This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Brad Paisley’s new song “Accidental Racist” is a sodden, self-pitying slog. Over surging, hookless country radio gush, Paisley’s anonymous vocals blandly wail about how he’s caught between southern pride and southern blame because the folks at the Starbucks don’t appreciate his Confederate flag T-shirt. “I’m a white man/living in the Southland/just like you I’m more than what you see/I’m proud of where I’m from/but not everything I’ve done,” he declaims, then mumbles about how Reconstruction was bad (for who, exactly?) and how we can’t rewrite history so we might as well celebrate the symbols of slavery? Then LL Cool J comes on and starts to bargain: “If you don’t judge my gold chains/I’ll forget the iron chains.” Hey, if you don’t judge my big schnozz, I’ll forget the Holocaust. Can’t we all just get along?
Pretty much everybody has already weighed in on what a piece of shit this song is. But I think to really appreciate its badness fully, it might be helpful to listen to an earlier country music take on race.
That’s Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, and the genre’s first major star, with Blue Yodel #9 from 1930. The piano player is Lil Hardin; the trumpeter is her husband, Louis Armstrong.
Rodgers doesn’t mention the Confederacy or race. Still, with Louis Armstrong standing beside him, the opening lyrics seem fairly pointed:
Standing on the corner, I didn’t mean no harm
Along came the police, he took me by the arm
It was down in Memphis, corner of Beale and Maine
He said, big boy, you’ll have to tell me your name,
I said, you’ll find my name on the tail of my shirt,
I’m a Tennessee hustler, I don’t have to work.
In “Accidental Racist,” Paisley sings ” I try to put myself in your shoes and that’s a good place to begin/it ain’t like I can walk a mile in someone else’s skin” — a couplet that seems half lament and half excuse. Rodgers, on the other hand, and with much less fuss, demonstrates that hillbillies and black folk have plenty of common ground. A half century before hip hop, this is, after all, a song about police harassment. Rodgers could be speaking for a young Louis Armstrong, out there on the streets of Memphis — though Armstrong didn’t usually yodel.
Armstrong gets to speak for himself, too — and, to no one’s surprise, his trumpet is considerably more eloquent than LL Cool J’s lyrics. The song, in fact, is a conversation, with Rodgers throwing out a line and Armstrong’s horn answering with its mix of jaunty assurance and melancholy. The two performers couldn’t be much more simpatico; both are completely comfortable with the blues and the raggy swing of Hardin’s piano accompaniment.
“Accidental Racist” is an ostentatious declaration of difference and tolerance; you’ve got your traditions, I’ve got mine, but we can still tolerate each other. Rodgers and Armstrong, though, aren’t tolerating each other’s differences, because they aren’t that different. Their musical traditions and influences, and even, the song suggests, their life experiences are congruent — almost as if they come from the same country.
That country is not the one that flies the Confederate flag. Paisley builds his marginal Southern identity on the symbols of slavery, identifying with a tradition of oppression. Rodgers builds his on the experience of being a hobo and a drifter on the butt end of the law. Paisley declares his Southern individuality by perpetuating completely anonymous country radio dreck. Rodgers declares his by demonstrating his links with the quintessentially Southern music of Memphis. “Accidental Racist” sees the south as white and the north as black; Rodgers and Armstrong, though, know their home, and their music, is integrated.
We tend to think about race relations in terms of progress. Once, we were benighted, but slowly we have crawled into the light. And it’s certainly true that things have gotten better in some ways since 1930; we’ve gotten rid of Jim Crow, we’ve elected a black President. But Paisley’s crappy track is a reminder that later isn’t always better. Once upon a time, there was room for a rural white identity which defined itself not in opposition to, but in continuity with, the black experience. Paisley’s track is a depressing reminder of how thoroughly Lynyrd Skynrd has replaced Jimmie Rodgers for contemporary country — and of how thoroughly that is a change for the worse.
Ah, Jimmy Rodgers. As Sam Shepherd said, “He had heart”. He knew he was condemned but he made art out of his death:
“Well, I’ve been fightin’ like a lion, but I think I’m goin’ to lose.
Yes, I’ve been fightin’ like a lion but I think I’m goin’to lose.
‘Cause there ain’t no way I’m gonna beat these T.B. blues.”
And he didn’t.
But he could also create one of the most joyous songs ever, “Honeycomb”.
Tip of the hat to you, Mr Rodgers.
