Shut Up and Sing: Dixie Chicks Controversy

I think Paul Martin is stupid

Oh no! I guess everyone's going to hate me now. Actually no, I don't think so, I have an opinion, and I said it, I'm allowed to because of free speech. That's one of the many things that I love about living in North America, I have free speech.

So, how come Americans, who are also entitled to free speech, are so hostile to other Americans that voice their opinions, especially when it comes to politics. Let's look at the Dixie Chicks for example, on March 10, 2003, when the United States was on the brink of a war, lead singer Natalie Maines stated "I'm ashamed that President Bush is from Texas" during a concert in London, England.

A London Newspaper "The Guardian" came out the next day with an article about Maines' bold statement against her president. The news quickly spread to North America, and in just one short week, the Dixie Chicks number one single fell dramatically on the charts, some radio stations went as far as banning the song from airplay, because people were claiming they would boycott any radio station that played their song.

There was also a large boycott of Lipton products, Lipton sponsored the Dixie Chicks, but due to their lack of sales, Lipton had to terminate their contract with the Dixie Chicks to save themselves.

The Dixie Chicks were under massive amounts of controversy, yet, they stayed strong, and refused to apologize. However, this cost the Dixie Chicks many fans, especially considering the fact that they're a country music group, and the majority of their listeners were Bush supporters. The Chicks decided to finish their tour despite controversy, and stayed off the radar for a few years until the controversy died down. But in 2006, they came back with a new album.

During their break, the Dixie Chicks decided it was time for them to stray away from their country roots, and find a new fan base, so their 2006 release, "Taking the Long Way" was released on the pap charts, and their single off the album, "Not Ready to Make Nice" showed to everyone that they still stand behind what they said, and they have no intent on apologizing, or stopping.

Photo Manipulation in the Media

Millions of people see pictures from the media every day, and we all know how much the media influences us in almost all, if not everything we do. Now, this is already wrong enough, but what makes it worse is the fact that almost all of these pictures we see aren't even real themselves.

Now, these pictures may not be completely fake, but, they really do stretch the truth on how things, or people look.

The question I have is, why? why do people have to look a certain way to be famous, then their pictures are edited even further? Cant people just be happy with what's in front of them anymore?


This commercial by Dove, shows the effects of photo manipulation


In the commercial, not only do they cover her in makeup, and change her hairstyle to make her look "more beautiful" but even after that, they continue to change her appearance in ways that aren't physically possible, making her neck thinner and longer, her eyes bigger. In the end, we're not even looking at a photo anymore, it's an illustration, an illustration of a fake person who looks too perfect to be real

Photo manipulation is just plain wrong, all it does is try to make something good out of nothing special, then it makes a bunch of people mad when they find out that they were tricked into believing it was real. People and things should be portrayed how they are, not "how they should be." It creates a degrading standard of what things should be like, and it deserves to be stopped.