If we were the Dixie Chicks, we'd probably grab up our satchels and leave country music behind as well.
Except for how it's what we're really good at. But young hearts run free.
The Chicks, meanwhile, are a good story. Almost all the coverage of the return of the Dixie Chicks with their first album since disrepecting a sitting president in wartime, feud with Toby Keith, and the concurrent general renunciation by Nashville's fans and industry apparatchiks, discusses the way in which they've renounced right back; because of cultural/political differences with the country base, they've packed up their fiddles and headed out west for a more LA-pop MOR sound. And most of the reviews mention, in a polite and even optimistic way, that this sound is lovely and all, but maybe just a little less incisive and dynamic than what we remember, and what we might've hoped.
The irony here is how closely the critics have hewed to the rhetoric — not just Nashville's, but the Chicks' — and not the musical history. There are eight million stories in the naked et cetera, and people prefer tales of difference and change. From the position of political rhetoric, this story has its measure of difference; it's true that one doesn't recall, say, Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Trisha Yearwood, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, or Dolly Parton spitting nails at the chief.
And yet, sameness and tradition, as country music knows all too well, are hard to outrun. Taking off for the West and independence is, in fact, an iconic activity in traditional country...as is the conclusive reminder that such an activity is itself always part of a cyclical tradition. Here's a platinum song that breezes us through it:
Many precede and many will follow
A young girl's dream no longer hollow
It takes the shape of a place out west
But what it holds for her, she hasn't yet guessed...
You know: the girl has to leave the country home for the wide open spaces out West, causing generational angst, but in the coda, it turns out the parents did the exact same thing:
As her folks drive away, her dad yells, "Check the oil!"
Mom stares out the window and says, "I'm leaving my girl"
She said, "It didn't seem like that long ago"
When she stood there and let her own folks know...
As the cultured reader will recognize, these are the first and last verses from the title track to the Chick's breakout album.
But it's not just to say that there's a mythic history of heading West that the Chicks are currently acting out, the latest generation to imagine themselves to be quitting a dumbshow whose script they're in fact following to the letter. It's true that this is what they're doing...but to settle for calling it a mythic history is to miss the industrial history, the marketing script the Chicks are also following. The pressures of maintaining and increasing market share drive almost every modern female Nashville superstar — Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Trisha Yearwood, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, and Dolly Parton, to choose a few examples from just the last dozen years — to leave behind the horizons of twang for a deracinated pop-40 MOR sound. Once you sell five million, this thing the Chicks are doing (in both sound and cultural positioning) is just what you do.
The last irony is that it doesn't work very well; with the possible exception of Dolly Parton (an exception in so many ways), none of these women increased their market share or made particularlly good records. But that drives the cycle too; other than Chapin (who was always a folk singer playing at country), each of these artists arrived inevitably at the moment of return, when LA suddenly reveals itself as bankrupt and you point the Pontiac southwest to record the comeback album with the recaptured core values and banjo.
Political chatter proving to be interesting and appealing and utterly irrelevant in terms of the career narrative, we can know that, no matter what they say, we can look forward to the continuation of the traditional country story, from which the Chicks have yet to deviate by so much as an iota. One can only hope that the Dixie Chicks disc wherein they embrace traditional values and are welcomed back into the cockles of Music Row's mechanical heart is half as good as something from 1998, though, if tradition holds, the odds against that are perilously steep.