(Shut Up & Sing – documentary – 93 min – directed by Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck – starring Natalie Maines, Emily Robison, Martie Maguire – 2006)

We're branching out here at bravenewfilms.org, and I thought a good step would be movie reviews. The movies we'll be reviewing at BNF will be ones with political aspects or significance, which will be defined as broadly as possible. Sometimes the movies will be current releases, but in this age of NetFlix, DVDs will probably make up the majority. But we can all use a few more movies for our queues, right? Several months ago, I reviewed Jeremy Earp and Loretta Alper's great documentary "War Made Easy", but I'll try to review a movie on a more regular basis (schedule permitting).  

So I'm starting with Shut Up & Sing, a documentary about the Dixie Chicks and the turbulent ordeal and transformation they experienced during the firestorm created when Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines' had the audacity to tell a British audience days before the start of the Iraq war, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”

The first thing I'd like to say is that I don't like the Dixie Chicks' music, though I like it slightly more than I did before watching the movie. I always saw their music as belonging to the genre of what I call pop country, which sounds to me like Christian rock from the 80s but with country accents and occasional songs about murder, adultery, and alcoholism. And in the movie’s concert footage, you can see that the Chicks perform dressed as some weird kind of cyberpunk hooker clowns, which I find odd. So I didn’t approach the movie as a fan.

And in the first part of the movie, I still hadn’t warmed to the Dixie Chicks as people. You see Maines’ comment for what it really was — an off-the-cuff, unplanned, throw-away remark between songs, not an impassioned declaration, or a powerful statement against the war. What’s more, the Chicks’ other members, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire, didn’t seem to share Maines’ sentiments at all and were eager to distance themselves from them. I was also unimpressed by the fact that Maines later released a statement apologizing to Bush for her “disrespectful” remark.

In that sense, I wish that Maines (as well as other artists) had had the bravery and conviction to make strong anti-war statements early on and stick by them, even if it damaged their careers. I know that’s easy for me to say when I don’t have millions of potential dollars on the line, but my feelings against the war were so strong in 2003 that I think I’d be ashamed if I hadn’t spoken out as loudly as possible, especially if I knew that thousands of people would listen. Even in 2003, you didn't have to be a genius to know that a Bush-led pre-emptive war with Iraq was a terrible idea, and the evidence justifying it was shaky at best.  

At the same time, I think it’s important to have some perspective on what was happening to the Chicks. In 2003, the Chicks were one of the biggest acts in the world across all genres and were really the darlings of both country music and the music industry. They were a phenomenon that could seemingly do no wrong. Then, because of one harmless comment, their lives were totally turned upside down. Country radio blacklisted them, their millions of supposed fans abandoned and attacked them, and they became the target of boycotts, CD smashing rallies, and death threats. As one of the Chicks says at one point of Shut Up & Sing, “We just want to get back into stadiums.” You can’t blame them for wishing the whole thing never happened.

While the film does a careful and honest job of not depicting the Chicks as anti-war heroines, it is very successful as an examination (and cautionary tale) of how utterly and outrageously war crazy country music fans and republicans were in the run-up to the Iraq war. The fact that a nice group of women like the Chicks would be the target of such hatred based on utter lies and jingoism would make you laugh if it hadn’t led to the shredding of the Constitution, our national identity and the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.

Self-described patriots were more than happy to throw the cherished notion of freedom of speech out the window, with former fans declaring that the Chicks should be deported, beaten, jailed, or killed for daring to question the president. In one clip, FOX’s Bill O’Reilly calls the Chicks "callow, foolish women who deserve to be slapped around," which begs the question: Exactly what kind of women deserve to be slapped around? The film’s tagline, “Freedom of speech is fine as long as you don’t do it in public,” is actually a quote from one “patriotic” Chicks protestor. The section where the Chicks decide to perform in Dallas despite receiving a specific death threat for that performance is particularly gripping. It really makes you wonder how the concept of patriotism could be so horribly mutilated to the point that someone would use it as justification to terrify such a seemingly nice group of women who hadn’t done anything wrong and just want to play music I don’t particularly like.

The last part of the film focuses on the Chicks’ comeback and transformation as they record their Grammy-winning album, Not Ready to Make Nice, which I'm only slightly interested in hearing because it was produced by legendary producer Rick Rubin. Despite the confusion in the immediate aftermath of Maines’ statement, the movie shows how the Chicks were able to digest the incident and realize that freedom of speech and the bonds between them as friends and bandmates are much more important than playing in stadiums full of fans who largely turned out to be jerks and dupes. While the attacks on them came close to literally and figuratively destroying them, it also gave them a chance to re-prioritize and start again outside the constraints of a country music culture that tried to bury them. Maines is particularly fiery in her refusal to court country radio or forgive them and their former fans for treating the Chicks so unfairly. And in my opinion, rightly so.

And even if the Chicks never produced another album after 2003, they could always take comfort in the inescapable fact that Maines was completely right: Bush is an embarrassment to Texas and the entire nation. And Toby Keith is an idiot.