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    Bite me! How Apple’s download chart became a new battleground for pop – and politics

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    Over 20 years after its launch, Apple’s online music store has found a surprising new life – as a battleground for online turf wars. Last week, at least five songs rose to the upper reaches of the Apple Music (formerly iTunes) download charts, powered by different internet factions. Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion fans waged war against each other as foot soldiers in the rappers’ feud; Britney Spears fans mass-bought the singer’s years-old songs Liar and Selfish as a way to troll her ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, who released a song also called Selfish last month; and rightwing media influencer Ben Shapiro encouraged his fans to drive Facts, his new rap song with Canadian former wrestler Tom MacDonald, up the charts. Far from a measure of objective popularity, the chart reflected political biases, years-old feuds and outright pettiness.Fans mobilising to push certain albums or songs up the Apple Music download charts is nothing new – in 2018, a group of Mariah Carey fans mass-bought the singer’s 2001 flop Glitter as part of a campaign called #JusticeForGlitter. But musician and writer Jaime Brooks says that the cratering of the digital download market in recent years – around 152m digital songs were sold in the US in 2022, less than half of 2018’s 412m – has allowed campaigns that are smaller and far less coordinated than #JusticeForGlitter to disproportionately affect the charts. “I don’t think anybody’s actually using their phones and iTunes to listen to files any more, except people who have not upgraded their setup since 2012 – there are a lot of people like that in America, but not enough to sustain these huge numbers,” she says. “This [downloading] is a purely performative gesture – it only ever happens as a result of some kind of factional culture war that somebody has the money and inclination to try to represent on the charts.”Indeed, a lot of these sales campaigns have an implicit or explicit political meaning. Shapiro’s song, naturally, is part of an attempt to “own the libs”; Spears fans see their trolling of Timberlake as a kind of punishment for his perceived mistreatment of the singer when they dated, and for the unapologetic pose he has since adopted. In Megan’s song, she references Megan’s Law, a piece of legislation that requires the government to make information about sex offenders public, which many saw as a shot against Minaj, whose husband is a registered sex offender; Minaj’s song accuses Megan of falsely accusing Tory Lanez of shooting her.These relatively niche buying campaigns seem small fry in comparison with two campaigns led by the American conservative establishment last year. In July, Jason Aldean’s single Try That in a Small Town was sent to No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its video was pulled from Country Music Television amid criticisms, including that it was racist, which Aldean denied. In August, the total unknown Oliver Anthony debuted at No 1 with his libertarian – and, some say, QAnon-pandering – single Rich Men North of Richmond.Kristin Robinson, a senior writer at Billboard, says the Aldean song in particular was not just driven by his fans, but by onlookers who saw the track as a cause to support. “Anchors on Fox News and other kinds of conservative talking heads led a fandom – not in the musical sense but in a political sense – to support that song,” she says. That both songs were in the country space, she says, only helped. “Country music still does quite well with sales in general, because country tends to be a bit of an older audience that has more buying power, or might not be as technologically savvy.”View image in fullscreenSales also have a disproportionate effect on the Billboard charts. A single sale counts for 150 streams, which is why astute fans tend to focus more on downloads than the kinds of “streaming parties” that some fanbases hold. Brooks says that education on the charts – the ways in which certain formats are weighted more heavily than others, and how a fairer chart might be implemented – has been led by K-pop fanbases. “They’ve developed among themselves a whole ideology about this type of thing, and they really did teach the pop fan community about how this stuff works,” she says. “That’s factoring into the current situation, where you had Megan fans organising to try to put big numbers on the board to fight back against Nicki.”Of course, few of these campaigns create their desired impact. While Megan’s Hiss debuted at No 1 – with around 100k in sales, 29.2m streams and 2.9m radio impressions – Shapiro’s song debuted at No 16, Timberlake’s at No 19 and Minaj’s at No 23. Brooks says that, either way, we’re likely to see more of this in coming years, as music consumption drops on the whole and pop music becomes more tied in with celebrity and politics. “Politics is sort of eating music – in the case of the Ben Shapiro thing, it’s enthusiasm driven by the political media industrial complex, and with Britney v Justin, it’s the celebrity industrial complex,” she says. “It’s all ultimately pointless – it’s people competing to be into the virtuous product v the non-virtuous product. But ultimately, it’s all the same shit.” More

