During Kacey Musgraves’ Sunday performance at Lollapalooza, she stopped the music to address the Dayton and El Paso shootings from the weekend. “Obviously something has to be fucking done,” she said. “Maybe somebody will hear us if we all yell together and say, ’Somebody fucking do something!” The country star led the crowd into a brief chant and then played “Rainbow.”
Unsurprisingly, Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt is not having it. But what she took issue with was not the “please stop killing people” sentiment, but the swear word Musgraves used. “What is happening to country music?” Earhardt exclaimed. “She’s up there preaching about gun control, but how about her language!” The segment then went into pretty predictable territory as her guest Todd Starnes, an ostensible pop culture expert and a radio host, talked about how “country music is going liberal.”
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Earhardt’s pearl-clutching and Starnes obvious lack of knowledge of both Musgraves’ long standing liberal views throughout her career and country music itself are infuriating. It’s clear Starnes has never heard “Follow Your Arrow.” In his FoxNews.com column, Starnes warns that Musgraves had been “Dixie-Chick-a-fied,” referring to when the Dixie Chicks protested the Iraq War in the early aughts and were largely ostracized by the country music establishment. A lot has changed since 2003, but the Dixie Chicks haven’t wavered from their anti-war stance. More recently, they’ve spoken out against Trump, too. Starnes’ comments got worse later in the segment as he condescendingly offered Musgraves advice: “Don’t talk politics, sing. That’s what we pay you good money to do.”
But Musgraves is fine, and she’s not going to let some television dorks stop her from speaking her mind at her own concerts. Her last LP Golden Hour, which won Album of the Year at the 2019 Grammys, has been on the Billboard 200 for 50 weeks. On Monday, she responded to online pushback about her comments gracefully via Twitter.
