The Chicks at the Beacon: Vindication, 23 Years After the Backlash

By Grace Kim

The Chicks played the second of three sold-out shows at New York's Beacon Theatre on Monday, weeks after the US formally completed its troop withdrawal from Iraq — the war that once nearly ended the band's career.

The timing is hard to miss. In March 2003, eight days before the US invasion of Iraq, lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience she was "ashamed" that then president George W Bush came from the trio's home state of Texas. One sentence, circulated on AM radio and cable news, triggered CD-burning protests and death threats. Country radio blacklisted the band for two decades.

The Beacon show served as an anniversary celebration of the trio's unapologetic album Taking the Long Way, released in the aftermath of that backlash. The Guardian's review, published under the headline "exquisite harmonies and hard-won vindication," frames the concert as a reckoning with history — a history that, last month, reached its own quiet endpoint when the US withdrew its troops after 23 years of what the review calls a "violent quagmire."

What changed between 2003 and now?

The mechanism of the original backlash is worth recalling, because it explains the vindication. A single off-the-cuff comment traveled through talk radio and cable news, and within days the band went from radio staples to pariahs. The review's author recalls catching "blue-sky hits" — Travelin' Soldier, Landslide, Cowboy Take Me Away — on the car radio one day, and hearing nothing the next.

At the Beacon on Monday, more than one fan wondered aloud where their fellow fans had been back then. The common answer: high school. The reviewer, who was nine years old in 2003, writes of holding "a child's stark view of morality and consequence" while watching a favorite band absorb the cost of criticizing a war.

What does this change for the band's legacy?

The short answer: the verdict has flipped. What got the Chicks banned in 2003 reads, in 2026, as scarily prescient. Three consecutive sold-out nights at a 2,900-seat Manhattan landmark — with no country-radio gatekeeper required — is its own measure of how the audience, and the industry's economics, have moved.

The band never retracted the comment. Taking the Long Way turned the scandal into their most defiant record, and Monday's show treated that album as the centerpiece rather than a detour.

The Iraq war that started it all is now formally over. The Chicks, blacklisted for opposing it two decades ago, are selling out the Beacon Theatre — which may be the cleanest vindication American pop culture has offered either the band or its critics.