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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's Bête Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Virginia Republican Senator George Felix “Macaca” Allen has associated himself with the white supremacist group Council of Conservative Citizens.
Why does it not surprise me that he likes country music?


The title song -- the first song -- on Gretchen Wilson’s recent album All Jacked Up is a rippin’ piece of party-hearty Southern Rock. I got it from the library and was digging it. I had liked the title hit from her previous album, “Here for the Party”; never heard that album’s other big hit, “Redneck Woman.” The title song was the only one I’d heard and I’d liked it a lot.

The new one repeats the alternation of everywoman party animality and redneck pride. The second song, California Girls, is a diatribe against coastal California women -- Wilson explicitly exempts women from the interior city Sacramento to an outer L.A. suburb in conservative Riverside County, Corona. The conservative parts of liberal California -- Gretchen approves of them.

Ain't you glad we ain't no California girls
Ain't you glad there's still a few of us left, who know how to rock your world
Ain't afraid to eat fried chicken and dirty dance to Merle
Ain't you glad we ain't no California girls


For years Seattle’s downtown McDonald’s, the one nearest Pike Place Market, played country music on its outdoor speakers to discourage young African American men from loitering. Not all country fans are race bigots, but enough are so that when I’m listening to country radio with the window open, and I drive by a construction site where African American people are working, I turn my radio down. Stupid-ass sectionalist bigotry like this from Gretchen Wilson is one of the reasons why.

I haven’t yet made it past the second song.
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