Congratulations, Chix!

I know what I said. The Dixie Chicks (a.k.a "the walking dead from Michael Jackson's Thriller") were teetering on the edge of irrelevance. Their stylist had done them an irreparable wrong. Their white trashness was testing our patience. They were following in the footsteps of the multitude who dared utter "Look how hard it is to be a rock star!" and then faded into oblivion.

Yet there they were, looking (let's not deny it) fairly radiant as they made multiple trips to the podium to accept major awards.

I'll eat more crow: I had wrongfully assumed that their collective IQ wouldn't add up to the weight of the short one. But their deft Simpsons reference indicates an astute cultural awareness. It looked on the surface like a twelve-year-old flouting the high road and throwing it in the face of her teachers who all got it wrong when she was flunking out of fourth grade. But think about it. Fellow cross over artist Homer Simpson's musical career was legitimized and validated by Grammy as well. Of course, he crossed over from the Hilarious Drunken Overweight Dumb-Ass with a Heart of Gold category into Barbershop, but it doesn't take a Dixie Chick to percieve the layers in her allusion.

Gone were the cross-eyed fiddler and the chubby white trash girl from Shitewater, Texas. Gone were the retarded alt-country "you go girl" anthems. Forgotten, the low-class gyno-posturing. Far behind us the shameless pub hounds lapping up the free press given to anyone who hates the president. The Chicks rose above it all, no apologies (not even for holding a knife to Stevie Nicks' throat and forcing their nauseating version of "Landslide" on the world), and proved to their critics that as long as the world needs Art, and artists willing to be all up in yo grill saying, loud and clear, "We have never heard the word DECORUM!" they will have a place. They've bloomed. They've matured. And they've got a long, important career in front of them. I was wrong.

One question remains: Now that you are, in your own words, not "Country" artists anymore, are you going to drop the "Dixie" facade and just be Chicks?