Six of the Biggest Lies in Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.”
LIE #1: JASON ALDEAN’S SONG PROMOTES ‘SMALL TOWN’ VALUES
Jason Aldean knowingly perpetuates division when he pushes one of the hoariest of bad country music cliches: Small town people are good people and the true patriots, and Big City People are the root of America’s problems. To be succinct about it, true kindness and welcoming, the supposed values he’s speaking about, would never make such a division. Also, besides being a tired trope, it’s a lie he’s pushing to make money and headlines. It’s the false nostalgia that’s become so dangerous in our country and which fascists have always pushed; in the imaginary good ol’days, we had no problems.
And all these people who claim to relate to and love the song because of its exaltation of small-town — Do they actually live in “small towns” or have they every really lived in one? (And what is “a small town,” in an America of big box stores and global fast food chains anyway?)
Where will so many of the people who plan on giving a musical middle-finger to “the libs” be singing along to “Try That in a Small Town?” Check Jason Aldean’s tour schedule. To maximize those ticket profits, he’s of course playng in a number of large cities; his list of shows are a litany of massive arenas, amphitheaters and corporate-named centers. While some of the people who go to his shows may indeed be from or travel from a ‘small town’ (typically defined by the US Census as being of less than 5,000 people), most of his audience lives in medium to large towns, including urban areas. Even smaller suburbs of those urban areas typically are populated by tens of thousands.
Aldean fans who embrace the kind of highly commercial, “party” form of mass-marketed, synthesized and highly-produced ‘country music’ (known as ‘red cup country’ fans) frequently come from mid to large cities and urban areas. 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas; 17.9 in rural ‘small towns.’ .
Maybe there was time a century ago when folk, bluegrass and ‘country music’ mainly was heard in rural “small towns,” but now it’s big business.
Aldean himself has several multi-million dollar homes (his MAGA-praising wife brags about their love of investing in real estate and flipping houses for profit). At least one of his homes is in a gated community where the security comes not from the good folks of small towns but from hired security staffs. Aldean himself grew up in Macon, Georgia (a city of over 150,000, which does not qualify as ‘small’) and attended a private high school. (His tireless apologists defend this by saying Macon is small “compared to…” which is of course, a form of right-wing ‘whataboutism’ and makes the song meaningless.)
To those who would say that he’s not being literal in the song or some kind of excuse that ‘small towns are a state of mind’: that’s the point. Aldean is tapping into a long strain of age-old clichés –small town vs. those scary ‘big cities’ — that is the white conservative form of ‘virtue-signaling.’ It’s permeated country music for years from big stars who don’t delve into the shadow sides of small towns (rock music’s Springsteen does that) or make it clear they’re speaking of a memory of a small town (like Dolly Parton, who also wasn’t afraid to talk about the meanness she encountered in sparsely populated communities.)
Big commercial country stars who want to make a fast buck utilize a symbolism that couldn’t be more simplistic. Small-towns good; Big cities bad. There’s no ambivalence, no dimension, no nuance, no consideration that you can find empathetic and sheltering people anywhere. ‘Small town’ songs play to fear and shame — if you go off to that big city, it’ll ruin you, son — and they’re calculated to take as much of that country dollar as they can (and then spend it on big city designers.)
There’s a myth that small towns are places (or the only places) with unique, mom-and-pop stores, independent farmers, inclusive churches, open-hearted people. The intended corollary to this myth is that big cities are soulless corporate concrete jungles. Welllll…have you ever taken a road trip across America? There was a time when you might indeed find individually owned restaurants and stores in “small towns” and to be fair, in some place, you will. But most of America has turned into one big sprawl of Home Depots, Hobby Lobbies, Paneras, Starbucks, Chilis, Targets and Costcos that even people who live miles away will drive to. The real concrete jungles are found when you’re looking for a space in a Walmart parking lot. And America’s surrender to the “low prices” or predictable food in those massive chains swallowed up and shuttered many “mom and pop” stores long ago. Ditto to what corporate farming has done to “the little guy.”
