There’s a cheesy country-western song that is getting quite popular. I admit, I’m not fond of the genre; while there’s the occasional spark of brilliance or great performer, most of it is smug white folks crying about how miserable their lives are while blaring out either fist-pumping patriotism or treacly self-pity. It’s still the music many people grew up with, though, so it’s fine if you like it. You don’t have to rationalize why you like it here, OK?
But some things need explaining. This new song, Pissed Off Rednecks Like Me” is getting a lot of undeserved attention because it is “controversial”. It isn’t — it’s dumb. It feeds a lot of bigotry, though, so bigots are enjoying it.
Let me explain why a lot of people detest Jamie Jones’ terrible little ditty. We’ll just go through the lyrics.
Mr. stick-head politician
I got some news for you
If you want to come
Tryin’ to take my gun
Son you better be bulletproof
Look, guns are dangerous. They’re designed to kill. No one is coming to take your guns away in America, but rational people would like you to register them and take adequate safety measures. And responding to even the hint that we might expect you to be a responsible gun-owners with threats to shoot people like me is precisely the issue — you think your guns are a way to solve your problems. They aren’t.
Also, you’re more likely to accidentally shoot your children, or your wife, or your neighbor, than you are to intentionally shoot me.
And don’t try to tell my children
When and where to pray
We don’t. Your kids can pray all they want, and this is coming from a die-hard atheist.
What we fight for in the separation of church is the principle that no one from the government can tell your children or my children to pray. This ought to fit right in with your conservative values, but your type rarely exhibits any consistency in those values: you are just fine with the government imposing it’s religion on others, as long as it’s your sect.
We ain’t that far gone
We’re still standing on
The land of the free
And the home of the brave
No, I’m not your normal political society
I live in the rural midwest. I’m sorry, but you aren’t special: you are boringly mundane and not very thoughtful.
This is coming from real America, son
And pissed off rednecks like me
OK, you know why you are “controversial”? It’s because you say idiotic things like that.
You are part of real America. I’m one of those liberal college professors, and I’m also part of real America. I come from a family of blue-collar factory workers, and they’re part of real America. Those black teenagers getting shot in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri? Also real Americans. You don’t get to appropriate the term “American” as only rightfully belonging to rural rednecks. It’s that selfish, unthinking self-righteousness that rankles.
Also, don’t call me “son,” you patronizing asshole.
No, I won’t push one for English
I just as soon hang up the phone
So you are so lazy and arrogant that you would deny people access to basic services because you can’t be bothered to push one button on your phone?
If you wanna serve in a Muslim church
Go and take your ass back home
There you go. You have the right to follow whatever benighted faith you want; that’s guaranteed in the Constitution. But so does the other fellow. Do you even realize that Muslims have been living in America for centuries? That white protestants like you dragged them over to this country in the 18th century as slaves? That they fought and died in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars? There are many Muslims who were born right here in the USA, and you want to tell them to go “home”. This is their home. Get used to it.
Get up and go to work if you’re able
Instead of living off our dime
This give me a hand out generation
Is gonna bleed this country dry
Yeah, I think it’s time that we change some policy
I agree. Let’s kick the moochers off the dole. Of course, the biggest moochers in the US are listening to country-western music right now: they’re the farmers. The government subsidizes farmers to a significant degree.
In 2011, the median income of commercial farm households — those deriving more than half their income from farming — was $84,649, almost 70 percent higher than that of the typical American household.
Now that’s unfortunately skewed — the small farmer isn’t making anywhere near that, while the guy who sold out to agribusiness is raking it in — but what’s driving that is billions of dollars from the government sucked up by Big Farm. And further, those subsidies drive bad food decisions.
Is that what you’re singing about?
As for most of us
It’s still in God we trust
Here on this side of the ground
Get up and give thanks in the morning
And we work till the sun goes down
Things have got to change
We can’t sit back, got to lead
Things have to change all right: to support justice for all, to reduce the rich/poor divide, to give women and minorities equal opportunity, to end the destructive penal system. Somehow, though, I don’t think you agree with any of my priorities, because I’m not a “real American” to you, nor are the victims of those injustices.
Old folks say can’t afford medication
Still Obamacare is a joke
They’ve help you with your sickness
I saved mine up and take a toll
This is just incoherent. You seem to think “old folks” deserve health care, but you oppose the one half-measure taken to provide health care to everyone.
And those last two lines make no sense at all. Go home, you’re drunk.
