Music Friday: "Skyline" & "It Didn't Make a Sound"

To counter last week's offering to the heavy metal gods, today I'm providing a couple of tunes by the Court Yard Hounds, the two sisters who are part of the Dixie Chicks.

Their album is one of the CDs I have in my car right now. I'm trying to expose my daughter to female musicians other than Taylor Swift, Katie Perry, and all the other stuff out there.









Listening to the Court Yard Hounds gets me to wondering when the Dixie Chicks will put out a new album. Their last one was outstanding.

[That's right. I like the Dixie Chicks. You can go to Hell if that's a problem.]

Last year in Rhetoric Review, one of the academic journals I enjoy reading but sometimes have a hard time keeping up with, Emil B. Towner from Texas Tech has an article titled "A Apologia: The Transcendence of the Dixie Chicks." The abstract is the following:

In the mid 1980s, Union Carbide used the apologia strategy of transcendence with mixed results—repairing some relationship while harming others. Two decades later the Dixie Chicks's use of transcendence revealed a similar dichotomy. Using ideographic analysis, the author examines (1) why transcendence appeals to one audience while alienating another and (2) how social values are shaped in the process. Ultimately, the author argues that the Dixie Chicks's strategy of transcendence appealed to the ideograph and in doing so constructed a concretized—and polarizing—definition of what it means to be a patriotic American during times of war.    

Natalie Maines' "controversial" comment about Bush created a media frenzy that got the talking heads on the cable news, entertainment, and infotainment programs chattering on for a good while. Her comment and the media circus about it made the three ladies lose a lot of fans. But they also kept and gained many fans, and I was impressed by them sticking to the values and opinions they believe in.

As Towner relates in the conclusion of his article, "the Dixie Chicks's unapologetic rhetoric stands out as a prime example of the ways in which rhetors can choose to redefine societal values, as opposed to the widely held belief that successful apologia strategies must reaccept or at least identify with the societal values that they are accused of breaking" (307).  

Or to put it another way, as Maines related at the time, "My comments were made in frustration, and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your point of view."