Cruz’s rejection of classic rock fits pattern today
Texas senator Ted Cruz is having an eventful time.
He announced he’s running for the U.S. presidency, one of the logical URLs for his campaign got redirected to an immigration reform website and he lost the Goldman Sachs health care benefits he had received through his wife. Most recently, he joined the culture wars that previously had been dominated by Cruz’s fellow presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee by announcing he’d quit listening to rock music after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“I actually intellectually find this very curious, but on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded,” he told CBS This Morning. “And country music, collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me.”
Liberals might be expected to bemoan the parochialism of Cruz’s decision to ditch the classic rock of his youth for mere political reasons. And New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait is right, of course, that the classic rock establishment was pretty solidly Team America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.
But Cruz’s position is totally consistent with much of how liberals currently talk about pop culture. If we want the TV shows, movies, comics, books and music we love to have strongly articulated ideas about politics and society, we have to expect that some people are going to reject certain cultural artifacts and even whole genres because of those ideas.
Liberals, perhaps driven by the disappointments of the Obama administration, have focused a great deal of analytical and rhetorical firepower at culture in recent years. Whether we’re advocating for diversity in front of and behind the camera, pushing back against the tired use of violence against women to raise storytelling stakes, or making forceful cases for how to tell sharper, funnier rape jokes, the best of these arguments don’t just pose ideological litmus tests or champion culture
that has few virtues other than its politics. They argue that a more thoughtful approach to ideas will lend variety and fresh interest to increasingly homogeneous industries.
But it would be naive of us to ignore the logical outcome of these arguments. If politics are going to be another kind of esthetic preference — and for some people, a very important one — then we shouldn’t be remotely surprised when some people turn out to like conservative country music more than the latest Rolling Stones album, or to
prefer the fevered commentary on U.S. life of right-wing radio host Alex Jones to the interpretations of Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes. It can’t be that it’s only acceptable to care about the politics of pop culture when your politics are liberal.
Both the esthetics and politics of culture would benefit, of course, from a more vigorous conversation. If conservative moviemaking wasn’t largely confined to products with low esthetic values aimed at niche political or faith-based audiences, mainstream Hollywood
might feel pressure to create more compelling characters of faith, or to create conservative characters who are more than strawmen (who in turn would inspire stronger responses from liberal characters).
Hip hop may lack a genuine conservative alternative, but the genre’s conversations about wealth and blackness, different visions of masculinity and the way police power cuts across class are a lot more interesting than a blander divide between supposedly liberal rock and conservative country. And more culture should take advantage of the fact that showrunners, musicians, novelists and directors aren’t running for office and raise important questions that can’t be neatly answered by political processes.
The best argument against Cruz’s decision to flee rock for country isn’t the parochialism of his choice. It’s that, after Sept. 11, the debate within country music about the war in Iraq provided an awfully bad model for the rest of us. Cruz hasn’t said what country songs proved particularly attractive to him, but judging by the success of maudlin but effective patriotic anthems like (generally beloved) Toby Keith’s jingoistic Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue, he wasn’t alone. But in 2003, when the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines criticized thenpresident George W. Bush for his decision to invade Iraq (on a tour for an album that included their cover of Travelin’ Soldier, a Vietnam-era song about the human costs of war), country stations boycotted the group’s music and former fans burned their CDs.
Country music’s debate about the Iraq war and the community’s tolerance for dissenting ideas didn’t end there. The Dixie Chicks released a 2009 music video on the subject. But instead of moving beyond the partisan responses to Sept. 11 and the invasion of Iraq, country music — and the rest of pop culture — largely ended up confined by them.
If Cruz has erred, he’s made a mistake that some on the extreme opposite of the political spectrum share as well — that of trying to fit culture neatly into established cultural positions, rather than embracing art’s power to transcend them.