Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Intertextual References and Making Sense of "Accidents" (reflections on Brad Paisley)



“Yikes, Brad! What were you thinking?!”  That sentiment toward Brad Paisley, or one far more condemning, is widespread at the moment, at least if one gauges such things by the blogosphere and social media.  With the release of “Accidental Racist,” Paisley has stirred up commentary from all corners, including from many writers who do not claim to be country fans, and most of whom are indignant and scathing in their reviews of the song, its text, its nature as a duet project, and the audacity of Paisley to attempt to confront racism in a half-baked way that backfires badly.  But I think the real story here is quite different and the outrage misdirected:  it’s not “Accidental Racist,” but instead earlier recordings from Paisley—and the fans who identify with them—that we ought to be challenging.  In the context of Paisley’s total output, in the context of contemporary country radio, and in the context of country music’s complicated history, “Accidental Racist” can be read as a response and moment of attempted critical self-reflection on a pattern of troubling contemporary performances that somehow seem to have escaped much public commentary.

Head back in time about a year, to the release of “Southern Comfort Zone,” a Paisley single penned by Paisley along with his standard songwriting team of Kelley Lovelace and Chris DuBois.  The song is an ode to the South, a recomposed version of the 19th-century minstrel tune known as “Dixie,” whose cultural legacy is steeped in the ugliest attitudes of racism.  Paisley’s single opens with the line, “When your wheelhouse is the land of cotton,” and proceeds to incorporate strains of “Dixie” sung by the Brentwood Baptist Choir with the religious fervor of a hymn:  “I wish I was in Dixie, away, away!”  “You have fed me, you have saved me, Billy Graham and Martha White.”  Sustenance and salvation, all in the nostalgia for the South, capital-“S.” In the lyrics, Paisley travels the world, but declares that neither Paris nor Rome can hold a candle to Tennessee, flaunting a disavowal of the global American south and the developments that have brought some level of economic progress to the region in the last century.  In the accompanying music video, Paisley momentarily appears to head to Africa as well, but the image turns out to be merely a cardboard cutout of him that landed on that continent while the real Paisley was racing elsewhere around the globe, a moment that offers shocking possibilities for interpretation: he doesn’t even grace Africa (visually represented in the video as explicitly black Africa) with his live presence.

The merest fragment of “Dixie,” sung in 2013, is enough to rightly provoke charges of racism.  At a recent academic conference I attended, a pick-up brass band played “Dixie,” with no consciously intended malice, and almost immediately, conference-goers loudly condemned the musical offense for its racist undertones and implications.  Yet Paisley’s “Southern Comfort Zone,” which is musically speaking nothing more than a reworking of “Dixie,” debuted in the top 30 on the Billboard chart and topped out at number 2 on the country airplay chart, a bona fide hit to which country fans sang along without any shame, and which, unlike “Accidental Racist,” did not register editorials on the front page of CNN.  In fact, no one seemed to notice. 

Paisley’s single prior to “Southern Comfort Zone” was a comedy number, “Camouflage,” whose only offense at first glance may have been one of fashion—camo prom dresses and custom sports car paint jobs may well violate acceptable standards of taste.  But on closer examination, the lyrics of “Camouflage” should have provoked an impassioned outcry.  “Well the stars and bars offends some folks and I guess I see why/Nowadays there's still a way to show your southern pride/The only thing is patriotic as the old red white and blue/Is green and gray and black and brown and tan all over too/Camouflage…” 

Not only does Paisley conflate “the old red white and blue,” a typical phrase used to describe the American flag, with a reference to the Confederate flag with the St. Andrew's Cross on it, but he suggests that there is a secret code in use, where camouflage is a means to fly the Confederate flag, “disguised” and under the radar of those not in the know.  The suggestion that camo equates to the Confederate flag, and that the hunting garb and good ol’ boy accessories are a clandestine expression of Confederate solidarity, is, at the least, daring.  And yet country’s audiences, many of whom routinely show up in camo wear, neither took offense nor challenged the assertion, while non-country audiences took no notice at all.

Paisley is far from the worst offender with such songs.  In 2011, Blake Shelton scored a hit with “Kiss My Country Ass,” an exercise in country-grandiloquence that opened with “Tearing down a dirt road/Rebel flag flyin’/Coon dog in the back,” and proceeded to depict drinking and driving, relegating a woman to a role as a sexualized accessory (expressly in the video footage), and clarifying for the listener that he is wearing a “camouflage cap,” in case the image was not yet solidified.  One of Shelton’s co-writers and co-conspirators in this musical exercise of defiant crassness was fellow artist Rhett Akins, who had released his own version a few years earlier.  A number of commentators have pointed out with more or less subtlety that this the particular brand of white, working-class masculinity has expanded its reach and frequency in country music of the past few years.  Paisley, too, appears to have gotten caught up in that trend, with some of his music moving increasingly in that direction:  draw a line from, say, "I'm Still a Guy" to "Camouflage," and nestle it in radio playlists that are saturated with dirt roads, trucks, and a working-class swagger.  "Accidental Racist" attempts at least for a moment to pull out of that dive and take stock of the situation.

Paisley holds two different roles within country music, which further complicates his voice in these songs.  He has garnered mainstream acceptance with a number of pop-influenced recordings, a public role of smooth spokesperson hosting awards shows and acting as an ambassador for country music whose songs (“Celebrity,” “Online,” “American Saturday Night”) reach across genre borders to a pop audience.  But, contrasting with that persona, Paisley has also taken up the torch of tradition, presenting himself as a self-assigned protector of country’s past.  He spoke out passionately when, over a decade ago, the owner of radio station WSM (home of the Grand Ole Opry since 1925) threatened to change the format of the historic station.  He paid homage to the senior generations of stars with ensemble performances (“Too Country”) and through his Bakersfield-shuffle grooves and guitar wizardry.  He sang gospel hymns on his albums, even packaging “The Old Rugged Cross” with monophonic AM-radio-style static to evoke an Opry broadcast from days gone by.  And he put instrumentals on his albums when that was tantamount to announcing that he was out of fashion and a relic of a long-gone time.  

