Shut Up & Sing is the best film I have seen so far this year. This is not because I am a fan of the Dixie Chicks, because I am not. Nor is it because the film captures it’s subjects perfectly, although it certainly does. No, Shut Up & Sing is the best film so far this year because underneath the music is a powerful and fascinating document of a country crippled by its shallow ignorance and close-mindedness.

It begins in 2003 as the Chicks are at the top of their game; the best selling women’s act of all time, until lead singer Natalie Maines makes a joking comment on a London stage that she is ashamed that President Bush is from Texas. After the press catches wind of this, a controversy emerges among American country music listeners, which the Chicks assume will eventually blow over, until the backlash becomes so severe that Maines receives death threats.

How ignorant, juvenile, and shallow have some of us become? As most controversies are, the Dixie Chicks controversy is a classic example of how people voice their opinion as if it is given fact; thought and speech become separated. The title of the film is derived from a comment made by one protestor outside a Chicks concert, but think about it. Shut up and sing is a statement that implies that the Dixie Chicks are entertainers and because of this, their opinions are devoid of worth. If the opinions of entertainers, as ill-informed as they can sometimes be, are not worth anything, then why would country music fans boycott the Chick’s music, throw away their CDs, have them banned from country radio, and put threats upon their lives? The real title of the film should be Shut Up & Sing Because Your Views Are Wrong And We Don’t Want To Hear Them.

What I find most fascinating about this whole debacle is that, the controversy begins as Bush is at the height of his popularity. However, once it becomes known that the president lied, that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and that troops are dying every day for no reason, and Bush’s popularity at the polls plummets, that the Dixie Chicks are forgiven and become fashionable again; the public forgiving them for their comments. Of course, since then the Dixie Chicks have risen back to fame, recorded the best song of their career in Not Ready to Make Nice, and won a Grammy for their latest album. However, their rise back to fame is not the kind of story in which a group of people overcomes adversity to triumph in the end; the kind that American’s love to tell as if America is the only place on earth where such stories could happen. It is a story of a confused and ill-informed public changing their views. Suddenly American’s knew Bush was bad all along and what happened to the Dixie Chicks was a simple forgivable mistake.

One of the main attacks against the Chicks was that they were unpatriotic. Why, because they had the courage to stand up and question how their country was being run? Because they made a silly little comment, which was not supposed to be taken seriously? This does not make the American flag any less valuable to them or mean that they are pro Saddem Hussien as the equally ignorant Toby Keith would suggest through his taking of Maines’ picture and imposing it with one of Hussien so that it looks like the pair are cuddling. What this means is that the Dixie Chicks believe that the actions taken by the rulers of America displayed a personal agenda that did not work towards the betterment of American wellbeing. But hey, country radio darling Toby Keith believes that social issues can be solved with no more than all the rope in Texas and a tall oak tree.

If anything, one could say that it was the country music fans of America that were unpatriotic in their ongoing attempt to strip individuals of the rights given to them through the First Amendment. Is it patriotic to give freedom of speech only to those whose speech conforms to the ideologies of the whole? I say God bless the Dixie Chicks and God bless Shut Up & Sing for exposing the hypocrisy that plagues certain sectors of America and pointing an accusing finger right back at it. We are not fascists; if something is disagreeable, we have the freedom to change the channel or turn off the radio and simply ignore it. Shut Up & Sing opens our eyes to the fact that there are a lot of people in this world who need to shut up, and the Dixie Chicks aren’t among them.