Review: Shut Up & Sing
On the box for the DVD of this Dixie Chicks documentary is a blurb from Mark Warren of Esquire: "This great American story makes you want to stand up and cheer!" By the end of watching this I was standing up and cheering, but it wasn’t to ask them to keep singing.
It's the story of how the Dixie Chicks handled being shunned by their country audience after lead singer Natalie Maines (the one who always looks like she fell forward off her bike) made a comment while on tour in London about being ashamed that George W. Bush was from Texas. Oh, sure, it seems like a harmless statement now, but in 2003 the war in Iraq hadn't turned into what it has become and Bush wasn't tanking in the polls just yet. The documentary then proceeds to follow the group for the next few years as they record a new album and figure out a way to preserve their arena-sized standard of living.
My problem is that this story is intellectually dishonest. The comment was wholly off-the-cuff, not just without preparation but investment, a throw-away brain fart. Maines has the opinion of a twelve year-old, bearing no research and no earnest position on Bush or the war except that it’s bad. There are about five disturbing minutes of film that take place after the statement, with the group trying to hash out a public statement with their manager. It is disturbing because you realize that none of them actually had any stake in the truth one way or the other, shown on film as Maines being one flip of the tongue away from declaring the whole thing a joke just to move on. That one of the other DCs is, in the same moment, distancing herself away by pointing out that she didn’t say anything is equally compelling, and yet this film spends the next hour or more showing them in a studio recording their next album. When another opportunity is provided to investigate this elephant in Rick Rubin’s living room, it is again dismissed. The whole exercise becomes a cliffhanger that never resolves, as Maines curses and pouts her way through a few years of the hard knock life of a super-rich country star and the other two sit around looking at their shoes.
This film brings to light a truth, but it isn’t that the Dixie Chicks are patriotic and that they’ve had their freedom of speech trampled on. At every turn Maines stokes the fire brazenly over the years. If she possesses a genuine feeling resembling anything other than thoughtless tirades and being the person-at-the-party-who-can’t-use-an-inside-voice-for-fear-you’ll-ignore-her, then it was not captured on this film. Perhaps it is in the special features. I somewhat doubt it. In the end the documentary only exposes that the DCs don’t really have any opinions that don’t affect their career, and that is a sorry ruse. I thought I was going to be exposed to a testimony to free speech. All I learned from this is that I like their music even less than I thought and that fresh fruit is on their concert riders.
I hated this shit and I want my hour and a half back.
It's the story of how the Dixie Chicks handled being shunned by their country audience after lead singer Natalie Maines (the one who always looks like she fell forward off her bike) made a comment while on tour in London about being ashamed that George W. Bush was from Texas. Oh, sure, it seems like a harmless statement now, but in 2003 the war in Iraq hadn't turned into what it has become and Bush wasn't tanking in the polls just yet. The documentary then proceeds to follow the group for the next few years as they record a new album and figure out a way to preserve their arena-sized standard of living.
My problem is that this story is intellectually dishonest. The comment was wholly off-the-cuff, not just without preparation but investment, a throw-away brain fart. Maines has the opinion of a twelve year-old, bearing no research and no earnest position on Bush or the war except that it’s bad. There are about five disturbing minutes of film that take place after the statement, with the group trying to hash out a public statement with their manager. It is disturbing because you realize that none of them actually had any stake in the truth one way or the other, shown on film as Maines being one flip of the tongue away from declaring the whole thing a joke just to move on. That one of the other DCs is, in the same moment, distancing herself away by pointing out that she didn’t say anything is equally compelling, and yet this film spends the next hour or more showing them in a studio recording their next album. When another opportunity is provided to investigate this elephant in Rick Rubin’s living room, it is again dismissed. The whole exercise becomes a cliffhanger that never resolves, as Maines curses and pouts her way through a few years of the hard knock life of a super-rich country star and the other two sit around looking at their shoes.
This film brings to light a truth, but it isn’t that the Dixie Chicks are patriotic and that they’ve had their freedom of speech trampled on. At every turn Maines stokes the fire brazenly over the years. If she possesses a genuine feeling resembling anything other than thoughtless tirades and being the person-at-the-party-who-can’t-use-an-inside-voice-for-fear-you’ll-ignore-her, then it was not captured on this film. Perhaps it is in the special features. I somewhat doubt it. In the end the documentary only exposes that the DCs don’t really have any opinions that don’t affect their career, and that is a sorry ruse. I thought I was going to be exposed to a testimony to free speech. All I learned from this is that I like their music even less than I thought and that fresh fruit is on their concert riders.
I hated this shit and I want my hour and a half back.