They need to lock down on the borders
Throw away the keys
In a cell bar on right here at home
Instead of sending it overseas
But right now raise your glasses
People breathe
Again, this song is just falling apart. Yeah, you’ve got the standard knee-jerk opposition to immigrants, you son of immigrants. My great-grandparents were immigrants from Sweden and Norway, and they came over here, were mocked and scorned as stupid squareheads who couldn’t speak English, and were allowed to work the land and do menial labor in frigid unpleasant places like Minnesota…and what I see now are immigrants from Central and South America, mocked and scorned by people like you, who are willing to work hard at menial labor to make a home for their families. Conservatives, if they had any consistency in their values, ought to respect that. They’re doing the hard work right now that rednecks don’t want to do, and I for one am not going to begrudge them the effort I need to make to push one button on my phone or see a lot of bilingual signs in the grocery store.
Also, you really are drunk.
Maybe if you sobered up you could figure out why your song is a piece of shit.
How about “Simplistic, Cliché-ridden, Moronic, Xenophobic Pissed-off Rednecks”?
Yeh. Doesn’t scan very well.
Good grief, that’s bad. Sort of a Lee Greenwood thang going on there. It just goes to show anybody can write a song after drinking beers all night long.
So it’s basically that Team America song, ‘America Fuck Yeah’ with all the irony, humour and ability to write coherently surgically removed? I knew those guys hasn’t done dumbed down enough.
I love that Real America stuff – people just so patriotic they hate 75% of their country and would lynch the President. Someone needs to do a checklist and point out that these particular ‘Americans’ would be far better suited to life in Putin’s Russia – God, Guns, Gay-Bashing, the starving poor, the rich elite, the racism. You like it so much why don’t y’all just move there?
Nothing about atheists? I am disappoint.
Also: “Muslim church.” I guess it’s hard to find rhymes with mosque.
re @4:
“Nothing about atheists?” I doubt he intended it, but that blockquote is easily interpreted as telling Gov to stop the school prayer indoctrination nonsense. As in: “Don’t proscribe a particular time at the beginning of school day for prayer, that all must participate in. Let kids pray whenever they want. Before and during test is usual, so stay out of it gov. And if a kid doesn’t want to (the atheist scumbug), then don’t force him to pray.”
I know that is reading it way out of intended line, but I hope this C&W guy now understands he miswrote that seriously.
Maybe I should make an official statement saying, “We’re not going to take away your guns and Bibles! We just think they are dangerous . . . especially in the hands of children who have no idea what to do with either one of them.”
Shorter “Pissed Off Rednecks Like Me”:
“I’m an asshole and proud of it!”
I think that’s the worst song I’ve ever seen.
Reminds me of Merle Haggard’s Okie From Muskogee, which was practically a redneck anthem when I was growing up in Alabama. I got so fucking sick of that song! (Moonshine killed my grandfather just as surely as if the bootlegger had shot him in the head.)
Of course now I realize that the song was actually ironic considering that Merle and Waylon and Willie and Johnny were getting high all the time and laughing at the rednecks who were funding the party. I actually kind of like the song now, as satire.
Can they really have this little self-awareness?
I think you misattributed this song. This obviously from the band, News of the Foxes, off their first album, Political Uncorrectitude.
@10
Yes, yes they can.
Don’t you worry your pretty little head, grand-dad*, the people who come for your guns will be riding in APCs and won’t be in the least bit concerned about the itty bitty bullets coming out of your gun. Seriously, there’s just no way that guns will “protect” you from an unjust government. Especially when you’ve voted it in. Idiot.
*If the average politician is “son” then surely I’m grand-child age.
Most voice mail systems these days don’t make you press 1 for English. You have to marque dos por Espanyol, and do nothing for English.
What’s the lyric after “Obamcare’s a joke”? “If it helps you with your sickness fire it up and take a toke”? Is that an endorsement of medical marijuana?
What a dismal ditty.
I still claim Jasper Carrot nailed the C&W song with his masterfully concise –
Since they took ma mama off t’prisonnnnn
Thangs ain’t bin th’same around the faaaarm
Now they’ve gone and let her out the jay-ul house
She drove her goddam truck into a tray-un
I’m glad to see that swipe at farm subsidies. I think that American and European agricultural subsidies verge on a crime against humanity. The amount of poverty, hunger and suffering they’ve caused in third world nations is incalculable.
This could pass for a song from “Bob Roberts”. The reason Tim Robbins never released a soundtrack album from that movie was that he feared people wouldn’t recognize the songs out of context as satirical.
Gee, you think maybe if there had been automated phone menu systems a century ago this song might have been more popular in Nebraska… where they tried to ban the teaching of German (the single most-common non-Anglo language of America’s ancestors at the time)? On the other hand I’ve never heard “Drücken Sie drei für Deutsch, bitte” on an American phone system — probably because most Americanized German-speakers learned English better than did Mr Jones. Or maybe the rednecks just mistook Yiddish for German… which has some other interesting implications…
Mr “Jones.” Sounds like it just might be a name adopted on immigration forms to evade a tawdry past. (Hey, I can say that: My grandparents did so — all four of them!)
403 Forbidden
Maybe the URL is cut off.
I agree.
