“Try That In A Small Town” by Jason Aldean sucks. It’s not a good song. I don’t consider myself much of a country fan by any means, but I can at least, typically, appreciate why someone would like a country song.
Absent the political angle, I can’t understand the appeal of the song. The melody is unmemorable. Nothing about the vocals particularly stands out. Nothing about the theme of the lyrics is a real departure from those present in the genre already. Nothing about it is remarkable except for the political fallout surrounding it.
Aldean himself is not from a small town–which isn’t a real issue. A lot of artists across a lot of genres do what amounts to live-action roleplay when they get on stage. Aldean will wear boots and a country hat. Tyga (the rapper) will rap about being from a low socioeconomic background when his parents owned a Range Rover and lived in the San Fernando Valley. Machine Gun Kelly talks about being “good in the hood” when I know damn well he grew up right down the road from me in Shaker Heights, Ohio–which is of course not the hood. Aldean isn’t the first and will not the be last musical artist who puts on a front.
The point I’m ultimately making is that “Try That In a Small Town” subjectively sucks. I don’t like it and think it’s a bad song. You don’t have to agree. Your agreement isn’t why you’re reading this. You’re waiting for me to meaningfully address the political fallout.
The most amusing thing about the cultural mishigas around this very bad bro-country song is that it’s most serious detractors (the people who say it’s an allusion to lynching black people) are falling into an extremely common trap in left-wing cultural analysis.
This is the standard form of criticism as it pertains to this song:
“Jason Aldean sings about retaliation against someone pulling a gun on a liquor store clerk, sucker punching someone on the sidewalk, and carjacking an old lady at a red light. These are all crimes, and crime is something that black people do, therefore this song is racist.”
The criticism of this song from the left relies on the direct mental association between black people and crime. When the left things of someone punching another person unprovoked on the street, they are thinking that the perpetrator is black. They are thinking that these are savage acts that can only be conducted by black people. The critique fundamentally relies on everyone hearing it making this association. It relies on making a race-based heuristic judgment that would be absolutely otherwise criticized as “racist”.
A few people have pointed out that the courthouse that the music video for the song takes place in front of was the site of a 1927 lynching of a black man at the hands of a white mob for a rape he didn’t commit. While obviously a horrific event that shouldn’t be glorified, racist events that shouldn’t be glorified have happened in nearly every American town south of the Mason-Dixon line. I genuinely believe (and Occam’s Razor determines) that it was an unfortunate coincidence rather than a deeply-researched racist dogwhistle. It’s unfortunately probable that any other chosen Tennessee Courthouse would have a similar ghoulish story attached to it.
I don’t like playing the “but you’re the REAL racist” game. It’s a game that not only cannot be won, but merely playing it at all cheapens the word “racist”–but this is worth pointing out anyway. The minds of those screaming loudest about racism often make race-based value judgments as part of their criticism.
This happens all the time.
It’s much like when similar Twitter X-addicted leftists criticized the World Health Organization for the continued use of the word “Monkeypox”–a virus first identified in laboratory monkeys. What’s the rationale? That Monkeypox is from Africa and therefore it’s racist against black people.
…why are they associating black people with monkeys?
…and those same people are calling the WHO racist?
That’s the kind of mentality that these Twitteristas share with the average Ku Klux Klansman (the three or four of them that aren’t FBI informants).
It’s enough to make your head spin.
The WHO did end up changing the official name of Monkeypox to “Mpox”, which of course begs the question “what does the M stand for”, which you are a racist monster for asking.
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