Bush-whacked?
Get real. More like Reuters has been writing dictation from the right-wing noise machine again.
The Dixie Chicks manage to sell 526,000 copies of their new CD Taking the Long Way and end up at #1 on both the Country and Pop charts. It's the second best debuting country album of the year and their second best debut ever.
And they did it with almost zero radio exposure.
And Reuters thinks this is "disappointing."
And this "disappointment" is apparently a result of the backlash of their criticism of our incredibly popular president.
The Dixie Chicks did get a lot of television coverage--60 Minutes, Time Magazine, David Letterman and Good Morning America. However, with the exception of the Time cover story, that's not unusual coverage for a mega-selling recording artist with a new CD coming out.
They got almost no radio airplay. Unlike Home, there wasn't a hit single getting pushed on country music radio constantly when it was released
They were going with a new sound that might have more in common with the country-rock sounds of California in the 70's than the Nashville pop-country or bluegrass of their previous albums. That was likely to make older fans hesitant--and unlikely to attract new fans who hadn't heard them without much adult contemporary/adult alternative airplay.
They were expected to sell between 300K and 400K albums.
By any objective standard, going gold in the first week of release is an incredible achievement and a statement that they are still music superstars.
But according to Reuters, the fact that they didn't sell the 780,000 copies of Home means that America is still upset about "the incident" and that apparently they should have just shut up and sang.
Yeah, this is just yet another example of how the media spins everything in favor of right-wing extremists, like the ones that banned the Chicks. And since Reuters is a wire service, this spin is going to show up in thousands of newspapers tomorrow morning and a meme is going to start about how America is standing up to the Dixie Chicks and their "anti-American" statements.
Unbelievable. Just go out and buy the Chicks new album just to spite the bastards.