Shut Up and Sing

The Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines’ remark about President Bush at a London concert in 2003, its aftermath and the band members’ steadfast defense of their own personal and professional integrity, provide the basic framework for the documentary Shut Up & Sing. Produced (and co-directed) by veteran documentarian Barbara Kopple, this 93-minute feature adroitly mixes genres—it’s a music performance film, socio-political chronicle and cinema vérité portrait. The film also works, in part, as a series of pop-cultural snapshots from our present era of social and political fracture. Kopple’s editing of backstage stuff from ’03 and more recent times brings out a feisty sort of undogmatic feminism in the trio’s attitudes and conduct as musicians, women, wives, mothers and sisters, metaphorical and actual