Monday, February 14, 2011

Lady Antebellum

OK. First, points for a name that requires some exposure to Latin to fully parse.
Second, points for winning 5 grammies! Well done, and congratulations!

Third, wow, that's a hell of a name with its racist connotations evoking slavery and an implicit yearning for the period when it was a common practice. I really have to ask how deliberate that was. Or was it just privilegedly thoughtless? Seriously? If the answer to "where'd the name come from" was "we just thought it'd be cool", I guarantee you the band members are all white. (Yep, just checked the band's website.)

*Sigh*

So, you should really just go read What Tami Said on this subject, because Tami is far more eloquent than I.

I wish to make one critical point - whenever you yearn for some feudal, antebellum, medieval, whatever-nostalgic-past - you always yearn to be at the top of it. Those from oppressed minorities, however, shall we say, have a much harder time with the necessary suspension of disbelief to imagine oneself in that position. Because one knows that the place of a member of such a group, in such a nostalgic, dreamy, racist, sexist, classist past, wouldn't be at the top, but the very bottom. Or dead in a field/ditch/shallow grave/Atlantic Ocean/etc.

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