The only good thing about this song is that it’s so flat-footed that it’s an easy target for music critics to practice their craft on. Like for instance:
To my non-critic friends who believe in “manufactured pop,” thought up by cynical executives and optimized through marketing research: one only wishes.
How long was Brad’s longlist? Two names? One? Will Chuck D ever play us the tragic voicemail?
Just to be clear, this would be a shitty song without these lyrics. For starters, it’s six fucking minutes long. Six minutes of a thick guitar-wah stew
Our sometime Skynyrd fan now spends maybe four seconds on reflection before saying fuck it, let’s just go for the Big Soaring Chorus: “I’m just a whiiiiiiiiite man….” And again: “I’m just a whiiiiiiiiite man!” AGAIN: “I’m just a whiiiiiiiiite! man!” LL Cool J can’t upstage him, though he tries with “if you don’t judge my gold chains, I’ll forget the iron chains.”
WHO THE HECK’S NARRATING? He whips from Starbucks patron to oblivious Skynyrd fan to proud rebel son to thoughtful amateur sociologist making a fair point about Reconstruction. This sounds less like a consistent character, or even like Paisley’s multitudes, than it does a songwriter capitulating to each bloc in his audience, trying to reassure us we’re all welcome.
And so on.
Hah; that’s great that you folks went off on it.
I even like LL Cool J, is the especially depressing part. Seeing him make a mockery of himself gives me absolutely no pleasure.
Honeycomb? That’s a completely different Jimmie Rodgers…
I think this gets to the ethical problems of a dead genre. Country music is dead. Black metal is frequently racist, but it is not dead yet, which means that there can be meaningful disagreement, and there can be balck metal bands with different ethnicities and viewpioints. It too will die, and perhaps in a less attractive way than country. Hip-hop is certainly alive, and has plenty of idiots (and righteous posers), but is available for positive politics.
That’s interesting. There is still some country I like okay (Miranda Lambert, Patty Loveless, George Strait)…but, yeah, it’s pretty slim pickings.
Country’s particular brand of racist idiocy is definitely about nostalgia in a way that makes it hard to engage with at all productively.
How is country music dead? Do you mean there’s endless innovation and creative wonder in hip-hop/black metal and there isn’t in country? Just curious.
Hip hop and metal are a lot more creatively interesting and relevant at the moment than country, IMO. Radio country is just a mess, and has been for a long while.
No, it’s just that country is moribund. “Innovation” (icky word) would make it not country any more, whereas it was once possible to have bluegrass, honky-tonk, rockabilly, country gospel, and country swing (maybe not quite contemporaneous, but semi-close) co-existing without being antique.
I like Miranda Lambert and Lee Ann Womack, but that’s pop music with acoustic arrangements. The same problem is facing white music (rock) more generally– metal is just holding out a little more successfully than most of the post-whatever corpse-flailing.
I was gonna mention Miranda Lambert, haha. I like Kacey Musgraves (original writer of Mama’s Broken Heart, too.
As for innovation, there’s lots of cross-pollination with rap and RnB at the moment, isn’t there? I mean, R Kelly had a country-ish song on his last album. (And says there are more that are more country yet to come.)
Meanwhile, some elements of country are finding their way over to SKorea one, two.
Music genres never die, they just go moribund for a while.
It’s kind of not an ideal thing when Miranda Lambert is the best your genre has to offer though, is the thing. She’s fine, and I would like her to be great..but she’s really not great.
She’s better than Alicia Keys or Keshia Cole, but she’s not better than Beyonce, Ciara, Mariah Carey, Ashanti, Jeremih, Miguel, or any number of R&B performers.
Yeah, that’s about what I’d say.
Noah, I agree in general with your points about this song, and I enjoyed this essay, but I think you got the title wrong. You correctly assert that country music got more racist, but you don’t explain how. At the risk of stating the obvious, I think it was an unfortunate side effect of the polarization during the Civil Rights Movement. But I don’t think that’s the whole story of what happened to country music, and I don’t think racism, per se, is the problem with the song.
You and my fellow commentators are right to point to country’s current vacuity as one source of the trouble. Country music is far from uniquely Southern and Western, but it is identifiably so. Like other forms of music from the poor, rural places, it is borne of hard times. Despite the current economic struggles, times aren’t as hard for most of us hillbillies as they were in Hank Snow’s day, so country music now has less to say. We’re also not as isolated, so country music is less distinctive.