Doing so will make a job appear like manna from heaven. *nodnod*
@14, I thought that was Steve Goodman from “You Never Even Call Me By My Name”. This kind of crap reminds me of the bumper sticker: Discourage inbreeding, ban country music.
Maybe not (only) drunk. I think these are closer to the right lyrics:
“If it helps you with your sickness / I say fire [it] up and take a toke”
I guess medical marijuana is better than nothing, if the idea is that we’re supposed to be both happy and totally pissed about half-measures, but we should legalize it.* Anyway, I doubt that has any relation to his actual problems with
Obamacare…Obama… people.*Better music for that here, in case anyone else needs a palate cleanser.
Jimmy Buffett said it best about people like Jamie Jones.
And for no particular reason, here’s “The Rodeo Song”.
Hmmm…he may have a point here. Islam is not native to the Americas. Neither is Christianity. They’re both equally foreign, neither more than the other. Now take your desert god and go home before I rip your heart out, feed it to the gods, and give your bones to my (native breed) chihuahuas!
Sorry, wrong attitude?
Best C&W song I know of is the satire piece “Sitting Here Picking My Nose and Thinking of You.”
Kinky Freedman sang it thirty years ago…
“Asshole From El Paso””
Lyrics
(chinga chavin, kenny snakebite jacobs)
We don’t have no love in’s in el paso
We don’t go to porno picture shows
We don’t swap our wives with our neighbors
And we keep our kids away from mexico.
And I’m proud to be an asshole from el paso
A place where sweet young virgins are deflowered.
You walk down the street knee-deep in tacos
Ta-ta-ta-tacos
And the wetbacks still get twenty cents an hour.
We don’t wipe our asses on old glory,
God and lone star beer are things we trust.
We keep our women virgins till they’re married
So hosin’ sheep is good enough for us.
And I’m proud to be an asshole from el paso
A place where sweet young virgins are deflowered.
You walk down the street knee-deep in tacos
Ta-ta-ta-tacos
And the wetbacks still get twenty cents an hour.
I’m proud to be an asshole from el paso
A place where sweet young virgins are deflowered.
You walk down that street knee-deep in tacos
Ta-ta-ta-tacos
And the wetbacks still get twenty cents an hour
left0ver1under #24:
That’s not Jimmy Buffet: It’s Fred ‘August’ Campbell.
How brave it must feel to be singing a protest song on behalf of the most privileged, powerful and protected groups in the country.
Yes. PZ misheard those lyrics, I’m afraid. consciousness razor @ 23 got it closer:
“If it helps you with your sickness / I say fire [it] up and take a toke”
Just remove the [it], and that’s the correct lyric.
In my opinion, though, this is the best pro-marijuana song.
NateHavens @30
Don’t bogart that joint, my friend.
Daz (#28) –
Whoops, silly me. That explains why I’ve never heard Buffett do it anywhere else. I’m only a casual Parrothead, not an obsessed one. I don’t own any flowery shirts.
They do sound alike, though. And I’m sure you’ll agree it was the right choice in this instance.
That sounds like a song my brother and every in-law I have would love.
They still think the south will rise again right before Jesus comes back to save them from the gays and the Mexicans.
The same people think vaccines are dangerous and that evolution is a lie from the devil.
America, FUCK YEAH!
teawithbertrand @ 15
I think the “lyricist” (and I use the term loosely) is actually scoffing at the idea that pot has any pharmaceutical purposes at all. The right-wing has long held that “medical marihuana” is just a lame excuse to legalize drugs entirely and turn our nations 8-year-olds into smack-heads.
Re: ‘That they fought and died in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars?’
How weird. The URL is correct, and works when pasted into the address-bar, but when placed in a formatted link and clicked , it results in a 404.
Here’s the full URL:
http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/dear_mr_sheldon_your_facts_regarding_muslim_americans_are_incorrect_heThe legalization thing thrown in there might give some of my in-laws pause. They think drug users and addicts are scary criminals who do drive-bys every day and listen to the rap music. They may even vote for Nader!
Just kidding. They don’t know who Ralph Nader is.
Sadly, this turd doesn’t see where he is heading. In the South/Southwest, the majority ethnic population is Latino. Once we reach the tipping point, guess who will be running the state and local governments?
Now, let’s just suppose that these privileged mental midgets manage to set an “official language” before they are swept out of power. What happens when the majority decides to reset that language to, um, Spanish? You know, because most people will speak it at that point?
You won’t have to press “1” for English, but maybe 4…if you’re lucky it is an option.
And it would serve them right.
Jackie @ 33
Given how our government (even the “liberal/socialist/communist/” Obama administration) seems content to coddle America’s gun-toting, Bible-humping, white supremacist, shit-kicker community rather than grinding them into powder, your in-laws might get that wish.
Nah, Username, English will remain an option and probably even 2. Or maybe 3–I think there’s a growing Vietnamese community in the southwest too. But they’ll keep up English for the tourists.
