June 26th: The Chicks!
This week, Friday's music honors 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐬, formerly The Dixie Chicks, who yesterday dropped the "Dixie" in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and in order "to meet this moment," as they say on their website announcing their brilliant new video "March March," also released yesterday. When they sing "I'm an Army of One," they speak to every One of us who is finding our courage and especially our 𝑑𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 to right now seek to challenge/overturn/heal racism and the legacy of slavery in America. The Chicks are not newcomers to the struggle for progressive social transformation: Following 9-11, their incredible version of "I Believe in Love," performed on national television immediately after the destruction of the World Trade Center, transformed a lyric about a personal relationship into an anti-war statement. When George Bush started the Iraq War not long after, they publicly announced that they were ashamed to be from Bush's home state of Texas, which led to their demonization and virtual expulsion from country music, with radio DJ's across the South hosting record-burning parties and inspiring death threats against them. And their reply, the number one hit song "Not Ready to Make Nice," made it clear in the name of peace and justice that they wouldn't be sorry for their transgression. But nothing they've done compares with the symbolic statement of yesterday's name-change and this brilliant new music video you are about to watch, with the overwhelming ending beginning with George Floyd, whose murder began today's movement, and ending with Emmett Till, whose murder helped to ignite the last civil rights movement in 1955.