The culture that made Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong the men they were is severely endangered. The Starbucks reference in “Accidental Racist” is a good indicator. Prosperity and progress have made the lives in the flyover states (regardless of color) more similar to those on Long Island or in Orange County than to those of Roy Acuff or DeFord Bailey. Many rural kids listen to pop, hip-hop and rock growing up. They don’t start voluntarily listening to country until they get jobs and families. Country music now talks about the responsible grown-up lifestyle more than other music, so we mature into people for whom country music speaks.
Had “Accidental Racist” been the integrated, honest modern equivalent of “Blue Yodel #9”, Paisley and LL Cool J would have commiserated over the petty politics of their homeowners’ association, or the difficulty of getting your children into the best schools. Those aren’t compelling issues, but they’re genuine.
In the South, we also listen to country because it is identity music. So are related forms like southern rock, gospel, blues, dirty south hip-hop, and gangstagrass. We associate country with our traditional culture — the slower pace of Southern life; the connection to the land; and the greater emphasis on family, community, hospitality, and faith. The attraction is even more powerful if none of those things describe our lives anymore. The irony of this nostalgia is that when we were children, the homogenization had already begun.
I grew up in classically (not to say stereotypically) rural Southern surroundings and circumstances. I love “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” maybe more than any other Lynyrd Skynyrd song. For me, that is saying a lot. The Ballad is about a homeless, black, blues guitarist and the white child who would scrounge money and defy his parents to hear him play. It could easily have happened in the racially mixed town I grew up in. In my mind’s eye, it did. It is an honest song that makes a statement about human equality. That statement may not be quite as organic or “accidental” as the statement in Blue Yodel #9, but it is nearly so, and it is neither preachy nor flat-footed. “Accidental Racist,” in contrast, seems more like the narrative of a frustrated suburbanite, awkwardly stumbling through race issues for which his primary preparatory life experiences were those very special episodes of “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life.”
On second thought, maybe it is an honest song, after all.
I’ll add one more word of defense for Brad Paisley. When he and I were kids growing up, white and black Southerners considered the Confederate battle flag a symbol of the South and Southern culture. More defensively, it was a badge of our us-against-them attitude toward those who believed themselves our superiors. White supremacist groups actively re-branded the flag and made it a symbol of slavery and racism. Where I lived, that took effect a little before I graduated high school, much to our vocal lament. I don’t know if that was contemporaneous with the rest of our society. This was pre-internet; we were frequently behind y’all when it came to zeitgeist awareness.
Interestingly, with the notable exception of England, Southerners in many European countries also lead simpler, more agrarian, lifestyles than their more cosmopolitan countrymen. So when football teams from southern Italy or southern Germany play their northern rivals, you can expect some fan to fly the Confederate battle flag.
You had me til you threw a crappy reference toward Synard. They were as goid as anybody.
I actually quite like some Skynrd. I just think that they’re not as healthy a model as Jimmie Rodgers, unfortunately.
Noah, I personally agree with your topics about the “Accidental Racist’ song by Brad Paisley. I myself am a huge fan and supporter of country music and Brad Paisley, even though he made an ethical mistake at producing this song. With that being said, I do disagree that country music has become more racist over the years and that racism is the problem with this song. Country music has made many changes over the years, because this is a different era and change is the only constant. The genre is starting to take a turn from stating aspects of being poor or rural hillbillies that are isolated to more broad aspects that many people can connect with. In my experience as a college student coming from a small town in Ohio, being country is something people want to call themselves. Where I come from, many people try to be or act country to fit in on a social level. I know many people from the younger generation don’t listen to country music voluntarily until they are older, because country music talks more about growing up, having a family, and leading the everyday life of a common man.
I believe that this song is very honest about the aspects of human equality. The song might not portray the message in a nice or politically correct way, but it still gets the point across. I don’t think Brad Paisley necessarily meant to sound racist in his new song. The song seems to be more of a narrative about an aggravated suburban living person struggling through race issues. The Confederate flag wasn’t always a symbol or sign of racism and slavery. The flag use to be a symbol of culture. All in all, I think the song might not be considered appropriate for many people in today’s society, but I personally believe the song is not any different than any other country, pop, hip-hop, or rap song. In my opinion, people are making more of it than what it is. Any work of art, visual, text, or verbal can be analyzed to death. Sometimes that analysis is a luxury that’s abused.
“The flag use to be a symbol of culture.”
