RIP Toby Keith

[hutmaster]

On a positive note. This is a great quick tribute from an unlikely source.

[Mission146]

I see some people here are dismissing the "foreign soil" element of what the Dixie Chicks did.

It was relevant because they didn't make these statements when performing in front of American audiences. They kept their mouths shut during their US concerts because they felt they were performing for a bunch of conservative hicks, and the anti-war message wouldn't be well received. When performing in the UK, where the audience was more likely to be friendly to an anti-war message, Maines felt it was important to let them all know that she had nothing in common with her hick fanbase in the US.

The message was basically, "I want to let y'all know that even though we're hugely popular among US pro-war hicks, we don't agree with them, and in fact are ashamed of being from Texas because we hate GW Bush that much."

It was really condescending to her US fans. She felt the need for her "more enlightened" foreign fans to know that she looks down upon her US fans and has nothing in common with them.

The US fanbase felt betrayed, and rightfully so. It was more of a swipe at them than GW Bush and the war itself. This is why her bashing of Toby Keith's "Red White and Blue" song, clearly from a left-wing viewpoint, didn't make much of a dent in the group's popularity, but her UK antics were a career killer.

Had she said this when performing in a US city, it wouldn't have been good, but I'm guessing the backlash would have been only a fraction of what she received.

Have you never heard of playing for your audience before?

I’ll be the first to admit that changing it to being an American audience is an untestable hypothesis, but I wasn’t the first one to bring it up anyway. Maybe Ohio would have been a big nothing; if Natalie Maines says she’s ashamed to be from Texas, whilst performing in San Antonio, I’m not sure she walks out of there under her own power. Either way, it’s an untestable hypothesis.

I think, “Having nothing in common with their hick fanbase,” is a bit of an overstatement. Maines was opposed to legalizing marijuana (at least, prior to these statements), for one thing. I don’t know HOW liberal Maines was, at the time, I just consider it fairly obvious that she was at least somewhat liberal before these statements; I don’t think they did much to hide that.

Anyway, her hick fanbase was convinced Iraq had WMD’s because of George W. Bush’s mere say so; that’s despite the fact that there wasn’t much in the way of evidence that pointed to that. Whether you like it or not, Maines ended up being right when it came to her stance on the war, a stance that was shared by Toby Keith anyway.

If the fans felt personally betrayed by Maines, then she was also right about what you imply she thinks their general intelligence level is; if there’s no war, then she doesn’t make the comment, so clearly, the comments are about the war. There’s no world where it should be seen as taking shots at their fans. Besides that, you’re now wanting me to believe that these people were so emotionally wounded that they just had to run over albums with tractors, set them on fire, etc…because they were such huge Dixie Chicks fans that they couldn’t even have figured out Maines was a liberal!? Come on!

First of all, even if you actually gaf what someone thinks (and there is no reason anyone should have really cared what Maines had to say anyway), if they say something that gets to you—you should never let them know it got to you. Being triggered by a 20 or 30-something year old’s anti-war opinion such that they construe it as a personal attack? Laughable.

Secondly, I don’t accept that the people on the backlash trains were all necessarily rabid Dixie Chicks fans; more likely, people just like faux outrage trains and are always willing to buy a ticket. I would say the last few years have proven that on both sides of the aisle. I legitimately believe that some people who didn’t even own a Dixie Chicks album bought one just to have one to burn.

Where I do agree with you is that her comments were bad business; first and foremost, don’t piss off your customers. Indeed, some of the more vocal (tractor/burning albums) fans were indeed hicks who, evidently, weren’t emotionally prepared for a musician of minor consequence to disagree with them about the war. You seem to suggest that Maines believed her fans were hicks so situated, so if that’s the case, her statements were bad business. She also probably didn’t figure they’d get any attention this side of the pond (accepting as true that she could have said them here, which isn’t testable), but that’s an error on her part.

We also agree that her statements were designed to ingratiate herself to a more anti-war crowd; that part makes sense, but making the statements under the impression that nobody over here would pick up on it is a miscalculation.

Anyway, she’s still loaded. I can all but guarantee that we’ve spent more time thinking about and discussing her Iraq War statements the last couple days than she has, so who are the losers here?

[mickeycrimm]

They stood on foreign soil and disrespected their country. That's a no no.

Like when Trump sucked Putin’s dick live on worldwide TV?

Joe Biden is a Chi-Comm asset, Xi's bitch.

