It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

By Kara Tucker

Picture this.
You're Brad Paisley. You have had a long, successful career with both critical and commercial acclaim. You recently turned 40, what better time to try to stretch your boundaries a bit?
After all, you're a skilled songwriter and guitarist, so why not attempt some new things, maybe deal with tougher topics.
You wore a T-shirt of one of your favorite bands, Alabama, and got called a racist on Twitter for it, because the shirt that depicted a Confederate battle flag.
You think "Am I a racist? Is that all it takes?"
Somewhere along the line, the term "post-racial" came out, a laughable term, definitely a premature one.
To this day, there exists racial distrust, not just in the South either, mind you. Granted, that part of the country has a portion of its citizenry that makes it an easy target, but there are racists as vile as any one else in the blue states and thoughtful, decent, intelligent human beings in the red.
Where to go if you're a Southern songwriter, though? Scratch that, a Southern white songwriter. Scratch that again, a Southern white male country songwriter.
How do you address pride in where you come from (Paisley's from West Virginia) while addressing that the part of that pride, if not yours specifically, comes from a dark part of this country's history.
That's where that flag imagery comes in. While it may have morphed in some people's minds to a version of regional pride, it is still very loaded imagery because it represents a pride at the expense of other people. Literally.
It was the symbol of those in the states who fought for the right to keep owning other people as slaves, as property. It continued to be used after the Civil War, through reconstruction into Jim Crow, into the defiance against civil rights for African-Americans in this country.
Try as they might, the apologists for it could never change the fact that most people see the Confederate imagery as an expression of white supremacist attitudes, of the United Confederate States.
Which brings us back to Paisley. He decided to tackle a post-racial America that's not post-racial at all. He's capable of nuance, even facing up to this impossible task. In reality, there's pretty much no way to tackle a topic with so many angles and centuries of history behind it in one song. A whole album? Maybe you get closer, but no way in one song.
Still, Paisley was more than capable of avoiding the trip that ensnares some songwriters, whose expression of Southern pride comes across as little more than unapologetic jingoistic buffoonery or bumper sticker level sloganeering.
He came up with a song with help from LL Cool J, who has managed career longevity in the hip hop field, no small feat for those of his generation even as his music career has taken more of a back seat to his acting in recent years.
The result of Paisley's endeavors with LL is "Accidental Racist", a song off his just-released album "Wheelhouse."
The moment the track hit the internet Monday, a rather substantial negative response quickly ensued. We've seen some quick negative feedback for others (as with the leak of Beyonce's egofest "Bow Down.") lately, but not at the level of reaction this track received.
Is the negativity deserved? The honest answer to that is that, yes, a fair amount of it is. The track ultimately falls apart as a well-intentioned failure.
Lets start with the music itself. The track feels like a Kid Rock 45 played at 33 speed at times. It fails to dig deep with a real hook in any real fashion. The whole thing comes off slick and rather lifeless, especially with the muffled "Sweet Home Alabama" snippet that kicks off the track. Not a good sign to remind folks of a far superior song.
That is a forgivable offense though, in comparison to what happens with the lyrics.
The sad part is that, even there, Paisley has occasional moments that hint at what could have been. At one point, he sings, "We're still picking up the pieces/Walking over eggshells/Fighting over yesterday/And caught between Southern pride and Southern blame."
Stating the situation, that's good. Paisley's character in the song goes on to talk about putting himself into the shoes of the black man working at Starbucks who took offense to his Skynyrd shirt with the flag logo.
Again, a willingness to see the issue through the other person's eyes. Considering the issue gets ignored altogether too often, this is promising?
Where does it go wrong? Hoo boy.
To start with, Paisley's getting a lot of blame because the track is his idea and it's on his album, but LL Cool J's contributions are highly problematic at best.Now, one could make the point that LL is not anyone's first choice to drop a socially conscious rhyme. He doesn't have the track record of Mos Def,Common, KRS-One, Chuck D and others in that department. But, he is skilled and savvy enough that he should have been up to the task, right? Sadly, no. No he wasn't.
The worst might be the jaw-dropping false equivalencies that he shouts out as the song plays out.
"If you forget my cold chains/I'll forget the iron chains.", he says. Because, you know, Mr. Smith's bling is just as scary as shackles used to make sure that people were kept as property.
Seriously, forget about the laziness of rhyming "chains" with "chains" and think about it. Did LL really mean to equate racists with people who hate racism?  Because that's exactly what that lyric does.
That howler comes on the heels of "If you won't judge my do-rag, I won't judge your red flag" Translation: "If you don't complain about my fashion choice, I won't complain about you wearing a long-standing symbol of white supremacy." Again. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
It's enough to make one long for the mind-numbingly simplistic "Side by side on piano keyboard/Oh, Lord, why don't we" that Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney gave us.
Not that Paisley escapes blameless on the lyrical front. He sings, "Our generation didn't start this nation/And we're still paying for the mistakes/That a bunch of folks made/Long before we came."
Somehow I doubt that Mr. Paisley, suddenly forgetting to check his privilege, is personally paying for the mistakes of his ancestors that much. Wait. Did he say "mistakes"?!?!?!?
Losing your car keys is a mistake. Using salt instead of sugar when making a cake from scratch is a mistake.  Years of slavery and the years of racism, institutional and otherwise, that followed is a little more than a "mistake." Jim Crow deserves a little more than an "oops, our bad."
Granted, most of those who truly had to answer for such things are dead, but their deeds need greater heft from a word than "mistakes."
While the song sprang from real life, it still seems odd when Paisley acts unaware that the shirt he wears in the lyrical story (with Skynyrd subbing for Alabama) contains loaded imagery. ("What? Black people don't like the Confederate flag? Who knew?").  He's old enough to remember the fights that have gone on in our lifetimes to take down Confederate flags that flew in front of some state capitols.
Or maybe he's unaware of the irony of a West Virginian wearing Confederate imagery, but I digress.
With the sometimes awful, cringe-inducing turns this song takes, the biggest disappointment is that as well-intentioned, as open-minded as Paisley seems to be, he and LL try to wrap things up too neatly.
Even in 2013, almost 150 years after the Civil War ended, things aren't anywhere wrapped up or "post-racial" in this country. Even with all the progress, things are much trickier, thornier and open-ended than this song seems to suggest.
Yes, it would be nice if more folks would buy each other beers (or some other beverage), converse and start clearing the air, but that's going to take a lot more time, many more conversations and a heck of a lot more beverages.
The net result feels more like an excuse for absolution of white guilt than it was intended to. Hell, the first line of LL's rap is "Dear Mr. White Man,"
As the song runs through its home stretch, Paisley hints at the business unfinished, singing lines about trying to understand and wanting to make things right. But then LL Cool J comes back with lines like "Let bygones be bygones" and "The past is past, you feel me."
Actually, no, I'm not feeling you and neither are a lot of other people.
This song will go down as a punchline, a Chris Gaines-level career misfire. That's unfortunate, because the subject matter has many serious topics worthy of musical exploration. It just deserves better than the ham-fisted earnestness (at best) and clueless to its own offensiveness (at worst) on display here.
It's also a topic that shouldn't require "bravery" to take on. It shouldn't be seen as "radical" or "having cojones."
Brad Paisley does deserve credit for trying, but his own internal sense of quality control should have kicked in well before this saw the light of day. Hopefully more artists take on the challenge, including Paisley.
In the meantime, back to the drawing board.
And that's what's real and what's truth.