A lot has changed since the last time we heard 

from The Chicks. They had a different name, 
different marital statuses and George W. Bush 
was still the president. The same president who 
lead singer Natalie Maines claimed she was 
“ashamed” of in 2003 — immediately sparking 
the trio’s fall from country music grace. Still, 
the group’s 2006 release Taking the Long Way 
offered no apologies for being outspoken. “I’ve 
paid a price and I’ll keep paying” Maines half-
vowed, half-predicted on the aptly titled track 
“Not Ready to Make Nice.”

Fourteen years later, Gaslighter proves 

Maines right. In detailing her tumultuous 
divorce, the album displays the personal costs 
of a commitment to candor. “My husband’s 
girlfriend’s husband just called me up / how 
messed up is that?” Maines winces on “Sleep at 
Night.” This kind of unswerving dedication to 
cataloguing the extent of Maines’s pain is what 
holds Gaslighter together. And at the same time, 
it’s what allows The Chicks to deliver the most 
scathing one-liners of their career. 

“I hope you die peacefully in your sleep / 

just kidding, I hope it hurts like you hurt me” 
Maines taunts on “Tights On My Boat.” If 
there’s one image that will now forever haunt 
Chicks fans, it’s those horrid tights on her boat 
— Gaslighter’s recurring motif and the damn-
ing evidence of Maines’s ex-husband’s infidel-
ity. Bouncing between jabs and sucker punches 
— “Will your dad pay your taxes now that I’m 
done?” — the laid-back but ominous “Tights 
On My Boat” is a deliciously petty tell-all that 
contextualizes Gaslighter’s arc. And, knowing 
that the divorce proceedings were drawn out 
over the prenup and a “confidentiality clause,” 
maybe Maines figured it was time for her ex to 
pay up too — in details.

It’s telling then, that the loneliest moment 

on the album is a cover. Originally recorded by 
singer-songwriter Charlotte Lawrence, “Every-

body Loves You” anchors Gaslighter in chilling 
disbelief. The listener gets the sense that even 
Maines couldn’t quite articulate how betrayed 
she felt — so she had to use someone else’s 
words. The song captures Maines’s recognition 
of a shade of hurt that isn’t found anywhere 
else on the record — confusion. “Why does 
everybody love you? / They don’t know enough 
about you” she sighs. Her delivery is brutal. 
There’s something special about seeing your-
self in a song that frees Maines to be vulnerable.

But what about their new sound? Known 

— and loved — for Maines’s rich harmonies 
with sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Magu-
ire alongside a generous helping of banjo and 
fiddle, The Chicks have enlisted artists to help 
launch their comeback who would make any 
country purist groan. Names include producer 
Jack Antonoff, known for his work on Taylor 
Swift’s and Lorde’s recent projects, as well as 
an assortment of pop-oriented songwriters like 
Julia Michaels and Anne Clark, who is profes-
sionally known as St. Vincent. But it works. The 
slick, sparse production matches the anger that 
pulses through the album and heightens its bit-
ing lyrics. Genre squabbles aside, banjo licks 
and studio-bred percussion are equally central 
to etching out Gaslighter’s narrative. 

From the rollicking, finger-pointing title 

track to the swampy battle cry “March March,” 
this beat-driven alteration to The Chicks’ sig-
nature sound helps keep them steady. More-
over, it’s a teaching tool. In “
Julianna Calm 

Down” The Chicks coach their daughters and 
nieces through heartbreak. “
Just put on, put 

on, put on your best shoes / and strut the fuck 
around like you have nothing to lose,” Maines 
instructs “Harper,” “Eva” and about a dozen 
other names. What starts slow and somber 
grows celebratory as the beat pushes the lis-
tener to dance. 

6

Thursday, July 23, 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

DIGITAL CULTURE
DIGITAL CULTURE

Politics and TikToks

On July 9, the world came tumbling down 

for TikTok fanatics and Gen Zers alike. The 
app experienced an hour-long glitch causing 
the short-form videos to appear like-less and 
view-less, with users’ For You Pages displaying 
arbitrary content as opposed to the personalized 
stuff the algorithm usually generates. Before app 
representatives could assure that the outage was 
just a temporary disruption, TikTok devotees 
hysterically flooded Twitter with hashtags like 
#RipTikTok and #tiktokshutdown anticipating 
the app’s demise. Severely ill-timed, the glitch 
occurred just three days following Secretary of 
State Mike Pompeo’s alleged threat to ban the 
app due to security concerns. 