That role as a keeper of tradition carries a huge social cost.  When flooding damaged the Opry a few years ago, Paisley was quick to help the recovery and repair efforts, including that of the center circle on the Opry stage that was transported from the Ryman Auditorium to the new digs in 1974 when the Opry moved out of downtown Nashville.  That spot on the stage is legendary:  the very wood where Patsy Cline and Hank Williams stood, allowing today’s stars to share the footprints of their musical heroes.  But the stage circle that Paisley was so quick to protect was the site of blackface performances well into the third decade of the Opry’s existence, an appalling fact further exacerbated by the lingering elements of minstrelsy that graced country radio shows for much of the 20th century.  To revere the troubled tradition in which he resides as an artist is difficult.  Denounce it, and an artist loses the ability to be an artist in that particular genre because the loyalties between audiences and genres.  Endorse it, and confront a legacy that should be renounced.  So even as Paisley was protecting the circle in the Opry stage where Little Jimmy Dickens first inducted him into the Opry, the Mother Church of Country Music, and where he had invited Darius Rucker to join the Opry, he was taking on the burdens of that same stage’s history.

But back to “Accidental Racist,” a duet recorded with LL Cool J.  Cross-racial country collaborations are old as the genre itself, and often as awkward as what is heard here.  When Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong joined forces for “Blue Yodel #9” in 1930, the recording documented an uncomfortable negotiation over just how to play the blues, and where yodeling belongs on the trumpet.  Less awkward instances have become increasingly common in the past decade, such as Tim McGraw and Nelly, and in most cases, these collaborations have been pitched to a country audience, not a hip-hop one.  “Accidental Racist” fits in that marketing slot:  by all current evidence, including the musical style, this is headed primarily for a country audience.  And that’s a country audience that has continued to wear Skynyrd tee shirts long after others have realized the flag signifies hateful segregationist attitudes in most any cultural setting, certainly since the 1960s.  Was (or is) Lynyrd Skynyrd racist?  Did they condone the use of the flag on stage behind them?  Books have been written debating the answer, but the association between the flag and the band persists, whatever one’s interpretation of meaning.  Yet as is suggested by the case of Michael Westerman, recounted by Tony Horwitz in Confederates in the Attic, plenty of people including music fans are deplorably oblivious to the flag’s cultural meanings and their expression and transmission, or in other words, there are plenty of Skynyrd-shirt wearing country fans who genuinely don’t know how offensive their clothing is to others, and maybe they need a wake-up call, one they might actually heed.

Close listening to “Accidental Racist” suggests a reading of it in this context:  around 4:50 in the recording, a direct musical quotation from “Southern Comfort Zone” appears (“Oh, Dixieland, I hope you understand,” paired with LL Cool J’s “The relationship between the Mason-Dixon needs some fixin’”).  Paisley is well-known for weaving intertextual references throughout his work, drawing such references from a wide range of sources including his own output (his second album started with a cross-fade from a recording on his first, for instance, or catch the Jimmie Rodgers jailhouse riff at the end of "Mr. Policeman").  Here, Paisley excerpts “Southern Comfort Zone” and its incarnation of the song “Dixie” to provide the compositional material from which “Accidental Racist” is formed.  “Southern Comfort Zone” – its success on the country charts and the deafening silence of any socially critical response—is a manifestation of the very “relationship” that needs fixing.  “Accidental Racist,” on the other hand, is Paisley responding to and commenting on his own work, a compositional act of self-reflection and contemplation of his previous single, shared with his audience through a song. 

So, why the response to this song and not the earlier ones?  Since the clamor is largely, albeit not exclusively, from the non-country fan base, it may well be either that they were not listening to Paisley prior to this song, or that they simply dismissed country music as inherently beyond redemption.  Ironically, it is  the presence of LL Cool J—an attempt at cross-racial dialogue and an apparent endorsement from a black singer for someone at least acknowledging the problem—that instilled sufficient curiosity in many people that they gave the song a listen in the first place, and that collaboration has therefore sparked the firestorm of attention, largely negative.  The worst crimes of “Accidental Racist,” in my book, are an insipid musical setting, awkward chemistry between duet performers, and blocky, occasionally wildly inappropriate lyrics that interleave flashpoint-inducing references with maudlin (and insensitive) hyperbole.  But crimes of musical blandness and tacky lyrics with metaphoric hyperbole are committed in country music on a daily basis.  As columnist LZ Granderson wrote on CNN, Paisley is actually a kindhearted person, and the artists’ intentions here appear to be of the best sort, toward opening a productive dialogue about racism.

Other attempts by country artists to use their music as a call for social justice have also been met with controversy, from advocating for gay rights to exposing domestic violence, fighting for gender equality, preventing child abuse, and ending poverty.  Perhaps this song will get more people who are not usually country fans invested in learning something about the music, its history, and the audiences who ascribe personal meaning to the songs, as well as shake up fans who have been listening to country all along.  Are country music artists and fans racist?  In some cases, yes, in some cases, no, and in many cases, complicit by either ignorance or association.  Does that racism deserve some examination and tireless effort toward eradication?  Absolutely.  But let’s target the right songs.  I, for one, would much rather listen to awkward attempts at self-reflective bridge-building than hear radio fans blithely singing along to a white church choir’s “Southern Comfort Zone,” or wondering if the person next to me wearing that camouflage cap is signaling a secret rebel flag flying—with all accompanying meaning—to those in the know.