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      The protest song that’s taken America by storm hits too many false notes | Kenan Malik

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      There is mean things happening in this landOh the rich man boasts and bragsWhile the poor man goes in ragsThere is mean things happening in this landSo runs the opening verse of John Handcox’s classic 1930s song There is Mean Things Happening In This Land. Handcox was a tenant farmer and union organiser in Arkansas during the Great Depression. His family, like thousands of others, had been made destitute, crushed between the droughts that afflicted the dust bowl and the ruthlessness of east coast bankers and of the old plantation owners, the white oligarchy that had retained its power in the south after the civil war.I don’t know if Oliver Anthony knows of Handcox. A jobbing country singer from Virginia, Anthony’s video of his song Rich Men North of Richmond has gone viral over the past week, clocking up more than 20m views on YouTube, rising to the top of the streaming charts and becoming an anthem for conservatives from Marjorie Taylor Green, the reactionary Republican congresswoman from Georgia, to the rightwing political commentator Matt Walsh, all viewing Anthony as a righteous figure, whose “rawness” and “authenticity” speak to real Americans.In some ways, Rich Men North of Richmond echoes the themes of Handcox’s song, giving voice to a sense of a world divided into rich and poor, and of ordinary people as menaced by those in power. It also shows the degree to which the working-class tradition that Handcox helped forge has decayed, politically and culturally.Handcox was not simply a singer or songwriter. He was first and foremost a union activist, and it was out of his activism that his music flowed. He stood in a long line of working-class troubadours. From The Ballad of Joe Hill to This Land Is Your Land, much of what is now called the Great American Songbook emerged from grassroot struggles, songs created to organise, inspire and console. Some names in that tradition are well known – Paul Robeson or Woody Guthrie. Others, such as Ella May Wiggins, a millworker murdered by a militia during thenotorious Loray Mill strike in 1929, and Sarah Ogan Gunning, a nurse and midwife from the mining country in Kentucky, are largely lost to the collective memory.All helped create a movement in which music became a central strand in the struggle for justice and betterment. It was a tradition that, long before the civil rights movement, was committed to interracial solidarity. Not only were African Americans, such as Robeson and Handcox, an inextricable part of the working-class folk scene, but there was much cross-fertilisation across blues, gospel and folk.Handcox was an organiser for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), helping stage a major strike of cotton pickers demanding better pay in 1935. The strike was met with ferocious violence from planters, militias and the Ku Klux Klan. The union was crushed, and Handcox, blacklisted and threatened by lynch mobs, was forced to flee, joining the thousands who had formed a great exodus out of the dust bowl, the raw horrors of which were captured in Dorothea Lange’s photographs and in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.Handcox would have understood Anthony’s lament in Rich Men North of Richmond about the precariousness of working-class life. But where he was committed to collective action and unionisation, Rich Men North of Richmond expresses individualised resentment. It is a resentment not towards bosses or the capitalist class, as in the old songs but, as has become fashionable today, towards a nebulous political elite, defined as much by its cultural alienness as by its economic power.A boss who is culturally familiar seems less threatening than a member of the cosmopolitan elite. Anthony even gives a nod towards conspiracy theories about paedophiles (“I wish politicians would look out for miners / And not just minors on an island somewhere”). It is a resentment, too, not just towards the elite but also the undeserving poor, towards benefit recipients and welfare scroungers: “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat / And the obese milkin’ welfare”. For Anthony, “if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”. Only for some is the precariousness of life to be condemned.All this has turned the song into a conservative hymn, “the protest song of our generation”, as Walsh has described it. Most of those who laud Rich Men North of Richmond as being, in Greene’s words, “the anthem of the forgotten