In some sort of doomsday scenario where 

the government threatens app prohibition on 
Monday and the application stops functioning 
on Thursday, TikTokers launched into survival 
mode and pivoted their focus to other platforms. 
LSA junior Ari Elkins, who has accumulated a 
following of more than 246.7 thousand on the 
app making themed music listicles, spent the 
outage trying to direct his followers to his Ins-
tagram account. Nick Daly, a Music, Theatre & 
Dance sophomore who has gained TikTok pop-
ularity by posting musical theatre covers, did the 
same as he encouraged his 71.4 thousand follow-
ers to find him on Instagram instead.

In an interview with the Daily, Elkins remem-

bered thinking “Everything I’ve put in is about to 
disappear” during the infamous glitch. Hannah 
Stater, a Music, Theatre & Dance student pursu-
ing a master’s in harp performance, has earned 
over 378.4 thousand followers and 9.1 million 
likes posting covers under the name “hannah_
harpist.” Stater told the Daily she recalled a wave 
of #RIP messages during the glitch as creators in 
her multiple group chats immediately declared 
the app dead. Within an hour, TikTok’s bug was 
sorted out, but content creators were still shaken 
by the malfunction and left uncertain about the 
app’s fate. Elkins admitted, “I did not really feel 
relieved when it got fixed. There’s always an 
idea in my head that I could wake up tomorrow 
and (TikTok) could be gone.”

A platform that has fostered political mobili-

zation and given a voice to a new generation of 
activists, artists and business owners, the ban 
could mean a lot more than just an end to viral 
dances and unfortunate “thirst traps.” To users 
like Elkins, who views his content as a supple-
ment to a career in music curation, the ban could 
translate to a severe professional setback. And 
to those like Stater or Daly, who are using their 
platforms to amplify Black and indigenous cre-
ators and distribute anti-racist resources, the ban 
could serve as a threat to free speech. So what is 
really behind the Trump administration’s sup-
posed ban on the app? Are Gen Z voices at stake?

TikTok, which has experienced a surge of 

success in recent months, currently entertains 
800 million monthly users — exceeding other 
popular platforms like Snapchat and Twitter. 

The majority of these users are between the 
ages of 16 and 24, allowing the platform to cata-
pult the voices of Gen Z into the national dia-
logue in unprecedented ways. The generation’s 
impact via TikTok reached political bounds last 
month when users banded together to botch 
attendance of Trump’s Tulsa rally through 
phony ticket sales. The app has also allowed 
Black Lives Matter protesters to push first-hand 
footage that challenges the way the protests are 
illustrated by mainstream media. 

In an interview with the Daily, Stater spoke 

on TikTok’s role in the Black Lives Matter 
movement and highlighted the generational dis-
crepancy between mainstream and social media 
protest coverage. She observed that, “Most Mil-
lennials and most Gen Z people don’t have cable, 
therefore they’re not watching the (same) news 
… that most Gen Xers and Boomers watch. In 
the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murderers still not 
having been arrested, people on the news … are 
not covering that any more. But TikTok is show-
ing videos of protests still going on … enabling 
people to question the media and question tra-
ditional news.”

Secretary of State Pompeo initially positioned 

the TikTok ban as a means of safeguarding data, 
accusing the app, currently operating under an 
American CEO, of sharing information with the 
“Chinese Communist Party.” In his proposition, 
Pompeo essentially posed all Chinese apps as a 
security threat due to the Chinese internet secu-
rity law, which would allow the Chinese gov-
ernment to request access to TikTok user data. 
However, many creators interpret the Trump 
administration’s TikTok ban as a way to hinder 
the work of Gen Zers and counteract the politi-
cal mobilization the app has stimulated.

Ari Elkins expanded on this belief, saying “I 

think the ban is a political tactic by the adminis-
tration to censor the Gen Z voices at the height 
of an election year, which ultimately I find to be 
a threat to our democracy. While, of course, you 
should definitely take safeguards on our privacy 
and data, this is a bigger issue beyond TikTok 
that should be dealt with.”

Stater shared a similar concern, stating the 

ban “will speak volumes to … where the alle-
giances of our government are in regards to … 
free speech. If they were to ever ban TikTok and 
yet they still haven’t declared the KKK as a ter-
rorist group, it just really speaks volumes to the 
government and the corruption that is at play.”

Daly believed that the ban could be working 

as both a political tactic and a genuine means of 
protecting users. He told the Daily, “I think that 
it is definitely possible that the motive behind 
the ban would be to push that anti-Chinese nar-
rative that the Trump Administration has been 
spewing. But, I also do think that it is very pos-
sible that it could be due to security reasons, 
which is also valid. It can be both, unfortunate-
ly.”

GRACE TUCKER 

Daily Arts Writer

The Chicks’ return 
with ‘Gaslighter’

Read more at michigandaily.com

KATIE BEEKMAN

Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

MUSIC REVIEW
MUSIC REVIEW

