The Dixie Chicks 2001–2003: The dissonances of gender and genre in war culture

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the US, the ideological undercurrents of America’s popular music culture were brought into sharp focus, with the music of the pop ‘mainstream’ revealed as being largely consistent with liberal stances, and the broadly defined ‘country’ genre as more naturally aligned to conservative views. Several critical discussions of this ideological divide have focused on the case of the Dixie Chicks, a country group who controversially declared their liberalism by opposing US foreign policy in the weeks preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. However, such studies have tended to dismiss the group’s repertoire in this period (which centres on their 2002 album Home) as securely conventional in its lyrical themes, and therefore as either implicitly conservative, or else apolitical. The author counters this view by arguing that the group’s use of the conventional ‘feminine’ themes of country music, which include images of motherhood, marriage and domesticity, provides an aesthetic framework for their enacting an ideological critique of country music from within. He also argues that the group’s use of these themes positions their repertoire within Kartomi’s ethnographic model of ‘war music’ genres, which observes a similar distinction between male and female repertoires. He concludes that the Dixie Chicks’ critique of genre may therefore be extended to country music’s explicit support of US foreign policy at this time, and ultimately demonstrates that apparently ‘apolitical’ songs may be interpreted as expressing positive political stances by their critical contexts.