viz. - Brad Paisley

Surface and Appearance in "Accidental Racist," Part 2

Calliope — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:11:24 +0000

At the end of my last post I promised to examine Brad Paisley and LL Cool J's controversial duet "Accidental Racist" in light of Paisley's 2011 "Camouflage" homage. This follow-up post offers that analysis as well as some context from Paisley's pop-country contemporaries and a recent national dialogue about race.

Sharing its name with the garb of hunters and soldiers, Paisley's lighthearted single from the album "This is Country Music" sounds, at first blush, like it would be anything but progressive. You might think only a select crowd could rally around a song that celebrates an aesthetic so closely associated with guns and stealth. But if we listen closer, the song stretches the application of camouflage into unexpected places where it creates an atmosphere of social inclusiveness. Let's see how this plays out.

In the first verse of the song an un-"cool" kid named Kevin makes a successful bid for popularity by pulling up to his high school parking lot with "his entire Chevy Cavalier" painted camouflage. The crowd cheers and Paisley exclaims, "camouflage - it disappears when it pulls out of his garage!"

Camo-bedecked high schoolers show up in the next verse too. Paisley croons,

I asked Jenny to the prom and her mom knew how to sew

So she mad a matching tux and gown from Duck Blind Mossy Oak

We took pictures in the backyard before we went to the dance

And the only thing that you can see is our faces and our hands

The final quatrain moves into a different register, away from teenagers and their efforts to fit or blend into their social environments to symbols of regional and national identity. The song slows down as Paisley concedes, "well the stars and bars offend some folks and I guess I see why." His reluctance to denounce the Confederate Flag outright is puzzling. But perhaps this is the kind of "tact" Paisley needs to use in order to get his largely southern, white fan-base to buy into the alternative flag he wants to propose:

Nowadays there's still a way to show your southern pride

The only thing as patriotic as the old red white and blue

Is green and gray and black and brown and tan all over too

Given the way camouflage functioned earlier in the song, as an invisible social glue that attracts even as it allows anxiety-producing social objects (outfits for prom, the car one drives to school) to fade away, we're encouraged to read the camo-colored flag as performing a similar kind of social function. Characterizing camouflage as his "favorite color" and adding that it is "designed by Mother Nature and by God," the singer makes the humorous claim that it is naturally occuring and divinely inspired. But the joke may have a deeper significance. By refering to camouflage as a single color that comprises "black and brown and tan" shades, the song also advocates for replacing old racist symbols of "southern pride" with symbols of a racially and ideologically diverse place. In the far-fetched, humorous universe of the song, camouflage is the means by which to reject exclusivity in favor of inclusion.

Paisley's struggle to find an acceptable outlet for "southern pride"--which he says is clouded by "southern blame" in "Accidental Racist"--may seem like a strange fixation. But it's a theme that is dear to Nashville country and has been handled in far less considerate or creative terms. Take for instance Eric Church's single "Homeboy," released the same year as "Camouflage." Adapting the biblical story of the prodigal son, the singer pleads with the title character--presumably his little brother--to return home from his wayward life on streets. Like Paisley's songs, Church's tune uses racialized clothing items and physical appearance to signal racial difference. But unlike "Accidental Racist," Church's song doesn't express difference through white and black characters; instead it sets up a strong antagonism between American farm life and hip-hop-influenced, urban culture.

Let's take a quick look at the lyrics. The singer's initial appeal to his brother mocks the urban style adopted and/or popularized by black hip-hop artists:

You were too bad for a little square town

With your hip-hop hat and your pants on the ground

Heard you cussed out mama, pushed daddy around

before you tore off in his car

Here you are running these dirty old streets

Tattoo on your neck, fake gold on your teeth

Got the 'hood here snowed, but you can't fool me

We both know who who you are

Later on in the song the singer counters the gold teeth and the baggy pants of the "'hood" with fixtures of a white, small-town existence: hard work, cold beers, hay bales, and trucks by the lake.

Even though LL Cool J and Brad Paisley work with the same sartorial imagery (Cool J tells us his pants are "saggin'") they actively reject the "us versus them" mentality of a song like "Homeboy." They do this by invoking stereotypically black or white clothing items (cowboy hats, a Skynyrd t-shirt, saggy pants, do-rags, and gold bling) and, without disparaging them, acknowledging that these are proverbially just the cover of the book. Paisley's line,

I try to put myself in your shoes and that's a good place to begin

But it ain't like I can walk a mile in someone else's skin,

captures the way the song treats dress versus more permanent forms of racial identity. Walking in someone's shoes, or in their do-rag or cowboy hat, isn't a meaningless gesture and neither should these objects be left out of a conversation about race. But "Accidental Racist" also refuses to absolve us of the ugliest kind of discrimination--not just judgment based on clothing, but judgment based on skin color.

