Who would have that thought back in 2002 – the year Bonnaroo began as a underground jam band festival – that the biggest band in mainstream country music (then known as The Dixie Chicks) would one day find themselves to be the undisputed queens of The Farm?

Well, we all should have seen it coming. And the reasons don’t just have to do with the trio’s infamous arc.

You know the one: the three women who were blacklisted overnight by the country world for criticizing the Iraq War, only to double down on speaking their mind, and earn their own devoted audience as a result.

But first, The Chicks (as they　rechristened themselves in 2020) reminded us of another key piece of their story: they can play and sing their hearts out.

They opened with the bluegrass barn-burner "Sin Wagon," with frontwoman Natalie Maines belting as fiercely as she did back in 1999. Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire trailed close behind with blazing banjo and fiddle solos, as the band’s charging rhythm soundtracked the many young women (and men) sprinting to get a closer spot on the field.

The Chicks followed up with "Gaslighter" – the title track of their 2020 album, which was their first in 14 years. It contains some of their most bluntly progressive material yet, and was helmed by modern pop super-producer Jack Antonoff (who coincidentally was performing at the exact same time across the field). Still, it was the vintage material that really lit up this millennial/Gen. Z-heavy crowd: cuts like "Wide Open Spaces," "Ready to Run" and "Cowboy Take Me Away."

"Well, hello Bonnaroo," Maines exclaimed after a few tunes. "How’s everybody doing tonight? You look fantastic. I love what you’re wearing, and it smells like you’re having fun. We’re very happy to be here for our first time, so we’re just gonna try to cram in as much music as possible."

To be fair, The Chicks of the 2020s are still connecting, whether their message is unmistakably personal ("And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat/ That she can have you now," Maines sang on "Tights On My Boat") or social. Cheers would rise from the field as the video screens behind them displayed the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others, or showed images of protest signs with the message "My Body, My Choice."

But no song, of course, made this audience erupt like the inevitable final number.

"Bonnaroo, we’ve had a great time tonight," Maines told them. "You guys are awesome. We’ve just got one more piece of business before we go."

By Adam Gold, Rolling Stone

The mantra of the annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, which returned to Manchester, Tennessee, this weekend after a forced two-year absence, is "radiate positivity." For the group formerly known as the Dixie Chicks — queens of the scorched-earth, fiddle-and-banjo-tinged, stick-a-pin-in-your-voodoo-doll revenge-fantasy rallying call — those posi vibes came by way of killing Russian president Vladimir Putin in effigy. On Friday, the Chicks debuted as both the festival’s first-ever country and female-fronted headliner. And just like Earl, Vlad had to die.

Putin’s figurative demise came during a mid-set performance of "Tights on My Boat" — a playfully savage ditty about karma and how it’s a bitch, with a repeating chorus of "you’re gonna get what’s comin’ to ya" and a deliciously hateful, brutally unambiguous opening couplet of: "I hope you die peacefully in your sleep / just kidding / I hope it hurts like you hurt me." On a widescreen behind the band, an animated image of Putin grimaced in horror when struck by a construction-paper missile that plunged his sinking ship into the shark-infested crimson tide of an ocean made of lava, triggering the eruption of a volcano, along with an explosion of cheers in the audience. Another verse featured a similar depiction of Ted Cruz, but the Chicks graciously let him live (though it’s reasonable to assume they’re ashamed that the senator is from Texas).

"You guys see how we killed Putin in that song?" a chipper Natalie Maines bantered, radiating positivity while holding for applause. "It’s not so hard!"

For some, music festivals like Bonnaroo (which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year) are a vehicle for escapism. Like Tool singer Maynard James Keenan who, during his band’s headlining set Saturday said: "We’ve been through a lot; we’ll get through a lot. Today, we deserve a break." For others, robbed of these grand communal events indefinitely during the Covid-19 pandemic, they are about catharsis.

The Chicks — rounded out by multi-instrumentalist/vocalists Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire — satisfied both camps at Bonnaroo. The notoriety Maines & co. garnered in the mid-2000s as mainstream country music’s most outspoken liberals is the band’s brand in 2022. This was evidenced by the group taking the stage to the sounds of Joan Jett’s "Bad Reputation." And if Chicks hits like "Wide Open Spaces," "Not Ready to Make Nice," "Goodbye Earl," and "Landslide" (the latter of which got an encore performance during Stevie Nicks’ festival-closing headline set on Sunday) didn’t resonate with Bonnaroo’s target demographic of twentysomethings when they first heard them in their parents’ minivans during the group’s salad days, they sure strike a chord now. A Gen-Z and Millennial hoe-down kicked up dust on the farm during the back-catalog bangers.

"Tights" was one of five songs the Chicks played off their 2020 comeback album Gaslighter, at Bonnaroo, only the second show of the group’s first tour in five years. And where the hits brought on the nostalgia feels, the newer material — like "March March," or a cover of Patty Griffin’s "Don’t Let Me Die in Florida" — kept the crowds’ attention by reflecting the zeitgeist. The band broadcast messages supporting racial justice, bodily autonomy, and gun control across the stage’s video walls too, earning cheers from the tens-of-thousands of festivalgoers.

In the end, Maines, a dynamic, all-in performer, may have left too much on the stage Friday night: The Chicks were forced to cut short their next concert Sunday night in Indianapolis after the singer lost her voice.