The Audacity of Woke

Jeff Goldstein Substack ^ | 5 Apr 2023 | Jeff Goldstein

[Rummyfan]

In a somewhat surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” a protest anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws crafted to prevent both child mutilation and the potential arrested development and bone loss often caused by hormone therapy for “transitioning” youth considered too young to consent to such procedures. The performance was of course steeped in Queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a televised awards show, and in the academic sense, where drag serves as a kind of postmodern Harlequin dance to usher pre-initiates into Queer theory more broadly. Choreographed to confront its audience, the unspoken subtext of the number was that it’s time for you to pick a side — and you had better be careful which side you pick.

The whole spectacle was, in fact, an offensive. A show of power. The precise moment when the tyranny of the Elect, the permanent victim class, flexed its collective muscles and informed viewers, with a glittery hostility camouflaged as kitsch, that any march through the institutions must and will be a march through all institutions. The country music scene is not immune. Nothing is. Because for the revolution to succeed, cultural hegemony must police its framework. And cultural hegemony brooks no dissent.

This was a brazen show of strength: Think “Shock and Awe,” only with lots of bedazzling.

[Rummyfan]

Et tu, country music?!

[Rummyfan]

But then this was merely the denouement to a week in which the left, confronted with what they suspect is a troubling manifesto from a “trans man” who gunned down six people in a Christian elementary school, decided — in a moment of choosing — to lay its agenda bare. They picked their side, from the President and his fellow travelers to the schools to the corporate marketers. And the side they picked was the side of a school shooter who became for them an emblem of their cultural movement: cast as a victim of “hateful” traditional religious values, a tragic figure broken by her desire to “be seen,” Audrey Hale was sainted, her death a kind of religious redemption play.

[Boogieman]

Most country music’s been crap for almost 40 years. They can have it.

[darkangel82]

She just torpedoed her own career. Dumb

[drSteve78]

She just torpedoed her own career. Dumb

She? How can we tell?

[dblshot]

Check out radiofreetexas.com for real Texas country music. Anything coming out of corporate big music industry is pretty much woke crap these days.

[Uncle Lonny]

A real country music song, “Murder on Music Row” addressed the death of country music in 1999:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RePRHOjF5M

[jmacusa]

I guess she never heard of “The Dixie Chicks’’.

[usconservative]

She just became a dicksee chick...