Americans”, have also long campaigned to deny those forgotten Americans their dues. They oppose unionisation and Medicare and abortion rights, view tax cuts for the rich as more important than support for the poor, and despise welfare payments as “money stolen”. A century ago, they would have condemned Handcox and Wiggins, Robeson and Guthrie, as treacherous “reds”, cheered on the strike-breaking militias, and probably joined them, too.It is a common theme on the right that when people take collective action to defend their interests, they are the wrong kind of workers. It is only when workers lament without resisting that their voice is deemed “authentic”. Yet, the decline of radical struggles, the neutering of labour movement organisations and the abandonment of working-class issues by many sections of the left has allowed the most grotesque of reactionaries to shamelessly pose as friends of the downtrodden.“I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day / Overtime hours for bullshit pay.” Anthony’s plaint rings down the decades. But as long as disaffection is shaped by a politics that abases working-class hopes, and is directed as much against the undeserving poor or the culturally different as against employers and politicians who seek to crush unions and impose austerity, rich men, whether north and south of Richmond, will remain in power.“The way they’re treated is a sin, / So I’m gonna get organised”, Sarah Ogan Gunning sang in her 1937 recording I’m Goin’ to Organize, Baby Mine. It is an attitude, and a defiance, as necessary today as it was almost a century ago. More

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      Rich Men North of Richmond punches down. No surprise the right wing loves it

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      In Rich Men North of Richmond, Oliver Anthony, a bushy-bearded former North Carolina factory worker, sings passionately about working hard for “bullshit pay”.Armed with just a guitar and his powerful voice, he identifies the source of the problem: “rich men north of Richmond” – federal politicians – who “want to have total control”. The song laments homelessness – “folks in the street ain’t got nothin’ to eat” – and a national suicide crisis: “Young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground / ’Cause all this damn country does is keep on kicking them down.”So far, so resonant: the song has collected more than 12m views on YouTube alone, and on Tuesday afternoon, it sat at No 3 on Spotify’s Top 50 – USA list.But things start to feel a little less empathetic when Anthony starts complaining about “the obese milking welfare”, reasoning that “if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds”. We can all agree that politicians have caused many of America’s problems; it’s harder to argue that our country is being destroyed by short, overweight chocolate enthusiasts. He also rails against taxation, which he says means “your dollar ain’t shit”.The supposed welfare abuse sounds like a rightwing talking point, and Anthony doesn’t appear to have considered that the nefarious fudge rounds might be feeding the very people he mentioned with nothing to eat. But Anthony claims to “sit pretty dead center” when it comes to politics, according to a video filmed in his car the day before the video was released. “I remember as a kid the conservatives wanting war, and me not understanding that. And I remember a lot of the controversies when the left took office, and it seems like, you know, both sides serve the same master.”Still, a reference to politicians “looking out for minors on an island somewhere” – apparently a reference to Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to elite figures – has also prompted speculation that Anthony could be nodding to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory positing that Democrats and Hollywood stars are drinking the blood of children. In the car video, Anthony claims child trafficking has become “normalized”, though what he’s referring to isn’t clear.It’s no surprise, then, that the song has been an enormous hit among the loudest rightwingers: Kari Lake, former candidate for Arizona governor, calls it “the anthem of this moment in American history”. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene calls it “the anthem of the forgotten Americans who truly support this nation and unfortunately the world”. The far-right activist Jack Posobiec can’t “even remember the last time a new song hit me like this”.The rightwing commentator Matt Walsh, meanwhile, claims the “song is raw and authentic … Everything around us is fake. A guy in the woods pouring his heart over his guitar is real.” Wait till Walsh hears about Bon Iver in 2007, or Ed Sheeran busking in a train station, or pretty much anyone at a New York open mic on a Wednesday night.Still, these politicians and provocateurs have helped Anthony rise from obscure singer-songwriter to darling of the right in record time – sparking questions over how authentically viral his rise has been.On