Of course, what actually happens is that the second generation, if they retain their parents’ birth-language at all, become bilingual. You know: more edjicated. Oh, and the majority-language borrows a whole heap of new words, and becomes even more capable of nuance, more replete with synonyms, etc. Handy for poets and, er, song-writers, in particular…
Yea, theocracy! Stick it to the atheists who have taken over!
Nor is this anything new. Joseph Heller has a minor character in Catch 22 who he describes as (paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to actually look it up) “a god fearing man who believed that government aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism”. This in a novel written in the 1960s. Farmers have been mooching for a while.
You made me listen again. It’s kind of hard to tell, but I can hear “it,” and it seems that way from watching the video a little closer too. Of course there sometimes isn’t a standard lyric at all, especially in cases like this. And who knows (or cares) whether the youtube version is “official”?
Besides, the rhythm needs all the help it can get, so we may as well spice it up with some more sixteenths, eh? He’ll get there one of these days, with that good hard manly pissed off white dude Protestant work ethic of his.
Mr. Elected Politician
I got some news for you
If you decide to sick the military on us
Our 223s won’t do…nothin.
I know all your children
Have no restrictions on where they can pray
We aren’t that far gone
There’s so much wrong
With insisting others pray your way
Though I’m baffled why you vote against your own interests
This is come from Real America, pokin fun
At your ginned up belligerence.
Hell no I won’t speak just one language
No soy un tonto ignorante
If you want to serve in your own church
We have that freedom, guaranteed
It’s called the Constitution,
Whats a-matter can’t you read?
Get up and go to work if your able
If there’s jobs that pay for your time
End the handouts to the rich
And make the companies pay for their crime
Yes I think it’s time we change some policies–
This is coming from Real America, pokin fun
At your ginned up belligerence.
As for most of us it is still
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion
Its time to set our money free
I don’t tell you how and where to pray
And you respect my lack of belief
You want to pray to a bone
Or a big ol stone
Or a Bronze age diety
Well that’s all right with me
This is coming from Real America, pokin fun
At your ginned up belligerence.
*solo*
Most folks can’t afford medication
Obamacare’s a small start
If it helps you with your sickness
I say light up and take a toke
We need to stop being afraid of foreigners
Immigration built this country strong
Reinvest our profits here at home
Stashing it overseas is wrong
Raise your glass up if you agree
yeah
This is coming from Real America, pokin fun
At your ginned up belligerence.
Just another whining Redneck Fer Jeezus with Little Dick Syndrome.
I’ve avoided country music for almost two decades as too right wing to listen to but I still unfortunately catch some and the one that I truly hate is played on commercials raising money for disabled vets. It goes, “Say a prayer for peace.” As I recall back when Dubya was starting his wars in the Middle-East only one country group, the Dixie Chicks, opposed him and stood for peace. The entire country music industry blacklisted them for doing so, cancelling tours, refusing to play their music, pulling it off sales lists. Perfect hypocrisy.
@46: I agree, but the Dixie Chicks’ response was so good that it made me want someone else to insult them just to see what they’d come up with in response to that.
Professor Myers said:
The redneck is bit rude to re-purpose the term “American” to only refer to people like him, but the redneck is absolutely correct to recognize that he is a member of a different body politic than, say, the protestors of Ferguson. (or liberal college professors) America as a unified political community that shares the same values, concerns and goals no longer exists despite the strained political bonds that still bind people like the Redneck and Ferguson protestors together. The redneck at least realizes there is a profound disconnect in values between himself and others.
Frankly, I think we should separate and dissolve any sort of political association between people like the songwriter and people like me. Let’s get this divide going and get people like this out of my life.
The redneck is right that he represents something very, very different from my value system. If he is a true American, then I am not one and vice versa. Frankly I’m not so connected to a word that I feel like haggling over who’s value system is the heir to America, so I’m fine with letting the redneck be the real America because frankly fuck America at this point.
In the original US constitution, only those who owned land could vote.
Farmers have always had extra government privileges, unless they were the wrong color.
Farmers get subsidies because The Free Market™®!!1!, if left to its own predilections, would eliminate the agricultural sector within a single generation. Of course, those with an abundance of cash quickly learned how to tap into those subsidies and tax breaks, quickly turning actual farmers into employees of tax-shelter corporations owned by lawyers, surgeons, financiers, et al.
While farm policies do need top-to-bottom overhaul (with a scalpel, not a chainsaw), if you really want to “kick the moochers off the dole” you need to start with hedge fund managers and megabankers, then move on to the military-industrial complex and “homeland security” contractors, the prison industries, etc, etc. Of course, any real government clean-up project would also need to sweep the likes of Cliven Bundy into the dust-pan, but we won’t balance the budget (for very long, anyway) by squeezing farmers.
michael kellymiecielica:
Problem is, the USA, and actually practically all of the Americas, consists of relatively less conservative cities surrounded by relatively more conservative suburban and rural areas.
