Blog Post #4: Context Analysis

When viewing and determining the contexts of this video, “Not Ready To Make Nice,” by the Dixie Chicks, it is very important to first understand the context in which it was created. The 2006 song, though powerful and very unrepentant, was written to, for lack a better phrase, “make nice” with the American public after the Dixie Chicks’ lead singer, Natalie Maines, made off-the-cuff remarks at a London concert about how she was "ashamed"to be from the same state as then President George W. Bush. The uproar and outrage about her comments surged through the relatively country music community and drove their songs and albums off the charts. For the next three years the Dixie Chicks all but disappeared. But in 2006 they resurfaced with a new album and were “mad as hell.” Thus, “Not Ready To Make Nice,” was born.

There are many other contexts in which to view the video for “Not Ready To Make Nice.” One important context is an aesthetic context. All of the choices made in the video were deliberate and significant. The dark setting and strategic lighting set up the mood and feeling for the video. The girls dressed in white, innocent and pure, are smeared with black paint, representing the way that their names were smeared and tainted. Also, the black paint stained on their hands that they are unable to wipe off is an aesthetic decision and visual representation of the words spoken that you can never take back, can never wipe away. The black and white color scheme chosen for the video is also an aesthetic decision representing the stark nature of our world and how things are either one way or the other, that they are black or white, no grey. Also, another important aesthetic aspect of the video is the pained and anguished looks that cover the faces of all the people in the video. This is seemingly genuine pain displayed metaphorically by the women of the Dixie Chicks as a visual representation of the turbulence and persecution weathered by the group in the years following Maines’s comments.

It is also pertinent to view this video in an institutional context. For example, when the women are sitting in the schoolroom setting and Natalie is called up to write on the board, “To talk without thinking is to shoot without aiming.” This plays on the notion of how students are punished in schools and forced to write out sentences stating what they did wrong over and over again. And that is seemingly what happened to the Dixie Chicks. They were treated like children, incapable of individual thinking and forced to admit what they had done over and over again as a form of "punishment." Another prime example best viewed from an institutional context is the scene in which they appear to be in a doctor’s office or operating room. Two of the women are trying to hold the other down. This is suggestive of how little choice is often given in institutional systems and repressive they can be. Both the educational and medical examples when viewed in an institutional context seem to take on a contextual meaning of repression and that it would be in your best interest to stick with the status-quo, because if you don’t there will be consequences and the blood, or in this case, ink, will be on your hands.