So here’s an example of why Ted Cruz thinks he ought to be a country music fan, per WaPo’s Emily Yahr:
Alana Lynn, a morning co-host on country music station 104.3 FM in Boise, Idaho, was excited to play Little Big Town’s latest single for her listeners. “Girl Crush,” a powerful ballad about a woman envious of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, seemed destined to be a hit.
“I want to taste her lips, yeah cause they taste like you / I want to drown myself in a bottle of her perfume,” vocalist Karen Fairchild sings. “I want her long blond hair, I want her magic touch / Yeah cause maybe then, you’d want me just as much. . . I got a girl crush.”
Sure, it’s a provocative way to describe jealousy. But when Lynn played the song on the air, she didn’t anticipate that she would get furious phone calls and e-mails accusing “Girl Crush” of “promoting the gay agenda” and threats to boycott the station. The last time she heard this much outrage from listeners? “The Dixie Chicks’ President Bush comments,” Lynn recalls, referring to when the trio’s career imploded in 2003 after making critical statements about the president.
This appears to be happening all over the country, and the fact that the accusation the song is “lesbian” is erroneous doesn’t seem to matter.
You cannot attribute this to country music fans as a whole, since the song’s sales are extremely strong on non-radio platforms. No, it’s the station managers bending to a lobbying campaign that I betcha is organized.
It’s pretty rich there’s a sizable group of people who think a musical genre that has long focused on cheatin’ and drinkin’ and brushes with the law ought to have some conservative cultural censorship filter. But hating on gays seems to overpower the common sense that’s central to country music.