Your plan would create a ton of political islands, which could not possibly survive without constantly using the many roads, rails, water systems, and other infrastructure that goes through the rural and conservative areas.
The whole world is so thoroughly interconnected that the entire idea of dissolving political associations is no longer viable. It’s like the libertarian dream of swimming off into the ocean to found your own off-grid nation on an abandoned oil platform. It can’t possibly work, and even if it could, it wouldn’t actually improve your independence.
Frankly, I wish to fuck that we could critique a bad country song without stereotyping the entire genre. Country music, despite its post-Vietnam reputation, has a long tradition of having some pretty progressive songs. For instance: Tennessee Ernie Ford’s famous “Sixteen Tons” made some great commentary about how mining companies managed to screw their workers over by paying them in company scrip:
In the seventies, Loretta Lynn sang “The Pill,” about birth control, which was still a pretty taboo topic among her audience. It was a pretty aggressive song about the costs of forced childbirth on women of the time.
In more recent years, James McMurtry was openly anti-Bush/Cheney and pro-Occupy. He wrote an anti-Iraq War song called “Cheney’s Toy,” and a great song about the devestation of free trade called “We Can’t Make It Here.” What I especially liked about the latter was that a lot of the songs in that genre have a tendency to sink into xenophobia and racism (e.g., songs demonizing the Japanese in the eighties). McMurtry deliberately goes in the opposite direction, putting the blame where it belongs:
There are ways to talk about this shitty song without pretending like the entire genre of country is owned by Lee Greenwood clones. There are also ways to talk about the lives of rural whites without dismissing them as “rednecks.” I think that a lot of the reason that Fox News and the GOP retain credibility with these folks is that so many middle-and-upper class white liberals feel free to blow them off as “rednecks” or “trailer trash” and dismiss any attempt to address the problems of being working class as “smug white folks crying about how miserable their lives are.” It’s also a technique that white liberals use to let ourselves off the hook: When talking about racism, our go-to model is a white guy living in a trailer park listening to country music. Racism is thought of as being mostly a pathology of the lower economic classes, not people who go to college (the recent SAE fuckup is a relief in that sense) and work corporate jobs.
So yeah, let’s criticize this piece of shit, but do it without elitist middle-class stereotypes.
I would like to be wrong about this but it seems like the last line is less an exhortation to the listener to “relax and take a deep breath,” and more a mockery of the Garner protesters, re: “I can’t breathe.”
Also, Chris Hall: You may have missed the part where the author of the song described himself and others like him as “rednecks.”
this guy would not even be complaining about any of that list of bad things he has if we were living in a time of growing prosperity and experiencing the benefits of increasing peace world wide but that is not the case nay where.
We are living through one of those great transition periods and we have no real clear direction yet and absolutely no consensus as to what should happen.
One of the more powerful things to happen I started to say good things but changed my mind is the growing outsourcing of manufacturing world wide to less developed countries. That does a number of things, it increases the interconnection of countries world wide, it helps to raise the standard of living of more people world wide, it also help expose more people to the wider world through making communications more necessary and ubiquitous and at the same time affordable.
I thought of the Reefer song by Fats Waller when those other links were passed out but this is still the one that comes to mind when looking out at the bigger picture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm-L9uMxzQA
uncle frogy
Singing bout a mosque, eh?
You might as well sing Toska:
Cause singing to this man
And his right wing band
those things they’ll equally understand.
This is mythology.
1. The USA is one of the most urbanized countries on the planet. It’s 84% living in metro areas. The average redneck lives in a suburb somewhere these days.
The small town America of Palin and Huckabee barely exists any more. There has been rural flight for generations now.
2. A lot of rural areas are full of poverty, child abuse, domestic abuse, crime, drugs and alcohol, and sick and old people. In half of them average lifespans are falling sharply for murky reasons, by a lot, 5 years in the last few decades.
This isn’t true of all rural areas, just many or most of them.
3. And BTW, not all rural people are uneducated, drunk and drugged rednecks. Some of the better places like Jackson Hole,Wyoming, parts of California, Treasure Valley, Montana and so on, are doing OK and have mainstream values.
Because they wouldn’t be part of the privileged class and they know it.
But don’t joke too much about it: if Putin can fund european far-right parties, he can do the same to their US’ counterparts.
This sums up redneckland.
Falling average lifespans. The hardest hit group are white women. This hasn’t happened in a century.
No one is too sure why. Part of it seems to be prescription opiate use. Part lack of access to health care, something the ACA was designed to fix. One theory is that healthy people migrate leaving the unhealthy behind.
raven @ 59: One problem is that doctors often have families. We don’t want to sacrifice them to the red states so the red states have poor medical coverage.
