's question remains. Is this America? The thrill, and maybe the sorrow, of the months to come will be finding out.

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