It was a — or rather, the — symbol of a culture which fought a treasonous war on behalf of slavery. I don’t see how that can be erased from what the symbol means.
Noah, nobody’s saying that didn’t happen, just that it happened about 150 years ago. There was, and still is, a lot more to Southern culture than that. Like anyone in love, we see past (not to say blithely ignore) our beloved’s past sins and focus on what made us fall in love with her in the first place.
Besides, aren’t we supposed to be the ones still hung up on the war? We have a rule down here: If you can’t let go, you have to join the re-enactors. Don’t you have better things to do with your money and your weekends?
Do you at least like the South Side of Chicago — the baddest part of town, as the strumming minstrel described it?
It happened 150 years ago…but Jim Crow lasted for another century, and the myth of the lost cause is around still.
The south has lots to be proud of. That flag is not one of those things, though.
Noah, I don’t want to offend you as we cover a topic we’ve covered before — and one you’ve been gracious enough to repost me on. I understand what the Confederate Battle Flag means to you. i also understand that your reaction is viscerally negative and effectively involuntary, and that many others feel the same way. I do not fly the flag publicly out of respect for that reaction. I do not want to communicate the wrong message or jack up good people’s blood pressure unnecessarily just to express my (admittedly powerful) geographic chauvinism.
All I’m trying to explain is that what that flag means to you, it does not mean to me, Gabby Scott, Brad Paisley, Lil Jon and the East Side Boys, or African-American college student Byron Thomas (http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/black-college-student-hangs-confederate-flag-dorm-room-163334484.html). I was taught our meaning of the flag well before I really understood slavery, Jim Crow, or the Civil War, and it will always evoke a different reaction from me, unless of course some idiot neo-Nazi is carrying it in a parade or something.
Symbols are somewhat subjective, but not that much. The flag was originally the battle flag of the confederacy. I don’t have a visceral reaction to it. I have a reaction to it based on its history, and its continued use by people like neo-Nazis or idiot tea-partiers displaying it outside the white house where a black guy lives. And by the unfortunate fact that neo-Confederacy is still alive and well in a lot of ways.
In return for centuries of oppression, black people get to say the n-word and use the confederate flag if they want. Maybe if white folks can manage to not use the flag in racist contexts for a couple centuries, it can be convincingly said to no longer mean what it originally meant. Until then, I think the south should seriously consider finding another symbol.
Noah, I disagree completely with your first point. Symbols are as subjective as phonemes and hand gestures. The meaning of a swastika is radically different in European politics than it is in Hinduism, and the American flag signifies very different things to different audiences. A black flag can represent anarchy or Al Qaeda, and a white flag can represent surrender or the Taliban. All of us “get to” use the symbols and words we want to — at least in the free world, and within reasonable limits (fire in a crowded theater, etc.). Responsible, thoughtful communicators will consider context and audience, however, and labor to prevent misunderstanding.
I completely agree about finding another symbol, however. Some of us use state flags as substitutes, but they’re really too narrow in meaning. Some use the actual “Stars and Bars” — the political flag of the Confederacy — but it’s as easily morphed into the meanings we don’t want as the battle flag, so widespread use would be both misunderstood and turned against us by supremacists. I think people like Byron Thomas are actively trying to take the symbol back to the meaning I grew up with, but I think it might be a lost cause (wait — that phrase sounds familiar…) — uhh, I mean a futile effort. That’s a better choice of words.
Phonemes and hand gestures aren’t solely subjective. They get assigned meaning socially an culturally. Language is social, not subjective (or not only subjective, anyway.)
I’m not saying that symbols are locked down to one meaning in general. I’m saying that, in our current cultural context, in which the Confederate battle flat stood as a symbol of racism, slavery and treason, and in which neo-Confederacy was the avowed ideology of the south for another 100 years, and is still a powerful ideology today — again, in that context, the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism, first and foremost. Individuals can subjectively see it differently, but in the culture as a whole one of the main things it’s going to mean is a nostalgia for treason and slavery.
Again, it seems like if we actually managed to not be a racist-ass country for a couple of centuries, then maybe things would be different. I don’t see any sign of that happening anytime soon, unfortunately.
Okay. I understand what you’re saying, Noah, and you clearly understand my point. Thanks.
But please don’t despair, and don’t be too hard on America. By any absolute standard, we have problems, but there’s less prejudice and more inclusiveness than many other places in the world. We do pretty well for being so heterogenous, or maybe because we are. And I think we’re definitely trending up over time.