Cupcake, you know, when you’re calling them, chances are that YOU are the one who wants something and THEY are the ones who have that thing. If YOU hang up the phone YOU don’t get that thing. It’s like a kiddie refusing to say “please” when they want a candy.
Also, isn’t that the capitalist system you love so much? People will spend money on you if you speak Spanish, so you offer your service in Spanish. Why do you hate America????
My wife comes from a small, rural town. 40 years ago there was a plant employing about a thousand people making small engines for lawn mowers, snow blowers, etc., and a shoe plant employing about 300 people. Both plants are now gone. The population of the town has gone down by about half and the median income by more than half. That’s what’s happening in many rural areas.
When we call our doctor we press 2 for English. We figure anyone who’s offended by that probably doesn’t go to our doctor.
He’s so angry that he can’t even insult properly. I don’t know what a stick-head would be. Cursory googling seems to indicate that it’s a fan of lacrosse.
What does this differ from the thug party’s manifesto?
At least in terms of things that are mentioned… There’s no voter suppression mentioned, e.g., nor climate client denial, but I suspect the record company put some limits on the overall time and, possibly, stoopidity.
If that’s all the “real America” is then I think we’re pretty justified in breaking it.
Marcus @9
In 1971, The Youngbloods released a great response to Okie From Muskogee.
I think Billie Joe Armstrong said it best, way back in 2004: I’m not a part of the redneck agenda.
Marcus @9
The Youngbloods link failed. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3OTNXFy5A
laurentweppe:
He doesn’t need to. The Koch brothers already fund US far right groups. They even have their own pseudo-historians, like Barton, just as Putin favors that character who promotes that weird “Hyperborean Russia” stuff. Notice the Kochs derive most of their wealth from fossil fuels … somewhat like Putin.
Thanks, that works!
llewelly #70
That may explain their funding of fossil ideologies thus.
When do we start solar energy then?
Okidemia
It’s all solar energy.
like, y’know, man
@drowner
Having just finished my few few days of work for the season (and not a day before it started to rain!) my neck is quite literally red right now. While it’s not a term I would try to take back myself the casual use of “redneck” as a slur reeks of classism. Anyone who considers themselves at all progressive or left wing should probably give some thought to why a term that literally means “person who works outdoors” feels like such an acceptable insult.
“few few” should be “first few” if that weren’t apparent.
Reminded me of Coco Rosie’s “Jesus Loves Me” rendition.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxF6U2oNhcA)
I don’t have a problem with the song’s offensiveness. I have a problem with people who like it, because in doing so they identify themselves as, well, bigots. I would prefer it weren’t on the radio, because radio play indicates that there’s enough of a bigot population to make broadcasting worth it. I would rather preserve the illusion that this type of redstater was a rare oddity, instead of a significant portion of the voting population.
TBH, I might hang up the phone, too — I need a minute to deal with my frustration at getting an automated system!
I may be annoyed (and even slightly inconvenienced) by having yet another options menu to wade through, but I understand why it’s there, and for essential services it makes sense to have the system be accessible to as many people as possible.
It’s because redneck culture is about anti-intellectual snobbery by which one who considers himself a redneck will cite his lack of education (or pretend to have a lack of education, like many Republican politicians) as somehow marking him as superior to anyone with more schooling than he has while also adopting Jingoistic and xenophobic stances toward the country.
@ Chris Hall 52, you make a really great point about historic country music (and I was humming “16 Tons” all yesterday afternoon). But you mentioned the “post-Vietnam” reputation of country music. And sure enough I can’t think of many examples of progressive country being made today. What changed?
@ georgewiman –
Progressive country music often gets labeled as “Folk”. Check out the music of Steve Earle & Billy Bragg to name a couple that come to mind. And when “country” musicians step out of line with the redneck drivel PZ has presented here, they are scorned. Remember back to when the Dixie Chicks dared not toe the line about the Iraq war?
http://www.hitfix.com/news/the-dixie-chicks-controversy-10-years-later-natalie-maines-rehashes-it
I don’t live in USArseholianstan anymore, and at the time I left, “Press one for English” was uncommon, if it even existed at all. So a question: On systems that offer that choice, I assume there is one or more choices for other languages (with Spanish being the most obvious, albeit not unique, alternative). But, is that choice said In the language (e.g., (this is a Generalisimo Google™ translation, Pulse dos para español (Press two for Spanish)), or in English ?
Español (in my example) is obviously better, albeit both Spanish and English would be Ok (if perhaps time-consuming). But English-only is, based on my own experiences as a expat not speaking the local language, awkward if not stupid and (especially in the case of USArseholia) racist.
“Press 1 for English” is a terrible imposition? Really? Way to shout to the world: “I AM AN ENTITLED WHINING RACIST!”
