About once a month, generally late in the evenings, my Bonnie and I will snuggle up on the couch and engage in a two or three hour marathon viewing of country music videos. It’s odd when it happens, as neither of us listens to much country music on a regular basis (although we each certainly have our favorites); on the other hand, it also feels perfectly natural to be drawn to the most popular manifestations of a genre that was vaguely in the air in both of our hometowns as we grew up. As with all music, we like some and dislike some, but the real fun for each of us comes from looking at the video images that are reimaginings of the songs. In my mind, there is no better place to begin an interesting conversation about culture than in the landscape that makes up Great American Country. I want to focus here, however, on one particular video as an example of a wider visual phenomenon that I've recently witnessed (or imagine that I have); I have no idea if this is "new" or ongoing, although I would tend to guess the latter. Rather than lay out my thesis, it might be more fun to have you simply watch the starkest example and see if the same idea strikes you. Our case study, then, is Randy Houser’s Whistlin’ Dixie (it’s only three minutes; give it a whirl):
The song is one of those somewhat standard "Southern and proud of it" country rockers; to be honest, there is a part of me that always loves these songs despite a simultaneous political discomfort that comes along for the ride. Indeed, this particular manifestation of the "Proud Southerner" song has a lot of the visual and lyrical panorama that you would expect from the title "Whistlin’ Dixie": honky tonk dancing, Appalachian-lookin' camaflouged kids sitting on the backs of pick up, old rural shacks, trucker hats, a naked woman in a trailer, gun imagery, grills, and so forth. And again, I find myself alternatively amused, entertained, angered, embarrassed and mystified by these images.
Here's the catch with this one, however (and again, I don't think this is unique to this video): just when you think you've got the song figured out (i.e., "Oh, it's about redneck pride"), just when you think you know the characters who make up this community (i.e., "It's a bunch of racist southern boys"), BOOM, it turns out that they have African American friends--friends they eat with, dance with, smoke with. Indeed, what I see in this video is something that might be called the inoculation of southerm pride through the inclusion of African American bodies (it would be nice to come up with something snappier, of course, but this is a first pass). Take a look at that honky tonk: there are a number of African Americans dancing there. When the catfish is cooking, it's African Americans doing the cooking. When Houser sings about smoking, he has an African American stand in for him.
While there is no rule that says that the video should feature a completely white cast, there is something about the music itself, and the remainder of the images, that makes the scenery seem somehow less than inviting for anyone but a white population (and honestly, most of the tourist honky tonks in Nashville are bereft of anyone but white people even when the songs are mostly covers of Taylor Swift and Tim McGraw). Again, I want to stress: I'm not saying that the images don't represent one version of a reality, or that "the south is all racist" (heck, as a proud Southerner, I despise that stereotype); I'm more simply pointing out that the characters drawn by the song and the accompanying images wouldn't normally lead me to expect the inclusion of African American characters in these roles. And while one thesis might be that I'm simply completely out of touch and have no clue what I'm talking about, if you check out some of the racist comments about the video on YouTube, you'll see that there are some viewers who neither expected it nor liked it (although, to be fair, most people either didn't notice or simply didn't mention it).
At any rate, given that I'm a person who would certainly be pleased with a world that is more inviting of everyone--more egalitarian, I'm intrigued by the images in this video. On the one hand, as I've noted, there is something odd afoot here--the inclusion of African Americans sticks out, seeming somehow unrealistic. One function they serve--intentionally or not--is making it difficult to say "Randy Houser" or even fans of this song, are racist, or, even more generally, the images are protection against the claim that the video shows that country music itself is racist. "Heck," the images say, "You can be southern, you can love shotguns, you can live in a trailer, you can shout about southern pride and still live in a culture of racial equality."
And you know what, you can. Or rather, you should be able to. The fact that these ideas are rarely articulated--at least so rarely that the images seem uncomfortable together--doesn't mean that it's not possible.
As always, the more I think about this, the more questions I'm left with. In essence, I don't know whether I should applaud the images or be very skeptical about them. That is, if critical thinking demands reactions, should mine be: "The record company included African Americans in this video to simply make it difficult to accuse everyone involved of racism?" Or should I look at these images, and the ways they don't necessarily fit, and applaud them for helping me imagine a different kind of world, a different kind of articulation. But just what kind of articulation is it that I'm applauding, if I do so?
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