Twitter, Jason Howerton, who advertises himself on LinkedIn as having “helped grow media companies and political influencers grow their social media footprint exponentially”, has been a major proponent of Anthony’s work, sharing the musician’s life story in a thread, offering to finance an album – which the rightwing country singer John Rich apparently agreed to produce – and announcing the musician had just joined Twitter. It does feel remarkable that Anthony decided to share his life story on YouTube a day before releasing a video that went viral.But Howerton denies any claims of astroturfing – in which powerful figures orchestrate supposed grassroots campaigns – and, as Chris Willman writes in Variety, there’s no clear evidence of it. And whether or not it was promoted by outside forces, the song has clearly struck a genuine chord with listeners. There are many unknown performers who can work wonders with just a guitar, and who are equally deserving of a platform, but there is no denying Anthony’s voice packs a punch.Compared with the likes of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and the rightwingers sharing his song, he also seems to have a modicum of empathy. Granted, the standards are incredibly low. But it’s difficult to imagine any of those figures offering listeners a sign-off like Anthony’s: “I hope wherever you are in the world listening to this, and whatever it is that you’re trying to do with your life, I hope that you succeed.”It would be nice if he’d apply that apparently heartfelt philosophy to his own lyrics. Winston Marshall, formerly of Mumford and Sons, compared Anthony to Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie – but if either of them ever recorded a song mocking the poorest of the poor, it’s been lost to history. If Anthony wants to keep moving upward, he should aim his punches in the same direction. More

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      Jason Aldean’s Try That In a Small Town sums up the delusions of the right wing | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Jason Aldean is a country music star and a big fan of law and order. He loves the law so much, in fact, that he’s willing to take it into his own hands.If you come to his (imaginary) small town and disrespect a cop or engage in any sort of protest, you will regret it.Such is the theme of Aldean’s new song, Try That in a Small Town, which is all about how the singer and his pals will aggressively deal with unseemly behaviour on their turf. A sample extract: “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face … Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road. / Around here, we take care of our own …”A little later in the song Aldean elaborates further on what might happen if lines are crossed. “Got a gun that my grandad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up. / Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck.” He is, it would appear, referencing a conspiracy theory that the government is going to confiscate Americans’ guns to impose martial law.Try That in a Small Town was released in May but when the music video came out last Friday it generated immediate controversy. The video leaves little doubt as to what Aldean is trying to communicate: it intersperses footage of him singing in front of Maury county courthouse in Tennessee – the site of the lynching of a Black man, Henry Choate, in 1927 – with footage from protests, looting and civil unrest. Small towns are wholesome, the message is. Full of “good ol’ boys” who were “raised up right”. Cities, meanwhile, are hotbeds of violence … and diversity.That last bit isn’t spelled out – it’s not like Aldean yells “I’m a massive racist!” in the middle of the track – but the dog whistles are difficult to ignore. The song has been called “a modern lynching song” by detractors and the video was pulled from Country Music Television (CMT) on Monday. (While CMT has confirmed the video was taken off rotation, it hasn’t put out a statement as to why.) Fellow country star Sheryl Crow has also voiced her disapproval. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence,” Crow tweeted on Tuesday. She further noted that Aldean should know better, “having survived a mass shooting”. Crow was referencing the shooting at Las Vegas’s Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017: the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in modern US history. Aldean was performing and got out unscathed. He was lucky. Sixty people were killed and 867 injured. Those people weren’t killed and injured by a Black Lives Matter protester. They were killed by Stephen Paddock, an angry white man from Iowa.Try That in a Small Town has generated a lot of criticism, but it also has fervent supporters. Including, of course, GOP lawmakers. “I am shocked by what I’m seeing in this country with people attempting to cancel this song and cancel Jason and his beliefs,” the South Dakota Republican governor, Kristi Noem, posted in a video on Twitter on Wednesday. The Tennessee house GOP leader, William Lamberth, similarly tweeted: “Loved this song since it was released and will continue to fight every day to spread small town values … Give it a listen. The woke mob will hate you for liking this song.