stand by your fans

Any celebrity worth his/her salt knows it’s not a good idea to diss the sweaty adoring mob, but apparently the Dixie Chicks know better. In the New York Times, Kelefa Sanneh sniffs out the careerist angle of the Chicks’ dissing of their fans:

Instead of fighting for their old fans, the Dixie Chicks seem to be dismissing them.

On “60 Minutes” Ms. Maguire told Steve Kroft that their concerts weren’t typical country concerts. “When I looked out in the audience, I didn’t see rednecks,” she said. (Did her lip curl slightly as she pronounced the r-word?) “I saw a more progressive crowd.”

And in a Time magazine cover story she said the group would rather have “a smaller following of really cool people who get it,” as opposed to “people that have us in their five-disc changer with Reba McEntire and Toby Keith.” …Perhaps there’s a difference between this attitude and simple snobbery, but you can’t blame country fans if they don’t much feel like splitting hairs.

And Sanneh points to the troubling culture-war consequences of the Dixie Chicks’ image makeover [emphasis mine]:

The Nashville establishment is not politically monolithic. The most depressing thing about this whole episode is the way the Dixie Chicks have conflated politics and culture, Bush supporters and “rednecks.” The unintended implication is that only sophisticated city folk oppose the war in Iraq, and only “rednecks” support the president.

Blech.

Of course, the Dixie Chicks may be trying to get in with the Cool Kids just as the Cool Kids start to grate on our nerves:

In a telephone interview before [a Bruce Springsteen] concert, Tamara Conniff, executive editor and associate publisher of Billboard magazine, said, “People will sort of endure Bruce’s politics because they just love the music.”

Bruce, we hardly knew ye: