Dakota

Caught the Dixie Chicks documentary, Shut Up and SIng on my Netflix tonight and I thoroughly loved it. It was a pretty fascinating collection of video footage from 2003 through 2006 and avoided Behind-the-Music type biographing and sentimentalism. It also presented a group of artists that I enjoy musically but don't know much about. As bitchy as I expected Natalie to be (just because I had my own prejudging of her outspoken nature) and Emily and Martie to be eye-rolling after every comment, I found myself really fascinated with all facets it presented.

And multi-faceted it was; it included the footage from the UK concert where Natalie Maines said "Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas" and it also included private meetings between the Chicks and their publicists, managers, and other people behind the scenes. To see Maines look like she wants to wretch when it's suggested that The View is willing to include an interview with them as long as it's just an interview (no song), and their own production crew works on the segment, and only Barbara Walters is involved, is just fascinating you-don't-get-to-see-this type footage.

I thoroughly recommend it to Dixie Chicks fans, because while at least a third of it covers the production of their first album after the controversy, it goes beyond the Chicks' music and really is a really interesting story of an artist and her supportive band mates caught in a PR cyclone for a statement made outside the medium that their fans and supporting radio stations started to protest in retaliation. Not bi-partisan by any means (Maines calls George W. Bush a "dumbfuck," for example), but a great cohesive, interesting documentary that never got boring or pandered.