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Dolly Parton at a concert in 2014: "I always say that a lot of people don't come to see me for who I am"
Photo: Shirlaine Forrest / WireImage / Getty Images
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine
I'm begging of you, please don't hesitate Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine Because once you're dead, then that's a bit too late
Dolly Parton sang these lines to the tune of her song "Jolene" after she was given a vaccination.
It is her own medicine, the most important country singer in the world had supported the pharmaceutical company Moderna with a million donation for vaccine research.
A ravishing pop-cultural momentum that comforts a little about the political misery of German mismanagement.
Parton, 75, saved the United States.
And not for the first time: The successful podcast “Dolly Parton's America” by Jad Abumrad sees her as the great unifier of a fragmented nation, the recently published book “She come by it natural” by the author Sarah Smarsh illuminates the feminist meaning of her songs.
Samira El Ouassil Right Arrow
Photo: Stefan Klüter
Born in Munich in 1984, is an actress and author.
In 2016 her book “The 100 most important things” (with Timon Kaleyta and Martin Schlesinger) was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
In 2009 she was candidate for chancellor of the »party«, which at that time was not allowed to vote in the federal elections.
She was recently awarded the Bert Donnepp Prize for media journalism for her media critical column »Wochenschau« (uebermedien.de).
Parton is perhaps one of the pop culture icons that most emblematically embodies our time: As the hyper-feminized stylization of a southern American who was able to work her way up from poor living conditions through enormous talent and against patriarchal structures, she unites socio-political contradictions and breaks.
She confidently describes the aesthetics of her over-femininity as "trashy".
Susan Sontag would probably say there is something genuinely naive about Parton's camp.
Naivety convicts the mendacity of a male gaze: he wants the woman to show himself to be covetous for the man, but she mustn't look "cheap".
"You'd be surprised how much it costs to look so cheap," the Parton countered casually.
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Icon: VideoIcon: VideoDolly Parton sings during her vaccination: »Vaccine« instead of »Jolene«
In her persona she combines longings and projections of a conservative and modern America, sleeve-rolled emancipation and optimistic robustness.
A conservative Christian from a small town in the south can develop a relationship with her just as much as a drag queen from New York, according to the podcast about her.
In her »Dollitics« - a term that describes her artful way of being political in an apolitical way - she behaves in an inclusive manner, even if she would not use such a label herself.
The irony: her wish not to be labeled with categories makes her even more an icon of progressive pluralism.
For example, if she shows her solidarity with the LGBTQI community, she does so by explaining in the podcast that "God made us the way we are, regardless of whether we are gay or straight." Black Lives Matter Movement, she told Billboard Magazine in 2020: “Of course, black lives are important.
Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter?
No!".
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Dolly Parton on Black Lives Matter: "There is such a thing as innocent ignorance - and many have it"
But of course she is also political in her songs.
"9 to 5" is a radically class-conscious ode to working women and an homage to the working class. In 1980 she sang the song "Deportee" by left-wing singer Woody Guthrie, about Mexican farm workers who were killed in a plane crash in 1948.
In the reporting, these were only referred to as »deportees« - the singer Guthrie mentions their names in his song.
Covering that is a statement.
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"I always say that a lot of people don't come to see me for who I am," she said in an interview.
“They come to see me for who I am or that part of them they would like to be.” For some, she is the humble Christian who “is too good to be really bad and too bad to be real to be good «she explains to the journalist.
For others, a shrewd business woman who creates jobs for her community.
I wish we had more Dolly Parton in German politics.
In any case, she is queen of self-narrativization and thus both an icon of self-empowerment and a muse of tolerance for ambiguity.
Completely one with their dialectical persona.
In doing so, she creates what the journalist Jad Abumrad called "the third" using a term from psychotherapy.
He thinks that Parton's concerts can be thought of as a kind of cultural third space: “The way in which she sees all the different parts of her audience, the way they see them, creates the spiritual architecture of this space.
This place where things that we consider different dissolve into something new. "
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I'll call Biden "
I would like to tighten the strings of this philosophical country guitar a little tighter and further develop this third with what the French philosopher Alain Badiou called the “stage of two”.
On the stage, this "construction", as Badiou emphasizes, two people who are in a loving relationship with one another understand "what it means to be two and not one".
The perspectives of the two would create a new reality, created by two individuals, in which they sound together, but still distinguishable, like two different instruments in harmony, but with an individual sound.
There are two different perspectives on the world that together create a new sound.
After that, we should definitely listen to the cacophony of current socio-political discourses about identity.
This “stage for two” that Dolly Parton creates with her heterogeneous audience becomes visible when you watch the viral YouTube video by Tim and Fred Williams from Gary, Indiana.
The two young black men filmed their reactions when they heard "Jolene" for the first time in their lives.
Your surprised enthusiasm for this 1973 country song is insanely contagious.
I wish we had more Dolly Parton in German politics.
The songwriter would trust the pandemic rescue of Germany single-handedly.
Well, we have Smudo after all.
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