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, also didn’t miss the chance to stoke a little culture war. “The Left is now more concerned about Jason Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals,” she tweeted.Aldean, for his part, is furious at insinuations there is anything racist in his song about shooting outsiders who come to his little country town.“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song,” Aldean tweeted on Wednesday, “and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage.”If Aldean isn’t trying to make a point about the Black Lives Matter protests, what is Try That in a Small Town about then? Community, apparently. “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other,’” Aldean wrote on Instagram when he launched the video. “It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost.”Perhaps you’re wondering which quaint small town Aldean grew up in. The answer is: he didn’t. Aldean is from Macon, Georgia – a city with a population of about 153,000 people. Now he lives in Nashville, a city with a population of approximately 700,000. The small town he’s singing about is a product of his imagination.But that’s conservatives for you. Last month Nikki Haley tweeted about how much better the US used to be back in the days before marginalized people had rights. “Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country,” she tweeted.Was the past really that easy for the former South Carolina governor? By her own admission things have got a hell of a lot better for people who, like her, aren’t 100% white. “Years ago I was disqualified from a pageant because they didn’t know whether to put me in the white category or the black,” she wrote on Facebook in 2012. “I was neither. Tonight I watched my daughter get first place in her school pageant. God has an amazing way of bringing things full circle.” God also has an amazing away of depriving people like Haley of self-awareness.Aldean’s song doesn’t just epitomize manufactured rightwing nostalgia, it also encapsulates rightwing paranoia. People on the right are obsessed with the idea that big cities are violent hotbeds of crime where you risk your life every time you nip out for a pint of milk. In reality, however, big cities tend to be safer than small towns. A 2013 study by the University of Pennsylvania, for example, found the risk of death from an injury was more than 20% higher in rural small towns than in larger cities. “Cars, guns and drugs are the unholy trinity causing the majority of injury deaths in the US” one of the researchers told NBC News at the time.The pandemic, to be fair, saw a rise in violent crimes in cities. But even still, you’ve got a better chance of living a long, healthy life in a city. A 2021 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on mortality data from 1999 to 2019 found people living in rural areas die at higher rates than those living in urban areas. That’s because they have less access to healthcare and are more likely to live in poverty.So what’s next for Aldean? Well, I’ve got some good news for all the Republican lawmakers screeching about how unfair it is that Aldean has been cancelled by the woke mob: he’s going to be fine. Indeed, he’s going to be more than fine. Country music (and America) has a way of opening its arms to people accused of racism and making them feel right at home. Just look at Morgan Wallen, for example. In February 2021 TMZ published a video of the musician drunkenly yelling the N-word during a conversation with a friend. He was shunned from polite society for a few months but made a rapid comeback. He won album of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2022. His song Last Night is currently in its 14th week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. If it sticks there a little longer he’ll beat the 19-week record currently held by Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road, featuring Billy Ray Cyrus.While people on the right may be railing about Aldean being “cancelled”, the sad truth is that this will probably help his career. He’ll go on Fox News and yell about wokeness. He’ll wallow in his imagined victimhood. His song will probably be played in rallies for the next Republican nominee for president. Aldean hasn’t been cancelled or silenced – his message has been amplified. More

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      ‘I’m a little hard to pin down’: country star Brad Paisley becomes unlikely Ukraine advocate