[mickeycrimm]

How many Okies does it take to hold a country music awards show? Did Toby know? How about Vince Gill? Maybe Carrie Underwood knows. Oh, Reba would definitely know. And so would Garth Brooks, maybe. Roy Clark would know, oh that's right, he's buried in Tulsa. Hoyt Axton and Roger Miller are also dead. I figure we should ask Blake Shelton. Woody Guthrie was an Okie too.

There's over 140 Indian casinos in Oklahoma. I spent a few years off and on cruising them. I drove all over that state. I visited some landmarks.

I went to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Betcha didn't know the Ozarks extend into Oklahoma.

I ate at a little country place owned by Toby Keith called Hollywood Corners between Moore and Norman. He had a ranch in Paul's Valley about 70 miles down I-35 from OKC.

There's a casino in Ada, Oklahoma where Blake Shelton is from.

There's a casino close to Yukon, just west of OKC, where Garth is from. His ex-wife moved with the kids to the Tulsa suburbs so Garth and Tricia moved up there too. Tulsa has several casinos.

I ate at Ole Red's in Tishomingo, owned by Blake Shelton.

Reba has a restaurant in Atoka but I haven't been there yet. There's a casino at Stringtown where she is from. Her parents have a ranch in a secret location.

There's a casino in Checotah where Carrie Underwood is from.

My favorite landmark in Oklahoma was the boyhood home of Mickey Mantle in Commerce. It's a shrine.

Filmed at Ole Red's in Tishomingo:

[Sloppy Joe]

LOL Team Gout pining for condolences from the biggest celebrity in the world for someone they didn't know.

Agree with positive sentiment about Toby Keith but I would have been 0.0% surprised to have seen him on a billboard advertisement for some Washington casino where mickeycrimm is plugging quarters into old machines.

Old men being primed on Twitter to expect words from a young woman toward a washed up country star says everything about America today.

1. No one’s fucking pining. It was a notable omission.

2. They sure as shit knew each other.

3. We ended up getting another great story Hollywood Harry.

I know this is your thing but to so blatantly mischaracterize what is being discussed is super fucking annoying.

Have you been tracking all celebrities that offered condolences to Toby Keith, or simply regurgitating the right-wing fixation of all things Taylor Swift?

Weird stuff.

[JeffDime]

Have you been tracking all celebrities that offered condolences to Toby Keith, or simply regurgitating the right-wing fixation of all things Taylor Swift?

Weird stuff.

Yea real fucking weird. I haven’t had any opinion on Taylor Swift. I don’t care if she’s at football games. All I knew about her was the few songs they played in a loop at the Taj Mahal a decade ago during my manic 24 hour Video Poker sessions. If you have to know….I was going through my Twitter feed and saw the John Rich tweet.

Now I would have to have my head up my fucking ass to not know she’s basically the most famous singer in the world. I also would have to be living under a rock to not know she started as a country artist and is now pop. What you expect out of someone of her stature when a legend in her original genre of music & someone who helped her get her start is at the minimum a canned message posted to her social media. Instead I just see her promoting her next album.

So I personally don’t give two shits what this woman decides to do. But I’m allowed to react to what I see. It’s seems petty af to me. So keep trolling I’m done with you. By your standard we should probably never react to anything we see because it isn’t our business.

[Sloppy Joe]

Have you been tracking all celebrities that offered condolences to Toby Keith, or simply regurgitating the right-wing fixation of all things Taylor Swift?

Weird stuff.

Yea real fucking weird. I haven’t had any opinion on Taylor Swift. I don’t care if she’s at football games. All I knew about her was the few songs they played in a loop at the Taj Mahal a decade ago during my manic 24 hour Video Poker sessions. If you have to know….I was going through my Twitter feed and saw the John Rich tweet.

Now I would have to have my head up my fucking ass to not know she’s basically the most famous singer in the world. I also would have to be living under a rock to not know she started as a country artist and is now pop. What you expect out of someone of her stature when a legend in her original genre of music & someone who helped her get her start is at the minimum a canned message posted to her social media. Instead I just see her promoting her next album.

So I personally don’t give two shits what this woman decides to do. But I’m allowed to react to what I see. It’s seems petty af to me. So keep trolling I’m done with you. By your standard we should probably never react to anything we see because it isn’t our business.

Even though you clearly don't care at all here's an olive branch where she congratulates him while alive, simmer down faggot.

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https://twitter.com/twt/status/1755019872650633265

[JeffDime]

What pisses me off more than anything Sloppy Joe is not that you do what you do. I get that. It’s your deal. But your absolute total lack of any kind of tact or discretion when making your posts. Yesterday you made a shit post right after Hollywood Harry did a fantastic write-up that both posters & lurkers would enjoy.

