"The Dixie Chicks: America Catches Up with Them"

Three years after "the Incident," the Dixie Chicks responded with a new album. In reviewing this and interviewing them, Jon Pareles observes that America has caught up to their earlier attitude towards Bush, while also catching America up on the trio's personal and professional movements.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 12 Unit 4's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: How the Media Twists the News, Why Partisans View, Bush's Address on Iraq Invasion, The Dixie Chicks, Keep the Heat, Chicks Reap Whirlwind, No More Whistlin' Dixie, America Catches Up, Speaking Up and Speaking Out, Esteemed Outlaws, A Tired Old Song
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. repentant
    feeling or expressing remorse for misdeeds
    It led to a partisan firestorm, a radio boycott, death threats and, now, to an album that's anything but repentant.
  2. fend
    try to manage without help
    After country's gatekeepers disowned them over politics, they decided to keep their politics and let country music fend for itself.
  3. oblique
    not direct, explicit, or straightforward
    The new songs are filled with reactions, direct and oblique, to the Incident.
  4. collaborate
    work together on a common enterprise or project
    "Taking the Long Way," due out on Tuesday, is the first Dixie Chicks album on which group members collaborated in writing all the songs.
  5. dirge
    a song or hymn of mourning as a memorial to a dead person
    The first single, "Not Ready to Make Nice," declares, "I'm not ready to back down/I'm still mad as hell," and starts with a tolling guitar more suitable for a Metallica dirge than a honky-tonk serenade.
  6. insist
    be emphatic or resolute and refuse to budge
    The Dixie Chicks and their manager insisted to their record company that "we need to approach everything like not one radio station is going to play one single song."
  7. lucrative
    producing a sizeable profit
    "Taking the Long Way" reaches not for the lucrative yet insular country airwaves but for an adult pop mainstream.
  8. vilify
    spread negative information about
    Right-wing blogs and talk shows vilified the Dixie Chicks as unpatriotic and worse, and the Incident reached the nightly news...
  9. plummet
    drop sharply
    They had the No. 1 country single that week with "Travelin' Soldier," which mourns a soldier killed in Vietnam; it plummeted to No. 63.
  10. fervent
    characterized by intense emotion
    On the American tour a handful of boos were drowned out by fervent cheers.
  11. irreverent
    showing lack of due respect or veneration
    After Ms. Maines replaced the group's lead singer in 1995, the Dixie Chicks became a voice of assertive, irreverent femininity in mainstream country.
  12. hypocritical
    professing feelings or virtues one does not have
    "Lubbock or Leave It," a fierce country-rocker, describes Ms. Maines's Texas hometown as a hypocritical "fool's paradise" with "more churches than trees," blind to its own problems.
  13. meticulous
    marked by precise accordance with details
    Without the Dixie Chicks' back story, the songs work as meticulous pop vows of loyalty and determination.
  14. liberate
    grant freedom to; free from confinement
    Three years after the Incident the Dixie Chicks insist that it liberated them.
  15. protest
    a public manifestation of dissent
    It will mean a lot to me if people buy the album just sort of out of protest.
Created on Sat Mar 07 16:20:42 EST 2015 (updated Sat Mar 07 19:07:15 EST 2015)

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