From the Boston Globe :
The music-business insiders who gave the Dixie Chicks five Grammy Awards Sunday night -- including three for their song "Not Ready to Make Nice" -- aren't the same people who shunned the Texas trio four years back. But the Chicks' resurgence, coupled with other rumblings of discontent within the world of country music, shows how much the nation's mood has shifted since March 2003.
I have to wonder, just how these folks would define "resurgence." The Chicks' album sales did indeed fall off after Natalie's remark, although they did remain respectable, and their airplay on country radio pretty much ceased to exist. The latest album has gone platinum, which is nothing to turn up one's nose at, but compared to the pace at which the Chicks' last studio album, Home, flew off the shelves in the 7 months after it was released, that's pretty anemic. I would say the Globe (or the Glob, as Bruce and others have called it) is really reaching here. Only in the insulated world of the Northeastern establishment media would the opinions of a bunch of music industry executives -- whose world is arguably as insulated -- represent the opinions of the American people as a whole. No big surprise, I guess, considering this is the same newspaper that employs a columnist who compares global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers, but rather vexing nonetheless. More reaching follows:
Meanwhile, (Trace) Adkins, who describes himself as a conservative, recently told the San Bernardino Sun that Republicans deserved to lose last fall's midterm elections.This is probably news to those Northeastern elitists too, but there are a hell of a lot of conservatives who feel the same way. I hope we don't have to find out how much more dissatisfied the Republican base is going to be if Giuliani is the candidate in 2008. God only knows how they'd spin that.
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