Sure they had the right to express their own opinion, but when you make your living by entertaining the most patriotic and traditional audience in all of American entertainment, you'd better align yourself with the values of that audience or at the very least "Shut the Hell Up!"
"The most patriotic" audience? Implying that non-country radio fans are less patriotic? I assume you have some kind of objective evidence to back that up?
As for "you'd better align yourself," what if ones goals were something other than appealing to an audience to maximize sales?
Doing what the Chicks did and the ensuing events -
insincere apology, take back the apology, fued with radio
publicly, the Entertainment Weekly cover, bash other stars of the format for not standing up for them, declaring themselves "no longer part of the country music family" and so on - only served to destroy thri career and relationship with country radio and it's audience.
Country radio is pop radio with fiddles and pedal steel, and will always move on to the new flavor of the month act with more promotion money behind them. The Chicks may have accelerated the process, but it's hard to believe they would still be making 10 million-selling albums over ten years after their debut. That's just not realistic for the business.
Their last big album, FLY, sold over 10 million copies. It came out before "the incident".
Their last album, TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME, sold less than one million - just over half a million actually.
That's simply not correct. That album sold half a million
in its first week and has sold over 2 million total.
Toby Keith followed a 4x Platinum album with a 1x Platinum. Did he make some kind of "un-patriotic" statement in the meantime? Or was it just the vagaries of the business?
Huge drop off! (sure that album won several Grammy's but you can't spend Grammy's)
Or glowing critical reviews. But believe it or not, some people have measures of artistic success that aren't simply based on what they can spend.
Of course by 2008 GOP candidates from John McCain on down were campaigning as if they were ashamed of George W. Bush as president, so the outrage that the Chicks' 2003 opinions may once have sparked could well have faded from the consciousness of mainstream America.
Careers in popular music tend to shoot up like a rocket and drop just as fast. Relatively few manage to continue for multiple decades, and almost never at the top levels of commercial success. Time will tell whether the Chicks will end up in the "where are they now" file, or continue to release new material to a more modest but consistent audience. If the latter, I think that would be considered a successful career.
--Justin