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      Wearing white cowboy hat, black suit and black tie, country singer and guitar virtuoso Brad Paisley strode on stage in the East Room of the White House before a bipartisan audience.It was a Saturday night and, fittingly, he began the 40-minute set playing his hit song American Saturday Night – but with an amended lyric. “I had to change the second line because it mentioned Russia, and I don’t do that any more,” he explained.When Paisley delivered its substitute – “There’s a Ukrainian flag hanging up behind the bar” – no one applauded louder than Joe Biden in the front row.It was a moment that illustrated Paisley’s engagement with Ukraine’s fight for survival and, before a gathering of governors from blue and red states, his efforts to bridge political divides. The 50-year-old from West Virginia, a three-time Grammy winner, describes himself as hard to categorise but optimistic that America can move beyond what has been called a cold civil war.That night last month at the White House, Paisley compelled Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah and an amateur musician, to join him in a duet. He also performed a new song, Same Here, marking the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Speaking by phone Nashville, Tennessee, Paisley recalls: “You had most of the states represented and you had all sides. I could see it in the room: let’s not lose what this is saying because it works. Face to face, left to right, it works. That’s the thing about something like this: when you put it out there, it’s going to be uncomfortable, but that’s OK. Art can be uncomfortable. I welcome the discussion.”The commercial release of Same Here features a voiceover from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, speaking proudly about his country and people. Paisley’s royalties for the track will be donated to the United24 crowdfunding effort to help build housing for thousands of displaced Ukrainians whose homes were destroyed in the war.He describes the song – the first from his new album, Son of the Mountains – as an expression of empathy. “It’s about anybody who longs for freedom. Around this time last year, when I was seeing all this begin to happen, I was moved by the images of people fleeing – mothers, daughters, grandmothers crossing the border, all huddled in the backseat of a car, fleeing for their lives as the husband stayed behind to fight.“It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s unlike anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes. It just felt so helpless to watch this and be a witness to this with nothing we could do. Maybe the most exciting thing for me in having this out is the idea that this is going to help rebuild homes for people, and it’s also raising some awareness.”Zelenskiy has worked tirelessly to promote his cause and build support around the world. The former actor, comedian and screenwriter delivered a rousing speech to the US Congress in Washington and has given video addresses at the Golden Globe and Grammy awards.Paisley reflects: “It’s an amazing thing. Who would have thought? You almost can’t write the script – they did, actually, that was his TV show – but he seems to be the right man at the right time in a way that just seems divine. It’s unbelievable.”The Ukrainian president was happy to collaborate with Paisley and even had some songwriting suggestions. “When he heard it, I got word that there were a few lines that he wondered about and so we worked on those and made sure that it came off the way it did.“It’s funny how much better it is now than when we began in the sense that it’s truly remarkable to hear this voice in the middle of this conflict with a melody. He had great suggestions. I don’t know if he’s got aspirations to write songs or not.”Paisley’s public shows of support for Ukraine has drawn attacks from bots – fake, automated accounts that became notorious after Russia employed them in an effort to meddle in the 2016 presidential election.It would be no surprise to find Paisley caught in political crossfire. The perils facing country music artists who venture into the political arena were spelled out when the Dixie Chicks faced fierce blowback for their condemnation of President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq.During the 2016 election, a survey by the trade publication Country Aircheck found that 46% of industry professionals favored Republican Donald Trump while 41% preferred Democrat Hillary Clinton. Many stars prefer to remain apolitical, which may be pragmatic considering the risk of alienating half their audience.Nashville, the home of country music, has a Democratic mayor, but is surrounded by Republican red in Tennessee. Paisley does not declare himself to be either Democrat or Republican. “The bottom line is I defy category. I definitely am one of the more confusing people that way. The minute you affiliate, ‘Here’s what I am,’ are you all those things? I’m certainly not all of those things on either side.”“I’m a little hard to pin down. There will be songs when this album comes out where a lot of liberals will go, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t say that!’ I have written an album that does not pull punches. If I believe in something or if I want to tell a story, it’s on here on this album. I have literally bled for it – I’ve cut my hand a couple of times playing the guitar. I’ve written it to the degree that I’ve really tried to scope every word all the way from the very first line to the last line of this album.“The far left may say, ‘What are you doing?’ Harlan Howard, one of our great songwriters in country music, they used to give him flak. So many of the songs were cheating songs, drinking songs. They’re like, ‘Why do you write about that so much?’ He said, ‘When people stop, so will I!” He laughs. “That’s the thing people do. If people don’t do that any more then we’ll have to write country songs about all the other things. But there are songs in here about things people do.”It would not be the first time that Paisley has faced criticism from the left. Next month marks the 10th anniversary of Accidental Racist, Paisley’s ill-fated collaboration with rapper LL Cool J.Paisley began the song with an anecdote about a Black man taking offence at his Confederate flag T-shirt, explaining: “The only thing I meant to say is I’m a Skynyrd fan” – a reference to the southern rock band that often used the flag. He went on to sing about white people are “caught between southern pride and southern blame” a century and a half after the civil war.Paisley insisted that he was trying to foster an open discussion of race relations, but critics said it was tone deaf. An analysis by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic was headlined: “Why ‘Accidental Racist’ Is Actually Just Racist.” Demetria Irwin of the Black culture website the Grio called it “the worst song in the history of music”. Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt tweeted: “I can’t wait for Brad Paisley & LL Cool J’s next single: “Whoopsy Daisy, Holocaust, My Bad.”Did he learn lessons from the experience?“You can’t think of everything, and at some point the art you make should exist as the way you want it to exist, but if it can be better, and somebody has an opinion, you should listen to them. If it’s a valid opinion, if it’s not a bot, if it’s not some sort of strange agenda. In that sense, it’s all been a part of my journey for sure, learning from these things.”The entire nation has been on a vertiginous learning curve in the 10 years since Accidental Racist, witnessing a racial reckoning that has a reframing of American history via the 1619 Project and the removal of many Confederate statues across the south.Paisley comments: “I drove by these statues my whole life since I was 20 here in Tennessee and never really thought about them at all. Obviously I’m the wrong one to ask on whether they come down. It’s not important what I think. To me it’s about the people that feel something so deeply and feel so much hurt. Let’s talk about that.”The musician has long used his platform to advocate for causes, opening a free grocery store in Nashville with his wife, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, and donating 1m meals during the coronavirus pandemic. He visited US troops in Afghanistan and has talked with Zelenskiy about performing in Ukraine. But he rejects that idea that Same Here is a case of mixing music with politics.“To me in no way, shape or form is it a political statement. I guess I have a world leader on and it’s interesting to say something is avoiding politics when you do that. But truthfully, for me, when you boil it down, here’s what we care about: crying at weddings, having a beer together in a remote place, families and soldiers and flags and freedom and all these things.“To me, if you want to call it political, call it whatever you want to call it. But let’s talk about this. These are key things in life that make us human.” More

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      Nashville review – Robert Altman’s country classic still sings

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      “This isn’t Dallas, it’s Nashville! SING!” The desperate speaker is rhinestone-suited old-time country singer Haven Hamilton, played by Henry Gibson, in this rereleased state-of-America ensemble classic from 1975, written by Joan Tewkesbury and directed by Robert Altman. The toupee-wearing star has just been shot in the arm by a lone gunman in the crowd at a political rally featuring wholesomely patriotic country music, and the crowd is on the verge of panic. Only soothing tunes will calm them, and eventually a sprightly number called It Don’t Worry Me finally gets them singing along, forgetting all about the murder attempt they’ve all just witnessed. (Like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, from a year later, this is a movie that is attempting to deal with the trauma of the Kennedy assassination as much as, or more, than the Vietnam war.)It’s an appropriately sensational and bizarre set piece to close this unique film and, watching it again for the first time since its last revival 17 years ago, what strikes me is its complex attitude to country music itself. Nashville is of course the home of country, the home of the Grand Ole Opry; the music