“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.
