I'm Not Ready To Make Nice

Chelsea Aumen
English Composition 2
Professor Kate Brady
February 10, 2009
Not Ready To Make Nice
In this essay I am analyzing the Dixie Chicks’ song “Not Ready to Make Nice”. This song is in response to the 2003 remark that the lead singer made about President Bush by saying that she was ashamed that President Bush was from her home state. She didn’t agree with going into war and she wanted to make a statement about what she thought about how the President was handling the war. This statement rocked the world and the Dixie Chicks ended up getting kicked off of the radio, banned in hometowns, and received hate letter from around the world. In this song, The Dixie Chicks convince the world that freedom means nothing unless we have the freedom to speak our minds.
The repetition of the lines “I’m not ready to make nice, I’m not ready to back down” states that she is not going to essentially “make nice” and apologize for what she said because that would go against everything she believes in. She will not back down because of the hate letters and the shunning. She believes that she was exercising her freedom of speech and right as an American to disagree with the government and the President’s stance on the war. “I’ve paid a price and I’ll keep praying” states that she knows she is going to be hated for a long time by some people, maybe even the rest of her life, for standing up for what she believes in but she made her bed and she will “sleep like a baby with no regrets”. She is saying here that she knows that what she said hurt a lot of Americans but she doesn’t regret what she did. Natalie Maines refers to the death threats she received when she says “It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger and how in the world can the words that I said send somebody so over the edge that they’d write me a letter saying that I better shut up and sing or my life will be over”. She is amazed that a mother would teach her daughter to hate her because of what she said when, in fact, the daughter probably doesn’t even know what happened and just hates her because of the mother’s views. She is wondering why the words she said gave someone the drive to write her hate letters and tell her that she is going to be shot down because of exercising her freedom of speech. Maines also says that she is “still mad as hell and I don’t have time to go round and round and round”. This is saying that she is still mad that we are in war and she doesn’t agree with the President at all so everyone should stop with the nonsense because she doesn’t have time to keep explaining herself over and over again. Maines also uses repetition at the being and end of the song when she states “Forgive, sounds good. Forget, I’m not sure I could.” She is saying that she will forgive the people that wrote her hate letters but she will never forget the lessons she learned.
The imagery used in the video of “Not Ready to Make Nice” is extremely powerful. At the beginning of the video, they are dressed in white, as a metaphor to their innocence. Then, they smear black paint over all of their dresses as to signify that they were shunned and deemed black sheep because of what they said. The people in the background dressed in black reference to the people that wrote hate letters and the people that are shunning her with the “black paint”. There is also a scene in the video where the two women are trying to hold Natalie Maines down. This signifies that she is trying to break out and she is sick of trying to be “perfect”. She wants to speak her mind but she can’t because people hold her back from speaking her mind. The black smoke in the video also represents the “bad” coming over them and ruining their innocence. In the middle of the video all three girls walk up and hold each other’s hands and “brush off” the pain and commentary they received for speaking their minds. I also think that it is a powerful image when they are in striped dresses, sort of like jail suits, and Natalie is writing on the chalkboard the phrase “to talk without thinking is to shoot without aiming”. She is writing on this on the board over and over again because, like in a school setting, if a child does something wrong they have to write what they did wrong on the board over and over again as a punishment.
I really enjoy this video because it teaches the American people that you should never be afraid to speak your mind. You should never be afraid of what people will say. You have freedom of speech and what kind of freedom is it if you get punished for speaking your mind. In fact, how can the U.S. be the land of the free if you are shunned for speaking your mind and showing a trace of originality? The Dixie Chicks are a powerful group that will be remembered for their bravery, rebelliousness and courage for decades to come.