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