is not really ironised in this film, not mocked, even when the singers are at their most narcissistic and self-serving and when the songs are at their cheesiest – especially Hamilton’s toe-curling For the Sake of the Children, a mawkish song from a man to his mistress, piously saying he has to return to his marriage. The music, playing almost continuously, is the glue that holds the movie together. It may sound schmaltzy, but the city-slickers deriding it sound worse.This is Gerald Ford’s America, on the verge of the bicentennial in 1976 … an event everyone hopes will heal the agonies of Watergate. An independent presidential candidate is coming to Nashville, hoping to promote his new ideas: taxing churches, abolishing the electoral college, removing lawyers from government. But for some Kennedy lovers present, the final dismissal of Nixon just brings back unhappy memories of how Nixon actually won against Kennedy in Tennessee in 1960, and the Kennedy motif is an unhappy omen.So too is a public fainting fit suffered by the local country star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), who has perhaps intuited the hysteria and anxiety in the air. Allen Garfield is great as her boorish husband-slash-manager Barnett. Geraldine Chaplin is insufferably patronising British journalist Opal, who has a fling with handsome singer Tom (Keith Carradine), who is also having an affair with Linnea (a superb Lily Tomlin), with whom Wade (Robert DoQui) is poignantly in love. Linnea is an unsatisfied married woman with hearing-impaired children whose sleazy husband Delbert (Ned Beatty) is working with visiting TV producer John Triplette (Michael Murphy) to set up a lucrative media-political deal. All these – and many more – characters’ lives crisscross, their dialogue overlapping in the middle-distance sound design while the candidate’s megaphone-van trundles around the city, blaring its choric political commentary, an ambient effect rather like the tannoy announcements in M*A*S*H.The film’s most brutal moment is the treatment of Sueleen Gay, the waitress and tone-deaf wannabe country star played by Gwen Welles, who is tricked by the unspeakable Delbert and Triplette into appearing on stage, purely because they want her to do a striptease for the braying good ol’ boys present. Poor Sueleen thinks they wanted to hear her sing. It’s an ugly moment of abuse and, perhaps tellingly, the band switch from wholesome country to traditional burlesque music for this humiliation.Altman’s control of this sprawling material is wonderful – though Tewkesbury’s screenwriting achievement should not be forgotten. This is the heart of the troubled mid-70s American zeitgeist: angry, sentimental, violent, comic, afraid. More

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      in Elections

      The inauguration music: Biden trumps Trump with singers you actually know

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      Whoever was in charge of booking the talent for Joe Biden’s inauguration clearly had an easier task than their counterpart in 2017. Donald Trump’s transition team promised the world a performance by Elton John. Instead, performers at various inauguration events included Tony Orlando, of Knock Three Times and Tie a Yellow Ribbon fame; a fading post-grunge band called 3 Doors Down; country singer Toby Keith; and a woman who came second on America’s Got Talent. Elton John, it transpired, hadn’t confirmed and evidently had no intention of playing. Here was a lesson for unscrupulous gig promoters everywhere about announcing an act before they sign up.
      In fairness, they managed to grub up one actual musical legend – Sam Moore, one half of 60s soul duo Sam & Dave, who performed at a pre-inauguration event called Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration. But the swearing-in ceremony itself featured only a choir and military band – a climbdown from Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, who had Aretha Franklin sing at his 2009 ceremony followed by Beyoncé in 2013. An excruciating nadir was reached when a Bruce Springsteen tribute act called the B Street Band withdrew from an inauguration eve gig. When the tribute bands start telling you to do one, you’re in trouble.
      Under the circumstances, almost anything would have been an improvement, but Biden’s team proved capable of drawing in some major stars: the Celebrating America TV special that followed the inauguration was hosted by Tom Hanks and featured Justin Timberlake, Foo Fighters, Demi Lovato, Jon Bon Jovi, John Legend and the real Bruce Springsteen.
      At the inauguration itself, Lady Gaga sang the national anthem wearing an enormous red skirt and something you would have described as a brooch in the shape of a dove were it not the size of her head; by her standards at least, she’d dressed down for the occasion. She belted out The Star-Spangled Banner in potent Broadway style, before Jennifer Lopez showed up to perform a medley of America the Beautiful and This Land Is Your Land. More