Freedom Walk & The Country Music Smackdown

The Style Section runs a story on a Pentagon-led 9/11 event called Freedom Walk being cosponored by third parties, including the Washington Post. The story is Antiwar Activists Decry Media's Role in Promoting Pentagon Event by David Montgomery. I will leave to another day a discussion about quoting the Stalinist front group International ANSWER  with a straight face, as Montgomery does. And some of the critics of the event have a point. But what interests me is the intense reaction of Metro columnist Marc Fisher in yesterday's live chat to the menace of country music:

Marc Fisher: The tone of the promotions for the event is, to use the technical term, yucky. If it's really supposed to honor the 9/11 dead, I don't see why you'd have a country concert on the Mall, and given the population and preferences of people who live in this region, the choice of country music is polarizing and bizarre.

Oddly enough there are no ordinances against performing country music on the mall...

Bizzare?: You can't hit "seek" on your car radio twice down here without hitting a country music station.

There are no country radio stations in NYC. It might be a "bizarre" choice there. But it's obviously popular in this area, so I can't see how it'd be "bizarre". (Personally I could take it or leave it, but obviously lots of people love it.)

Now if you just meant it was bizarre to use it at a 9/11 commemoration thing, I might agree, although I'd say most any kind of concert would be a bit bizarre, not country specifically.

Marc Fisher: Not sure where you live, but in the Washington DC market, there is but one country station and it draws about five percent of the total audience. Yes, as you move out toward more rural parts of Virginia, country plays a much larger role, but not in the Washington-Baltimore region.

Gerrymandering against country music! Out here in Manassas, a staggering 30 miles from downtown DC, I have no trouble picking up four or five stations broadcasting the divisive and polarizing country music--do we count? 

(By the way, I've only lived here for like 13 years, so what do I know? Now I'm not saying things haven't changed. Our new motto is Manassas--We Ain't Just Country Anymore! ¡Hola!)

Polarzing divisive country music drives the discussion further:

Why Country is the Wrong Choice for D.C.: It's not just because country is stereotyped as a white genre. It's also because in recent decades, the genre has developed attitudes that are anti-city and culturally reactionary. Think Hank Williams Jr. and Toby Keith. The genre advocates going back to the way things were in the '50s. That's a hard message to sell to D.C. residents, especially veterans of the civil rights movement.

Marc Fisher: There are urban country fans, enough to support one country station in most major cities. But it's definitely a tiny minority, not only in the cities themselves but also in the suburbs.

Sure, they're tiny, but they have power beyond their numbers. You do not want these reactionary Ozzie and Harriets running around the Mall, suckering you in with ice cream cones while they roll back civil rights. Beware my polarization rays!