But when they come to the thread what are the going to see? Your shit fucking post. If you had any sense at all you would let his write-up at least beathe a bit for people to see. But you just shit all over it with your nonsense. That’s what really sucks about you. You can’t help yourself…or more likely, you just don’t care.

BTW I don’t know what point you’re making in her saying something nice 8 years ago. Not that it even fucking matters.

[JeffDime]

Reposting

The Taylor Swift silence is quite interesting to me. The fact that she won't even put out a short blurb of condolence speaks volumes.

There are two reasons I can think of for this.

In her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, Taylor indicated that she had been paranoid throughout the 2010s that speaking about politics would ruin her the same way it did the Dixie Chicks. At one point she said, "Throughout my whole career, label executives and publishers would say, ‘don’t be like the Dixie Chicks.'"

Taylor was also a big fan of the Dixie Chicks growing up, and in fact learned to play some of their songs on her guitar while in middle school. It is true that she expressed admiration for Toby Keith in that 2005 news report seen above, and this was well after his feud with the Dixie Chicks. It's possible that 15-year-old Taylor hadn't yet stopped to think about their fall from grace and the politics surrounding it.

However, I think the bigger reason involves Swift's feud with Toby Keith's onetime business partner, Scott Borchetta. As already mentioned in this thread, it was Borchetta who discovered Swift in 2004 and asked to sign her to a record deal. She did eventually sign with him, but the connection to Keith was that he was the co-owner of that label, Big Machine Records.

The real issue came in 2019 when Borchetta sold Big Machine records to a man named Scooter Braun. This horrified Taylor because Scooter was somewhat behind escalating the feud between her and Kim Kardashian, and he had no issue with client Kanye West doing a music video which simulated Taylor being stripped naked. After the news of the sale went public, Taylor went to Tumblr (I bet you didn't think that site still existed) and blogged about her outrage. Taylor was also upset that Borchetta did not approach her about buying her own music rights back, as she claimed she would have purchased them, clearly having the money to do so at the time.

While Toby Keith had absolutely nothing to do with Borchetta selling Big Machine to Scooter Braun, I have heard around Hollywood that she rested some of the blame at his feet. Toby Keith fell out with Scott Borchetta in 2006, before Taylor was famous, and sold most of his interest in Big Machine. He retained only a minority share and no longer had decision making power. Despite this, Taylor blamed him a little because she felt Borchetta's deal with her was exploitative in the first place. At the time the deal was signed, she had stars in her eyes regarding Toby Keith being a major partner in the label, but as an adult she came to look upon it as them taking advantage of her. Essentially she feared for years that Borchetta would do something awful with the rights she gave to him as a 15-year-old, and 14 years after that, her nightmares came true. For Toby Keith, it was basically guilt by association.

For this reason, it would have surprised me if Taylor put this aside and said something nice in memorial of him. It seems she is taking the position of, "If you do not have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

I hope this clears things up for those wondering about the Swift-Keith connection.

[RichardBrodiesCombover.]

Can you stop crying already, jeff

[Sloppy Joe]

What pisses me off more than anything Sloppy Joe is not that you do what you do. I get that. It’s your deal. But your absolute total lack of any kind of tact or discretion when making your posts. Yesterday you made a shit post right after Hollywood Harry did a fantastic write-up that both posters & lurkers would enjoy.

But when they come to the thread what are the going to see? Your shit fucking post. If you had any sense at all you would let his write-up at least beathe a bit for people to see. But you just shit all over it with your nonsense. That’s what really sucks about you. You can’t help yourself…or more likely, you just don’t care.

BTW I don’t know what point you’re making in her saying something nice 8 years ago. Not that it even fucking matters.

Wow you are one angry faggot deep in your feelings over this.

I simply pointed out how absurd it is for grown men to take note of whether or not Taylor Swift offers condolences based off of conservative media stoking outrage, which you confirmed is what prompted you to dance like a puppet cuckold.


Wipe away your tears and appreciate precious Taylor congratulating now dead Toby on his accomplishments if it helps you cope. Then kindly chug bleach.

[JeffDime]

Harry Hollywood contributed more to this site in his first paragraph than you have in 12 years Joe.

[Sloppy Joe]

Harry Hollywood contributed more to this site in his first paragraph than you have in 12 years Joe.

Much like Toby Keith he ain't as good as he once was.

I'm sure he appreciates your tongue on his nut sack.

Stay mad!