April 14, 2013
Commenting on the commentary about "Accidental Racist"
By Lisa R. Pruitt
I don't watch TV or follow much pop culture, and most of the country music I occasionally listen to is on old albums by the likes of Sara Evans, Faith Hill, Martina McBride and Alison Krauss. But this was apparently a "big week" in country music thanks to Brad Paisley and his new album Wheelhouse. I was on the road on Tuesday, but by the time I was catching up on email early Wednesday morning, I had lots of messages from friends giving me a heads up on the furor associated with Paisley's new song, "Accidental Racist," which includes a cameo from LL Cool J. Commentators have varyingly discussed Paisley and his new song thusly:
a "middle-age rural liberal reckoning"
"well intentioned, if cringeworthy"
"cringe-inducing sincerity"
"ponderous and lumpy, the worst sort of agitpop"
"some kind of elaborate joke"
"intellectual undercookedness"
"country's ultimate postmodernist"
"how we 'do' race in the age of Obama"
"a masterwork of camp to heap our snark upon" and, perhaps the most high-brow reference,
"a Derridean act of derring-do."
In short, as one commentator put it, the song has attracted "an unusual amount of ... sneering."
Eric Weisbard did not sneer in his piece for NPR. His headline references the history of white southern musical identity, and Weisbard touches on biases against the South, as well as white-on-white biases:
As you may have heard, Paisley is sifting through some rubble of his own right now, having been declared a national laughingstock by virtually all commentators coming from outside mainstream country. But then, this condescending dismissal is nothing new. There is a history to "Accidental Racist," the history of how white Southern musicians — heatedly, implicitly, at times self-servingly and not always successfully — try to talk about who they are in answer to what others dismissively assume they are.
After all, while the Jim Crow South was Anglo supremacist politically, American culture offered a very different dynamic. Ever since white Northerners started putting out their records, Southern whites have represented a backward rural mindset in a national culture of jazzy modernity. ... Variety loved jazz but scorned the hillbilly in 1926 as " 'poor white trash' genera. The great majority, probably 95 percent, can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all to themselves. [They are] illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons."
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