This might be an unpopular opinion, but I would say that “Sweet Home Alabama” is very different. It was not written bitterly and it was written by a bunch of Neil Young fans (and Neil himself loved the song). The point of “Sweet Home Alabama” was to show that there were people who grew up in the South who weren’t racist, who acknowledged and decried the racist history of the South, but who also felt resentment at being lumped in with the racists, past and present. Being both proud of being from the South and ashamed of being from the South at the same time even has its own term, coined AFAIK by the band The Drive-By Truckers: “the duality of the Southern Thing.”
There are plenty of artists and musicians that should just be written off, but I don’t think Skynyrd is among them. They were actually relatively progressive for their background and were trying to paint a fairly sophisticated and balanced story; it’s not their fault that their fanbase evolved into a bunch of racist assholes who preempted the song for their own causes, especially since the heart and soul of the band died in a plane crash in 1977. But that’s just my two cents as a huge music fan who grew up listening to Skynyrd in the 90’s.
Maybe Lynyrd Skynyrd shouldn’t have constantly used the Confederate Battle Flag and other Confederate imagery if they didn’t want to be lumped in with the racists.
Just a thought.
It was bad, but mind the cultural context they it was widely considered the “southern” flag (by southern whites) which just happened to also have been used by the Confederacy. There was a century of pro-Confederate propaganda we were raised under, and we’ve only recently reckoned with that.
A lot of those same people who flew it when they were kids decades ago denounce the thing today, thankfully.
They heard “Southern Man” and went so hard “not all southerners” that they even included the line directly telling Neil to fuck off. One of their black back-up singers went on to cover “Southern Man” as a little bit of a personal win for her. Lynyrd Skynyrd could have done a million things that weren’t that in response but instead they wrote that little piece of whiny-baby bullshit. They did it all on their own, without their base needing to misinterpret anything. Fuck ‘em, I got loads of fantastic music to listen to without giving that one any of my time.
People have literally died for their rights and we’re so damned soft we can’t even just consume different yet equally good, or better, media and that’s fuckin’ weak. Sometimes we aren’t given much choice but it’s not like we’re hurting for high-quality music, TV, and literature. It’s so fucking easy.
This is such a horseshit take.
The entire song is a screed to southern ignorance including the gem “Watergate does not bother me”
These assholes are part of the reason we ended up with trump.
Get fucked.
“Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you?”
Bother in this case means he’s not losing sleep at night over it due to any regrets. This was all Northern people being corrupt. An answer to southerners being bad and evil.
It was not meant to be interpreted as they don’t care
