LA Times on Dixie Chicks "Not Ready To Make Nice"

By now everyone has probably read about the Dixie Chicks new album, "Not Ready To Make Nice. "  If you haven't heard the title song of the album, you should check it out on the Chicks' website.  It's good, it might give you goosebumps, and it feels a bit like a good revenge movie.

This week the Chicks kick off a media 'blitz'.  They have a blogger travelling with them, and a special website on MSN.

Today the Sunday Edition of the LA Times has a good article beginning on the front page of the Calendar section.  

A few quotes from the LA Times article:

"Most sane people thought it was like a flash and then it was over," Maines said after a recent rehearsal in Los Angeles. "They don't realize how insane it got and how it still is." This week, the Chicks will release an album, "Taking the Long Way," and it is impossible to separate its music and messages from "the Incident," as the band refers to the comments made by Maines at the Shepherds Bush show three years ago. The first single from the album is "Not Ready to Make Nice," a simmering statement of defiance -- this time Maines isn't speaking off the cuff.

The Chicks, by 2003, had shelves full of awards and walls lined with platinum and gold records. The week Maines made her comment on stage at Shepherds Bush, the group had a new single, "Travelin' Soldier," at No. 1 on the country charts. In one week, the song went from No. 3 on country airplay charts to No. 31, and it continued south from there. Within days, there were CD bonfires and boycotts through the south, like the "Chicken Toss" event in Kansas City, Mo., where copies of the hit album "Home" were heaved into trash bins.

That's one reason the stakes are high for the documentary, which the band hopes may catch the eye of film festivals. The Chicks had agreed to a straightforward band film; that plan took a sharp right turn in England. The cameras were rolling that night (yes, the infamous quote was captured) and the days after. The Chicks realized as the weeks unfolded that the movie should be as much about a jolting cultural episode as it was about them. They brought in a new director, two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple, and raised the documentary ambitions of the endeavor.

"For us, it's important to catch that moment in our country," Maines said. "You go through racism [as a nation] and all the battles everyone fights and you're in school and you think, '' can't believe they did that.' But history does repeat itself; not that what happens to us is important, but that hatred...."

The sisters are tall, long-limbed and, despite their fame and fortune, seem to have a quiet demeanor and marked lack of pretension. Maines is the firebrand, no surprise, and she fixes a pretty intense stare on strangers. All three are married and say the quiet of family life makes the chaos of the past few years even stranger. For the record, all three women remain opposed to the war in Iraq and fervently believe the Bush administration has repeatedly hoodwinked the American public. ("I think most people in this country are still not paying attention to what's going on," Maines says.) And each agrees that the name "Dixie Chicks" will forever be followed in print by some allusion to the night of March 10, 2003.

Maines:  "I've lost my optimism and my hope in humanity," she said. "I'm not being funny. I try to find it. I hate it. It wasn't all gone after what happened to us, but then after the last election ... it was gone.... I keep waiting because I'm open to it."

I love the Dixie Chicks as much as I hate George W. Bush.  For me, this is one of the few moments when I feel a little bit of satisfaction from what is happening here and now.  It restores to me a little piece of the hope that Natalie Maines says she is lacking, but open to.