DIXIE CHICKS CLUCK FOR BUCKS

TIME is looking less and less like a news magazine and more and more like an entertainment weekly.

Iraq, Iran, the War on Terror, immigration, the 2006 elections, even Karl Rove -- They all take a backseat to the Dixie Chicks. Yes, the three singers rate the cover of TIME this week.


Clearly, TIME adores the Chicks.
What's not to love?

In March 2003, just before the war in Iraq began, the Dixie Chicks came underfire when Natalie Maines told an audience in London, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas."

At the time, Maines apologized. Now, just as their new album is released, she's decided to make a retraction.

She's no longer sorry. In fact, she's back to bashing the President. This time she's not on foreign soil. This time she's at home sweet home, embraced by the lib media.

Josh Tyrangiel of TIME opens the story:

Natalie Maines is one of those people born middle finger first.

Isn't that nice?

As a high school senior in Lubbock, Texas, she'd skip a class a day in an attempt to prove that because she never got caught and some Mexican students did, the system was racist. After Maines joined the Dixie Chicks, and the Dixie Chicks became the biggest-selling female group in music history--with suspiciously little cash to show for it--she and her bandmates told their record label, Sony, they were declaring themselves free agents. (In the high school that is Nashville, this is way worse than skipping class.) Now that she's truly notorious, having told a London audience in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas," Maines has one regret: the apology she offered George W. Bush at the onset of her infamy. "I apologized for disrespecting the office of the President," says Maines. "But I don't feel that way anymore. I don't feel he is owed any respect whatsoever."

..."If people are going to ask me to apologize based on who I am," says Maines, "I don't know what to do about that. I can't change who I am."

As proof, the first single from the Dixie Chicks' new album, Taking the Long Way (out May 23), is called Not Ready to Make Nice. It is, as one country radio programmer says, "a four-minute f___-you to the format and our listeners. I like the Chicks, and I won't play it." Few other stations are playing Not Ready to Make Nice, and while it has done well on iTunes, it's quite possible that in singing about their anger at people who were already livid with them and were once their target audience, the Chicks have written their own ticket to the pop-culture glue factory. "I guess if we really cared, we wouldn't have released that single first," says Maguire. "That was just making people mad. But I don't think it was a mistake."

Whether the Dixie Chicks recover their sales luster or not, the choice of single has turned their album release into a referendum. Taking the Long Way's existence is designed to thumb its nose at country's intolerance for ideological hell raising, and buying it or cursing it reveals something about you and your politics--or at least your ability to put a grudge above your listening pleasure. And however you vote, it's tough to deny that by gambling their careers, three Texas women have the biggest balls in American music.

This is TIME magazine?

Women with the "biggest balls in American music"?

What garbage!

I couldn't boycott the Dixie Chicks back in 2003 because I never bought any of their music and I never went to their concerts in the first place.

I guess I'll just keep up never buying their music.

The article is a lengthy tome about the bravery of the Chicks. Pardon me, but I don't think of them as heroic.

They're entertainers and they're publicizing their new album by speaking out against Bush again. That's not courageous. That's smart marketing.

This anger is all so contrived.

Very dramatic, so dramatic it's laughable.

It seems like self-parody. Actually, I think these three Texas women with the big balls take themselves far too seriously.

The article concludes:

Will anybody buy it? The Dixie Chicks talk about Long Way as the end of their commercial salad days, but they're shrewd enough to know that only suckers choose between art and commerce. "I'm not ready to fly coach," jokes [Marty] Maguire, and indeed Taking the Long Way could easily sub as the title for their marketing plan. They'll tour starting in July and flog the record on a few select talk shows. "Natalie's new motto is, 'What would Bruce Springsteen do?'" says [Emily] Robison, laughing. "Not that we're of that caliber, but 'Would Bruce Springsteen do The View?'" They're not doing The View.

Maines says she's not looking for more battles, but she won't shy away from any either. "Everything was so nice and fine and happy for us for the longest time," she says of their pre-Incident days. "It was awesome to feel those feelings again that I felt in high school: to be angry, to be sure that you're right and that the things you do matter. You don't realize that you're not feeling those feelings until you do. And then you realize how much more interesting life is."

And that's the burning question covered in TIME this week. Will anybody buy the Dixie Chicks' new album?

Who cares? I mean really, who cares?

So, Maines is sure that she's right. She feels angry like she did in high school.

Well, I don't think she's right, but I do think she's acting like she's in high school.