Where I live, language choice is routine in all government, and many business, telephone interfaces (the alternative being, of course, French). But I notice that English is still usually the first choice, and also more prominent on most bilingual signs and labels. It’s a kind of privilege.
Rey Fox (#64): He’s so angry that he can’t even insult properly. I don’t know what a stick-head would be. Cursory googling seems to indicate that it’s a fan of lacrosse.
He replaced the “d” with “st” to keep the song playable on the radio. He wasn’t that drunk.
Malta (#4): Also: “Muslim church.” I guess it’s hard to find rhymes with mosque.
It is when you’re drunk, as the author of that song might have been.
Trav Mamone (#6): Maybe I should make an official statement saying, “We’re not going to take away your guns and Bibles! We just think they are dangerous . . . especially in the hands of children who have no idea what to do with either one of them.”
Wouldn’t do a bit of good.
RE: all country music being (to coin a phrase) “redneck refuse” (of your teeming shore) — it isn’t.
I remember a song called “Home of the Brave” that protested a kid being sent home from school because he had long hair. And of course there’s Jeannie C. Riley’s Harper Valley PTA.
@blf,
Yeah, it’s usually in Spanish. Usually “oprima dos para español.”
Oh, **hells** yeah.
I remember loving that song when my mom played it for me as a kid. But somehow my mom stopped playing it while I was still pretty little. I have a quite vivid memory of it coming on the radio while in a car driving through northern Washington. That was somewhere between 10 and 20 years ago. But I never followed up and asked who wrote the song of found a copy. I told my best friend we needed to do that when the song ended, but …just like a damn human being… I failed.
All that is to say that I find the song fully equivalent in all important respects to Village Green Preservation Society and that song I dearly love **and** listen to on a fairly regular basis. My only defense is that when I was in my teens, the Kinks were still making well-circulated music, which caused me to end up researching more of their music after falling in love with them. Jeannie C. Riley? Well, if she was making music in the mid-80s, it wasn’t played on any station I was listening to.
Sad, really, that I lost track of the existence and brilliance of that song. Um, I don’t have to thank Mr Redneck for creating the circumstances that allowed a font-freak like caseloweraz to remind me, do I?
Please tell me I don’t. I’d rather just thank caseloweraz and go listen to Harper Valley PTA again for the 3rd time in the last 10 minutes.
Crip: Um, I don’t have to thank Mr Redneck for creating the circumstances that allowed a font-freak like caseloweraz to remind me, do I?
If I were a font-freak… La la la da la-da-da-de-da…
Actually, I think of myself as less of a font-freak and more of an HTML-elements freak™ — to the Nth°. <G>
Seconded. I must admit I’d totally forgotten that song, and have literally just listed to it for at least the first time in two, probably more, decades. I confess I hadn’t realized it is C&W, so there is one more exception to the rule C&W is neither entraining nor music…
Thanks to all who mentioned that song.
That reminds me:
You know, recently we’ve been hearing about how “rednecks” are an oppressed group and distaste for them is “classist.”
Bullshit.
Rednecks aren’t an oppressed group for basically the same reasons “nerds who play video games” aren’t an oppressed group.
Well put, Azkyroth.
As far as progressive country music, I found this from B*tch Media in their My Top 10 Feminist Music Discoveries of 2013 (I’d link but PZ’s filter doesn’t like their urls):
I listened to a bit of it (sorry, not a country fan) and it does take on what’s listed.
Mitch Benn did this better with “This Ain’t Your Country Anymore”, but his was intentionally a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s0Vk_LgSFc
Rednecks as a group are poor, yes. Poor and rural, and often but not exclusively Southern. They are also predominantly white and supportive of a “traditional” culture, which is highly religious, high patriarchal, and very often bigoted. “Rednecks” are a type of poor people that are right-wing, often ridiculously so, to the extent that they will often invoke the fucking Confederacy. And as right wingers they will gladly vote to screw over other poor people, under the presumption that other poor people aren’t Good, Hard-Working, and Deserving like they are.
Oh yes, there are certainly ways that expressing disdain for rednecks could be classism. Looking down on a subset of poor people almost exclusively because they are poor. But let’s not be fooled: “rednecks” are an essential demographic of the Republican party. They are not exclusively an oppressed group, they are also an oppressive group. Disdain for that fact is entirely justified.
@91 Azkyroth:
I can think of two (unrelated) possible chains of reasoning on which that statement might be based. Out of sheer curiosity, what is your reasoning behind that statement?
Because for me, it’s quite the opposite. My belief says that for every step we as a society must take to still reach the dream of Martin Luther King — that people are “not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” — that step is a measure of the oppression we currently exert as a society.
One such step is that we so quickly pigeonhole people into various categories utterly unrelated to the actual content of their character and judge their worth on those categories. As long as we thus prioritize how people look, speak, or even their lifestyle choices over what they believe and how they behave, that pigeonholing itself is a barrier to the final goal; the pigeonholing itself is therefore a form of oppression (no matter how negligible) and must be combated wherever and however it arises.