Image Credit: www.cbsnews.com

If there's any doubt about whether clothing or appearance is a legitimate place to start a dialogue about race, just recall the murder of Florida teen Trayvon Martin that occured just over a year ago and the national "hoodie" movement it inspired. If anything LL Cool J and Brad Paisley do well to remind us that appearance, whether it is racial or cultural, still triggers prejudice and fear. How can we deny the emotional basis of a simple wish like this, "Just because my pants are saggin' doesn't mean I'm up to no good / You should try to get to know me, I really wish you would"?

Surface and Appearance in "Accidental Racist," Part 1

Calliope — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:23:37 +0000

Image Credit: Mark Humphrey, AP

The media reacted volubly to Brad Paisley's song "Accidental Racist," a ballad on his newly released "Wheelhouse" album that openly tackles the problem of racism. Staging a dialogue between Paisley and rapper LL Cool J, the song imagines the tense process of "remembering and forgetting" slavery, as one critic put it, from highly stereotyped white and black perspectives. Many voices from the blogosphere last week, including Stewart and Harris from Jezebel and Slate, fumed at the song's presentation of racial history and relations, while others viewed it as simply a provocative song characteristic of Paisley's other work. That it was selected by the NYTimes.com for one of the online "Room for Debate" forums is, perhaps, an indication of how ripe the song's lyrics are for critique and how generative they are of competing rhetorics.

Here I will consider how controversial lyrics from "Accidental Racist" alongside resonant verses from Paisley and other mainstream country artists foreground surfaces and appearances--clothing, physique, and color, for instance--to talk about identity, race, and social perceptions.

Image Credit: www.bet.com

One of the verses from "Accidental Racist" that has caused contention is Cool J's line, "If you don't judge my gold chains / I'll forget the iron chains." Critics object to the implication that white people overlooking a "black" fashion choice is somehow equivalent to black people forgetting about slavery altogether. Setting aside the offensiveness of this equation, I'd just like to point out that the line centers around a clothing accessory and also the suggestion that while such objects can inspire misjudgment and misunderstanding they can also be imbued with meanings that have deep consequences for race relations. I would argue that the song's frequent references to racialized apparel--a white cowboy hat, "invisible white hoods," a Skynyrd t-shirt with a red confederate flag on it, saggy pants, and a do-rag--are not so accidental, and that they fit in with a tendency in Paisley's work to appropriate and explode a certain kind of visual stereotype.

Take for instance, Paisley's tune "Online" from his 2007 album "Fifth Gear." Seemingly just a goofy song about online dating it actually engages with larger questions about anonymity, identity, and personal interaction on the Web, and it does so primarily by parodying the way we enhance our digital appearances.

The song begins with its protagonist enumerating what he calls his "stats," details about his height, weight and livelihood:

I work down at the pizza pit

And I drive an old Hyundai

I still live with my mom and dad

I'm 5'3 and overweight

Despite this profile, which, within the heteronormative frame of the song is represented as hopelessly pathetic, the singer is buoyed by the way he looks online:

'Cause online I'm out in Hollywood

I'm 6'5 and I look damn good

I drive a Maserati

I'm a black belt in Karate

And I love a good glass of wine

The sketch of the subject's "real" appearance and that of his constructed online persona present radically different versions of maleness; the one resembles adolescence and the other independence and success. Yet the descriptions are similar in their form and artificiality; neither evokes an image of a real person but rather two poles of a cartoonish spectrum of male desirability. Thus, beyond the song's main lesson--that people "grow another foot" and "lose a bunch of weight" when they portray themselves online--is the notion that a list of personal "stats," like the sort found on Facebook or used to size up a date, fail to express a person's true identity even though they can help with reinvention, profilerating online a "whole 'nother me."

The basic paradox presented in "Online," that while appearances are only skin deep they have real effects and consequences, also underlies the interplay between appearance and perceptions in "Accidental Racist." Paisley articulates the paradox when he apologizes to the black man he meets behind the Starbucks counter,

When I put on that t-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I'm a Skynyrd fan

The red flag on my chest somehow is like the elephant in the corner of the south

In my next post on this subject, I'll look at Paisley's 2011 song "Camouflage" to further examine his interest in fabric and color and their ideological freight.