From the AP
The state attorney general [of TN] wants the country singer who made the song “Redneck Woman” a hit to stop “glamorizing” the use of smokeless tobacco at her concerts.
State officials said Gretchen Wilson can be seen on concert jumbo screens pulling a can of Skoal from her pocket while performing her new song, “Skoal Ring.”
That may violate the 1998 settlement between states and tobacco companies forbidding tobacco ads targeting young people, Attorney General Paul Summers said.
“Many young people attend your concerts and purchase your music and T-shirts,” Summers wrote in a letter he sent to Wilson Thursday. “Because your actions strongly influence the youth in your audience … I ask you to take steps to warn young people of negative health effects of smokeless tobacco use.”
Calls to Wilson’s representatives at her music label Sony Music Nashville were not immediately returned Thursday.
Wilson won wide acclaim and a Grammy with her debut single “Redneck Woman.”
The title of her song “Skoal Ring” refers to the wear mark left by carrying a can of smoking tobacco in a pocket of blue jeans. In the final verse of the song, Wilson sings that she gets turned on by the taste of smokeless tobacco on her man’s lips.
The landmark $206 billion tobacco settlement “provided that advertisements such as this would be and should be prohibited,” Summers said.
Well, I’m no lawyer, but as a published fiction writer (and a confirmed narcissist), I’m more than willing to extrapolate this out to see how the implications of such government intervention might impact me. And the analogy that comes to mind is one wherein I’m giving a public reading (at, say, Borders) of one of my short stories in which a likeable character is smoking, or eating junk food heavy in transfats, or committing some other health atrocity—and the state attorney general of Colorado insists that in subsequent public readings I bowdlerize those bits of the story for public consumption or else risk running afoul some nannystate statute pretending to protect us from ourselves. How very Samuel Johnson!
In the case of Gretchen Wilson, the assumption here is that her use of Skoal in her art (and that’s what we are dealing with when we speak of someone’s original music) is intended as an advertisement for a product or behavior—when instead, what it is is an instance of use of a legal product in the context of a song reflecting the artist’s life.
This is not the kind of slippery slope we wish to head down, believe me. And by “we,” I mean those of us who support free speech and the arts.
This impulse to regulate art under the false premise that simple exposure to certain ideas will somehow necessitate their adoption (this is not, after all, the same as having your Imam preaching to you about the righteousness of blowing up schoolbuses, then putting you in contact with those who can supply you with the materials) needs to be fought at every turn. And the best way to do so is to stop bad law based on such tendentious premises from being enacted in the first place.
(h/t Rob, who has more; see also, Club for Growth and DragonLady’s World)
****
update: Oh well. So much for fighting the good fight, eh Gretchen?
Attorney General Paul Summers said the singer’s representative apologized Friday and said Wilson would not use the Skoal can in concert again. It was not used at a Cincinnati concert Thursday night, his office said.
“I appreciate Ms. Wilson’s attitude,†Summers said in a news release. “I thank her very much. This quick and positive response speaks well of her as a professional artist, as a good citizen, as a parent and as a role model for youth.â€Â
Well, sure—if caving in to the ridiculous demands of overzealous petty tyrants out to strip us of our freedoms one tiny pinch at a time makes one a role model for youth…
(Thanks again to Rob)
Yeah, but it’s decidedly CONSERVATIVE art. Got a gay artist who wants to sink a crusifix in a jar of urine or publish pictures of a bull whip stuffed up his backside? “Step right over here for your NEA check sir.” Got a conservative redneck from the south who mentions tobacco in a song? “Think of the CHILDREN!”
So, how come nobody jumped up and down when every college kid and their roommate was fantasizing being like Hunter Thompson when Fear and Loathing came out?
Skoal rings on your pocket or-
“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, laughers, screamers… Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.”
I don’t care much for skoal….
Poor bastard is gonna have a heart attack when rap finally gets to Tennessee.
tw: around, yep i been there
Wow Jeff,
I wish you hadn’t posted that story because after scraping up the necessary loose change from my sofa, I am heading down to the local five and dime to have that ever so cool refreshing taste of Skoal grace my lips..
Damn you
I Skoal paying her? Or paying her off with big tubs of free Skoal?
If not, I don’t see how agreements signed by tobacco companies have any bearing on the situation.
And even if Skoal is rewarding her with free tobacco, the question is, which came first? The dippin’ or the egg…?
(Thank you very much. Thank you).
SKOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLL!
I oppose the arts, so I’m okay with banning this so long as we get to ban the whole Christ in jar of urine thing.
THAT is the slippery slope I wanna go down.
Because… of the… you know, hippocracy… wait… hypocrisy… yeah.
So who do we send to get Leviathan? Captain Ahab? Van Helsing?