Alexander:
In other words, you are invoking the trope: “You are acknowledging that race is a factor by pointing out racism! You’re the real racist!”. Labeling or “pigeonholing” is not inherently oppressive. It is oppressive if you are doing so as part of discriminating against them. You know, oppression . Pigeonholing rich people in the category of rich person is not oppressive. Pigeonholing white people into the white person category is not oppressive. Pigeonholing Christians into the Christian category is not oppressive. Hell, simply acknowledging that poor people, non-white races, and non-Christian religions exist and pointing to them as categories isn’t oppressive in itself, because doing so is necessary to point out how those same groups are treated , including the pointing out and calling out of the actual oppression against them.
Also: MLK being invoked to advocate for complete blindness of context, including “color blindness”, and predominantly in the name of ensuring that a disproportionately white group is not “oppressed”? Must be a day that ends in Y.
Alexander #96
So says every “equality bigot”, who doesn’t want to have to consider their bigotry in keeping POC and women down. Until society gives equal results to those not now receiving equal results, all forms of bigotry/privilege that prevent equality of results must be dealt with. If that makes you uncomfortable, that your problem, not ours.
Liberturds are big on “equal opportunity” by law, but are post facto bigots. They don’t want equality of results. Then they are special.
@97 anteprepro:
@99 Nerd of Redhead:
I don’t know quite why either of you think I disagree with you, other than that I may have been unclear. (Or you’ve run into one too many concern trolls.)
Let me clarify: anteprepro, “pigeonholing” is not “labeling”, it is stereotyping. Labels — identifying ducks, geese, and swans as such — is helpful if and only if those categories have meaning. For instance: nothing is going to erase the biological roles of men and women in procreating anytime soon. However, to attach other meanings to these categories — usually in an “all X are Y” sense — like “all African-Americans are dishonest”, or “men who love fashion must be gay”, is to deny people the ability to express all possible intersections of identity.
Nerd, you bring up “equal results” as if this were some sort of easily defined thing. The Southern states had a sort of “paper equality” even in the 40s and 50s — POCs could apply to vote, they would just be handed an impossible test. Likewise, the CCCP had equal results for everyone only on paper, because we know absolutely nobody in the Politburo had means to seeks favors from the general populace</sarcasm>. While I’m not going to argue there aren’t problems with inequality — looking at any statistics from the BLS or FBI shows significant bias in how people treated by race or gender — simply stating everyone will receive “equal results” without also ensuring the system cannot be cheated will not produce the results you claim to seek.
Alexander: Okay, I agree insofar as “pigeonholing” specifically refers to stereotypes and absolutes about a category, rather than the related act of classifying people into said category.
Alexander
You bring up the “biological roles” of “men and women” in procreating.
“men and women” are not scientific terms.
@Nichrome 80 Thanks that makes sense. Though it is depressing.
Okay Dumbass before writing a blog about a song you should get the lyrics right.
Hey Mr. slick haired politician
I got some news for you:
If you’re gonna come and try to take my guns
Son ya better be bulletproof.
And don’t try to tell my children
When and where to pray.
We ain’t that far gone were still standing on
Land of the free and the home of the brave
No, I’m not your normal political society.
This is coming from real American, son
And pissed off rednecks like me
Hell no I won’t press 1 for English.
I’d just as soon hang up the phone.
And if ya wanna serve in a Muslim church
Go on and take your ass back home.
And take yourself to work if you’re able
Instead of living of our dime.
This “give me a handout generation”
Is gonna bleed this country dry.
Yes I think it’s time that we change your policy.
This is coming from real America son
And pissed of rednecks like me
As for most of us it’s still “in God we trust”
Here on this hallowed ground.
We get up and give thanks in the morning
And we work till the sun goes down.
Things have got to change we can’t sit by idly.
This is coming from real America son
And pissed off rednecks like me.
Old folks they can’t afford medication.
This damn Obama care is a joke.
If it’ll help you with your sickness
I say fire it up and take a toke.
We need to lock down all the borders
And throw away the key.
And let’s help our own right here at home
And stop sending it overseas.
Yeah, right now raise your glass if you agree!
This is coming from real America son
And pissed off rednecks like me.
Those lyrics are dumb. If old folks can’t afford medicine, why shouldn’t there be socialized medicine. The lack of logic is being laughed at….
I think that would be improved by a bit of disemvowelling.
Okay Dumbass before writing a blog about a song you should get the lyrics right.
Not sure those lyrics are entirely accurate either. “Hallowed ground”? I saw “hollowed” ground at Metro Lyrics. Thought it was some kind of reference to fracking. IMHO, in the video, thought he said “solid” ground.
You’re a young guy and probably get a lot of varied peer input. My unsolicited advice is; embrace a better, or less conflicted dharma.