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.
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.
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.