{"id":6721,"date":"2013-04-10T19:47:36","date_gmt":"2013-04-10T19:47:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=6721"},"modified":"2013-04-10T19:47:36","modified_gmt":"2013-04-10T19:47:36","slug":"hillbilly-highway-paisley-ll-cool-j-and-an-internet-shitstorm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2013\/04\/10\/hillbilly-highway-paisley-ll-cool-j-and-an-internet-shitstorm\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillbilly Highway – Paisley, LL Cool J, and an internet shitstorm"},"content":{"rendered":"

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by Sheldon Birnie<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you were anywhere near Twitter this week, or the decrepit social media hulk that is Facebook, you probably heard about Brad Paisley’s new tune\u00a0“Accidental Racist”<\/a> and the shitstorm of vitriol<\/a> it inspired in pretty much everyone. After getting lambasted online, Paisley took to Twitter to defend the tune<\/a>, telling folks he wrote the tune to “evoke feelings” and “wouldn’t change a thing about it.”<\/p>\n

For those of you who missed the debacle, or who haven’t heard the tune, it is since proving pretty dang impossible to find it on YouTube. It’s a pretty maudlin, sub-par offering from Paisley, with an interesting, but awkward guest verse from LL Cool J.<\/p>\n

The subject matter, of course, is a touchy one<\/a>, and is delivered via the classic country trope of a first person monologue<\/a> disguised as novelty tune. As a brief synopsis, Brad plays the part of some good ol’ southern boy who loves Lynyrd Skynard (and really,\u00a0who doesn’t?<\/a>) who unwittingly walks into a Starbucks with the symbol of the racist South, the Confederate flag, on his t-shirt. In the process he opens up “an ol’ can of worms” (ie. the whole slavery, Civil War, segregation, etc history of the southern United States, and the ensuing and continuing racism and subsequent tensions that exists in the region).<\/p>\n

As the song progresses, Brad’s character awkwardly attempts to come to terms with who he is (ie. a southern White male) and what that means in today’s society. By the end of the song, LL Cool J comes in<\/a> (awkwardly, at best), and the two admit that while they’ve come a long way since Restoration, there’s still a ways to go.<\/p>\n

Again, this quite literally set off a shitstorm online, with thousands (if not millions, at this point) commentators weighing in, the bulk of whom are denouncing the song and Paisley himself as “dumb,” “hillbilly,” “racist,” etc.<\/p>\n

(The criticism of LL has been vehement, too<\/a>. But as I know about as much about hip-hop music and culture as I do about Scandinavian death metal, I’ll defer to those who can speak to the issue better than I could ever hope to.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

My Twitter and Facebook feeds quickly filled up with denunciations of Paisley and track. I hadn’t heard the song (if you haven’t, it really isn’t worth the $1.29 I later paid on iTunes for it), so I didn’t know what the fuss was about. I did, however, see a lot of folks who I’m pretty sure have never willingly listened to a Brad Paisley song<\/a> before call him out as dumb whitetrash racist idiot ad nauseum.<\/p>\n

“Hey now,” I figured, “this definitely looks like Brad stepped in a pile of dog doo here. And it smells like a big one.”<\/p>\n

But it is hard to fault the guy for bringing up a topic that desperately needs discussing in the world of contemporary, popular country music. I’m not apologizing for Brad here (and he<\/em> isn’t apologizing, so fuck it), but I would like to caution self-righteous internet pundits with no knowledge of country music, its culture or its history to dig a little deeper than a vitriolic and clearly hurriedly composed Gawker post<\/a> before weighing in on the subject from your Ivory Tower. Much of the attacks on Paisley were delivered in a context that assumed that Paisley, by virtue of being a big time country star, was nothing but a dumb redneck anyway.<\/p>\n

“He’s a country singer,” one liberal arts type (of which I myself am also one) snarkily chimed in. “Doesn’t he have a truck or a dog to write about?”<\/p>\n

Thank the sweet Lord that Eric Weisbard from NPR put up a thoughtful, well researched post<\/a>\u00a0yesterday where he provides some context to the situation that next to none of the rest of the internet<\/strong> bothered with. As Weisbard clearly articulates:<\/p>\n

There is a history to “Accidental Racist,” the history of how white Southern musicians \u2014 heatedly, implicitly, at times self-servingly and not always successfully \u2014 try to talk about who they are in answer to what others dismissively assume they are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Personally, it took me years to realize that the Confederate flag represented anything other than a “fuck the law,” rebel attitude. I grew up with Beau and Luke Duke and their sexy cousin Daisy running circles around Boss Hogg and sheriff Roscoe P Coltrane out in Hazzard County. I even had a little version of the General Lee, racist rebel flag and all, that I eventually smashed to bits in my sandbox trying to recreate those wicked creek jumps that old Charger pulled week after week. I was raised in a northern, redneck town far from the Deep South where rebel flag decals were stuck to countless rusty bumpers and flew from dozens of run down apartment and trailer windows. As a kid, I thought the Duke Boys were the fucking shit, and if they painted the flag on the top of their car, by God, so would I!<\/p>\n

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It was only after listening to tons of punk rock and reading books like Beloved<\/em>, Roots,<\/em> and Coming Through Slaughter<\/em> that I realized what the flag really meant. To this day, I know many folks who still fly the Confederate colours, not because they’re racist, but because they feel it represents an idealized rebel identity that never truly existed in the first place. These people are the target audience of “Accidental Racist” (or would be if they listened to radio country and not Pantera).<\/p>\n

Many of Paisley’s listeners may never have heard of any of those books or ever picked up a Minor Threat record<\/a>, but they sure as shit listen to country radio, and if as tacky, awkward, and (sure, I’ll admit it) downright dumb “Accidental Racist” is, if it can move that conversation forward in Nashville and the Heartland to a point where bands like (the remnants of) Skynyrd can stop flying the Confederate flag without risking a Dixie Chicks level <\/a>backlash from their fans, then Paisley has done his job here.<\/p>\n

With that, I’ll leave you with Weisbard’s final thoughts from his NPR piece, as it sums up the situation much better than I could ever hope to in my brief time with you on the Hillbilly Highway here in Canada (where, frankly, we’ve got some discussions we could enter into regarding the Union Jack our own racist, colonial past<\/a>):<\/p>\n

None of which quite redeems “Accidental Racist,” though longtime listeners to mainstream country might filter its simpering melody through Garth Brooks’ “What She’s Doing Now” and its overweening ambitions with Brooks’ “We Shall Be Free.” Soft can register as radical if you hear Nashville in full format context. I don’t look to music for policy solutions, just proof that what lives in people’s heads is more complicated than their voting choices might lead you to believe. Paisley can joke about his “Southern Comfort Zone” in a No. 1 hit. Then he can risk some Southern discomfort, too. And the story of “Sweet Home Alabama,” the story of so-called morons and their complicated responses to unambiguous derision, staggers on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Sheldon Birnie If you were anywhere near Twitter this week, or the decrepit social media hulk that is Facebook, you probably heard about Brad Paisley’s new tune\u00a0“Accidental Racist” and the shitstorm of vitriol it inspired in pretty much everyone. After getting lambasted online, Paisley took to Twitter to defend the tune, telling folks he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[133,210,432,560,772],"class_list":["post-6721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","tag-brad-paisley","tag-controversy","tag-hillbilly-highway","tag-ll-cool-j","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6721\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}