Even MSNBC has its limits — so learned Jamilah Lemieux earlier this week, when she crossed the rhetorical line on the network’s afternoon program Now with Alex Wagner. Responding to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s remark that he stopped listening to rock and roll and turned to country music following the September 11 attacks, Lemieux, senior digital editor at Ebony magazine, opened the panel by declaring, “Nothing says ‘Let’s go kill some Muslims’ like country music.” Fellow panelist Joan Walsh, editor-at-large of Salon, chuckled along. But following a commercial break, guest host Ari Melber distanced the network from the comments, saying, “A few minutes ago on this program, a guest made a comment about country music that was not appropriate, and we want to be clear this network does not condone it.” Here’s the clip:
A couple thoughts, the first about Ted Cruz’s musical pivot. Here is what the Texas senator said on CBS This Morning on Tuesday:
I grew up listening to classic rock, and I’ll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11. And it’s very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.
And I have to say, it just is a gut-level. I had an emotional reaction that says, these are my people. So ever since 2001, I listen to country music. But I’m an odd country music fan, because I didn’t listen to it prior to 2001.
Cruz did not say which bands he liked growing up, or which country musicians he turned to, and predictably MSNBC’s guests were dismissive. But rock and country have long had regions of overlap — think Lynyrd Skynyrd — and Cruz rightly observes that the two genres, broadly construed, responded differently to the events of September 11 and the George W. Bush years.
Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan provided new outlets for rock and roll’s traditions of anti-establishmentarianism and anti-war sentiment (think of Vietnam protest music), which had been less edgy since rock and roll stopped being the counterculture and became, simply, the culture. Thus anti-war anthems appeared from R.E.M. and Lenny Kravitz, and John Mellencamp rewrote Woody Guthrie’s “To Washington” with lines such as “He wants to fight with many / And he says it’s not for oil / He sent out the National Guard / To police the world / From Baghdad to Washington.” Those impulses were reinforced by the ascendancy of punk rock, which combined classic rock’s temperamental rebelliousness with late-1990s/early-2000s suburban-youth angst — hence Green Day’s “Holiday” (“Sieg heil to the president gas bag / Bombs away is your punishment”).
Country music, meanwhile, responded almost oppositely. Perhaps the best-known country song to come out of the attacks was Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” which featured unabashedly hawkish lines such as, “We’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way.” It topped country music charts, and has since gone platinum. Keith also penned the ballad “American Soldier,” one of several songs written sympathetically about or from the perspective of American servicemen (along with, among others, “If You’re Reading This,” by Tim McGraw, and “Letters from Home,” by John Michael Montgomery). In the weeks after September 11, Aaron Tippin released “Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly,” which reached No. 2 on country charts — held out of No. 1 by Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).”
Country music was not and is not “Republican,” but it was and is certainly reflexively pro-American — unashamedly patriotic, and congenial to a view of terrorists as evil and Americans fighting them as good. Rock and roll started from a position of ambivalence (and perhaps constitutional distrust) toward America’s activity abroad, and came, in certain cases, to embrace an outright hostility against it. What September 11 did was expose pre-existing fault lines in Americans’ self-perception. It’s entirely plausible that Ted Cruz tired of music that attacked his worldview, and discovered in country music a more like-minded musical community.
Now to Lemieux.
It’s one of the great ironies of progressive activism that its solution for the (alleged) crime of dehumanizing an entire group of people is . . . to dehumanize an entire group of people. But, then, someone who calls herself a “heroine” is unlikely to have the capacity for self-reflection requisite to see that.
Additionally, one can pretty well guarantee that “Chicago-born, Howard-trained and Brooklyn-made” Jamilah Lemieux has an approximately nonexistent experience of country music (in case her absurd, offensive comments did not make that clear). I happen to be a country music fan with Muslim friends. The sound you hear is Jamilah Lemieux spontaneously combusting.
Finally, Lemieux describes herself on her website as a “proud millennial gamechanger.” Pro tip: If you’re actually changing the game, you probably don’t have to announce it.
No, we all know what game Lemieux is playing.