You want to solve this sort of problem? Cut the staff of every state attorney general’s office by two thirds. Force the political appointee in charge to actually do something other than press conferences. After that he, or she, won’t have time for uselss crap like this, maybe. TW-your, as in your tax dollars at work. Okay, it was really youre, but that’s close enough for government work.
Robert Earl Keen is in real trouble.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I was never the same when, at a tender age, The Divinyl’s biggest hit came out…
(Please pardon my poor apostrophe placement. I’ll blame it on a hand cramp.)
Hell, Insomni, the song didn’t do much to me but the video sure did. But then I saw her outside the video…cured me in a heartbeat.
Speaking of violating the 1998 settlement, Tennessee legislators sunk the state’s tobacco lawsuit money into the general fund to cover budget shortfalls a couple of years ago, when they were trying to ram an income tax through. My guess is the AG is trying to take our minds off the TennCare mess currently going on. I don’t think the AG will get very far with this, anyway. I don’t think anyone in Tennesse really wants to take on Music Row in Nashville. With the revenue they bring in, I have to think the record companies are slightly more powerful than the attorney general. It is also interesting to me that the Tennessee AG sent a letter after his “deputy tobacco chief” travelled to St. Louis & witnessed Wilson “use Skoal as a prop,” according to The City Paper of Nashville.
<a href=”http://www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section_id=9&screen=news&news_id=43931″ target=”_blank”>
I live in the eastern part of the state and admit that I’m not that familiar with West Tennesse, but I’m pretty sure that St. Louis is in Missouri.
Prince Albert was in the can, so he could not be reached for comment.
You’ve been a great crowd! Be sure to tip your waitresses.
ArizonaTeach: Yeah, I guess it was the video. I don’t remember ever seeing her in any setting that wasn’t post-production/airbrushed, so my illusions are intact.
To be fair, the attorney general should also ban Scandinavian toasts.
Could Skoal cause COCK cancer?
I mean, whomever she happens to go down on is going to have to wipe Skoal juice off his COCK.
Was that necessary?
I guess “One toke over the line” is out, eh?
Whose?
Not that there’s—oh, skip it.
I’m guessing they’re givin’ her a pass on her song, “All Jacked Up”. A hard-drinking/drankin’/drunk song about Jack Daniels bourbon.
Skoal, brother.
So all this time I’ve been jamming a cucumber in my pants when all I needed was an empty can of long cut in my back pocket?
That is the secret to impressing the sweet sweet county ladies?
Well, now that she’s caved to this, I hope that Ms. Wilson will also wave a condom on stage every time she twitches her twat and gives a “let me ride you like my raging stallion” look, because that twat stuff can be kinda dangerous, too.
Redneck woman, my ass. I know Redneck women. Redneck women are friends of mine. You, Ms. Wilson, are no Redneck woman.
What a fucking phony.
The time to protest against the slippery slope was when they banned tabacco ads from TeeVee. We are waaaay down that slide already.
Joe Camel-RIP. Ronald Macdonald is next.
I was real disappointed. I posted a nice long screed on the AG (Asshat, Generally) & even said I’d pardon the slight breech in etiquette if miss Wilson neglected to remove the Marlboro red from between her lips as she told Summers to kiss her country fried ass (course this was on my back up site as my main site’s server is having “issues”). Course I knew that there was a chance she’d cave, I was just hoping.
I know redneck women. Have them in my family. Dated them. Grew up around them. I know a few who can still be ladylike & elegant while they kick your ass badly in high heels. If they were in miss Wilson’s place the closest they’d have come to a concession is to say that if Summers won the cage match with em they’d recant (knowing full well they’d have a pal slip a folded chair in for them just in case). So this is disappointing.
But note Summers’ tone; it’s one I’ve seen before in Clinton as well as both Bush’s. Authoritarian in nature, it expresses that it’s only just & proper that someone should follow their whims. Doing otherwise would be morally wrong. Oh I agree about the intrusion into an artists’ creative freedom & I ranted about that as well, but the thing that I see that presents the biggest danger is not in the specific offense of the .gov agent, but of the attitude that it’s morally just to obey & consequently morally reprehensible to disobey.
Your last setnence summed it up exactly – obeying the whims of petty tyrants does make her a role model for the youth. Not a role model I’m confy with, but one that the petty tyrants approve of.
…
…
Er… ahem, do you happen to have the phone numbers of any of these… er… delightful sounding ladies perchance?
chnoes,
Why, yes I do. But seeing how they are when they’re not happy I’m not gonna start passing out their phone numbers. The ass whooping I avoid may be my own.
*Sigh*
Mental Note: When solvent, attempt to get job where aforementioned redneck ladies live.
Turing word ever: as in “Has anyone ever lied about their Turing word?”