Mediating The Chicks on Gaslighter
Album: Gaslighter (2020)
Performer: The Chicks
Cover photo: Breidge Martin
Design: Britt Cobb
Label: Columbia Records
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), author of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan, who helped establish the field of media studies, famously claimed “the medium is the message.” This counterintuitive statement highlights the ways media are not passive transmitters of messages, but rather channels that significantly impact the meaning we make of the content they convey.
A medium is anything that stands between the message and the receiver. Its plural form, “media,” is often used to describe the total of television, newspapers, radio and so on. These different mediums or media constitute different ways “messages” are transmitted. In the verb form, we can say that messages are mediated by the modes in which we receive them.
This week’s featured album is the new Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks) album Gaslighter. The Chicks, like many other country recording artists, tended to feature images of themselves on their records (their 1999 album Fly being the notable exception). Having their images on the cover of their albums helped shape their public image as a trio of young female performers in a country music field dominated by female solo acts and other male soloists and groups.
In McLuhan’s terms, the album cover is a (visual) medium. When we see Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire, and Emily Strayer on The Chicks album covers, the message—at least on the surface—is “this is The Chicks.” If we take McLuhan seriously, however, we should consider how the medium of the album cover actually affects the meaning we take from the images. We do not, after all, actually see Maines, Maguire, and Strayer when we look at these album covers, but rather a static two-dimensional representation of them.
René Magritte, “The Treachery of Images” (1929)
Surrealist painter René Magritte (whom we discussed in our post on The Phosphorescent Blues) plays with this reality in his painting “The Treachery of Images” (1929). The image we see is of a pipe, and Magritte’s subtitle reads “This is not a pipe” ("Ceci n'est pas une pipe”). On first thought this seems just wrong—of course it is a pipe; it’s plain to see! But on second thought we begin to realize what Magritte means: what we have is not a pipe, but a painting made of oil paints and canvas. But we could not fill this thing up with tobacco and take a puff. The pipe is mediated for us by Magritte and his painting.
So when we see images of The Chicks on their album covers we see a powerful mediated representation of the group. The outfits, facial expressions, and postures captured in these images play a large role in shaping who we imagine The Chicks to be. These mediations construct a public-facing persona for the group, one that could very well be quite different from Maines, Maguire, and Stayer’s “unmediated” personalities.
Like previous Chicks albums, Gaslighter features three ladies on the cover. But what’s remarkable about the ladies on the cover is that they are not, in fact, Maines, Maguire, and Stayer. Instead the image on the cover features winners in the Corrigan-White School of Irish Dance competition. How does this interesting choice to feature different “chicks” on this cover affect how we think about The Chicks and their music on Gaslighter?
This question is open for many interpretations, but here are a few of my thoughts:
By including an image of three ladies who are also obviously not the members of The Chicks, this cover draws our attention to the artifice of The Chick’s public identity. The version of The Chicks we see on their album covers is created for the viewer and listener through mediated representations. We might even ask if the image of them we see on, for example, Taking the Long Way (2006) is actually “them” or a version of themselves created by and for this medium. How would we know?
By extension, the image of the three non-Chicks on the cover also mediates the way we hear the music on the album! We might begin to wonder how or whether the very personal songs on the album relate to The Chicks in real life.
If identities of performers are mediated in particular ways through album art, we can also ask “mediated for whom”? The image of almost uncomfortably neat, pretty, smiling girls on the cover, complete with sashes and number tags, recalls beauty pageants and highlights how the male gaze shapes how images of female artists are mediated.
To advertise the release date, The Chicks released a photo with their faces superimposed over the dancers’ heads on the cover.
It is also interesting that this cover coincides with The Chicks dropping the Dixie from their name. We’re not able to discuss this in detail here, but check out the “Dixie’s Disappearance” episode of Dolly Parton’s America for a podcast wrestling with similar issues.
What do you think The Chicks are trying to say with their most recent album cover? How have images of performers on album covers affected the way you think of the artists and their music?
