62
Popular Culture Review
music, which the Dixie Chicks failed to follow, just as there are scripts for this
idealized Redneck America. It is by following these scripts that individuals
enact citizenship and prove their fidelity to the nation, and it is through these
scripts that the U.S. sees itself, or perhaps how the U.S. can separate its citizenry
into categories of proper and suspect. Under this system of classification the
Dixie Chicks, of course, are suspect.
The division inherent within this Redneck Nation is more than mere
classification, as it serves to establish a baseline of normalcy for the broader
American culture. That is to say, in the Redneck Nation model I’m employing,
“Redneck” ceases to be a pejorative classification of the rural, southern, white
working class, and instead becomes a new mode of the mainstream, one that is
simultaneously unbound by the very real pressures of class and status that
defined the “traditional” redneck or hillbilly even as it seeks to reify certain
social situations inherent within a white, hetero, masculine America. As a
theoretical construct, the Redneck Nation is certainly much broader than the
Dixie Chicks and their criticism of war, broader than country music, even
broader than the concept of scripts I am examining here. In fact, the modem
iteration of the Redneck, as a socio-political construct of self-assignation,
spreads throughout American literature and culture, with the roots of the
Redneck Ideal in early American frontier literature, then continuing though
modem and contemporary Southern literature and, now, a broader popular
culture. In the current state of our Redneck Nation, individuals may choose to
claim membership as a means to establish an incontrovertible American
citizenship. Based in American ideals of self-reliance (consider Emerson and
Jefferson as proto-Rednecks) and anti-elitism, the ethos of the modem Redneck
identification evokes a distinctly American sense that can be defined by what it
is not: not elite or high-falutin’, not overly intellectual, not overly-socialized
and, perhaps most crucially, not not-American.
Here I turn back to the Dixie Chicks and their violation of the American
Redneck scripts. In this context, the issue of Patriotism looms largest, both
overtly as a mechanism for displaying ones allegiance to a national power (and,
here, Maines violated Patriotism by choosing to be “not-with” the nation) and
covertly as a sign of acceptance of the ideals of the less-tangible Redneck
Nation that defines contemporary American political/patriotic discourse. The
two go hand in hand, of course, as the scripts I’m suggesting require fidelity to
the national power as evidence of membership in the ideological Nation, just as
full citizenship in the Redneck discourse predicates unwavering allegiance to the
U.S. government. In the wake of 9/11, several country stars released hyperpatriotic songs that tapped in to the general American sentiment of shock, anger,
even war-readiness: Clint Black’s “Iraq and Roll,” Alan Jackson’s “Where Were
You (When the World Stopped Turning)”, Darryl Worley’s “Have You
Forgotten,” Chely Wright’s “Bumper of my SUV,” and of course Toby Keith’s
aggressive “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”1. Each of these, in its own
way, followed the accepted guidelines of the Redneck Nation, as each song