The mental and geographic gymnastics most Jason Aldean fans have to do to make it seem like they’re the “real Americans” must get exhausting. Besides the ringing in their ears after the bombast of his concerts, doesn’t the sing-along of “TTIAST” ring hollow?
LIE #2: SMALL TOWNS ARE CRIME-FREE PARADISES
The video for the song shows clips only of events that appear to be in large cities (or where the criminals are people of color.) The accompanying lyrics suggest that if you try anything the authors (Aldean didn’t write the song) consider criminal, or if you protest, you won’t last long. In the mythical small town, they ‘take care’ of criminality in small towns and nobody ever would resist or attack the police.
Except that’s not really true.
— Several states have higher rates of opioid overdose and illegal drug activity in rural small towns than in urban centers.
— 74 percent of farmers report being seriously impacted by the opioid and illegal drug crisis.
— FBI reports of violent crime ratios in ‘small towns’ compare and in some cases exceed ratios of violent crime per capita in large urban centers
— Of course, lynching and vigilantism, which the song openly courts (and then, dishonestly, Aldean and his fans deny) are under the constitution and federal and state law, CRIMINAL. Taking the law into your own hands (“try that in a small town/see how far you make it down the road”) is AGAINST THE LAW. It’s also a form of disrespect to LAW ENFORCEMENT.
— The run-off from large corporate rural farms, such as massive cattle farms, resulting in bacterial infiltration of the water and the rise in mass outbreaks of salmonella and food recalls, is IMMORAL AND ILLEGAL.
— The release of known cancer-causing pesticides into the air to blow downwind or enter the water table is CRIMINAL AND IMMORAL.
— -Gay bashings are CRIMINAL AND UNCHRISTIAN.
— -Vigilantism against migrants at the border is a VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW.
We’re going to watch “Ozark” and “Justified” and “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” and claim small towns are refuges from dark criminality?
The idea that people in small towns don’t taunt or harass police is so broad of course it’s ridiculously untrue. “Cops”, anyone?
Of course, protests don’t only occur in urban centers. They have taken place in small towns throughout American history. Southern mining communities have been historic locations for long-term labor disputes. Civil Rights actions were staged in many Southern small cities. Graffitti is a form of protest; it litters small cities and rural areas. Racist vigilantism, the brandishing of confederate flags — they are a mockery of the tradition of benevolent nonviolent protest, but they still can be broadly defined as protest even if it’s in the service of asserting white dominance.
But these are not the kind of protests Aldean cares about. He wants to show footage his fans will ascribe to BLM and broadcast his patriotism through assigning the American flag a type of religious sacredness (which by the way, is not in the Constitution.)
LIE #3: ‘WE TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN’ IN SMALL TOWNS
The idea that American small towns, just by virtue of their size, are more inclusive, safe, secure and protective.
Huh. Really?
First of all, it’s plain gross stupidity and self-serving narcissism that promulgate the lie that communal compassion and charity don’t exist in urban areas. Go to any large city and you’ll find saints of the most selfless order reaching out to the suffering, and you’ll hear of neighborhoods that come together to support one another.
‘We take care of our own.’
Talk to a crowd of LGBTQ people, and inevitably you will hear stories of queer people who were bullied, harassed, tortured and killed in America’s ‘small towns.’ Watch episodes of ‘We’re Here’ or the latter day ‘Queer Eye’ and you’ll see these narratives over and over, often documented as they’re happening. There’s a song about the instinct for LGBTQ youth to flee small towns because they aren’t safe: “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat. While of course there are LGBTQ people who feel nurtured in small and rural communities and who have agency within them (the excellent show “Somebody Somewhere” explores this), we can’t ignore the antipathy many encounter, even if they learn to navigate their way to safety within them despite the lack of equity and safety.
Many LGBTQ people fled to form protective communities in large cities (which isn’t to downplay the violence that some, especially trans persons, have encountered there.) Increasingly, and dishonestly, the GOP has crafted a cynical strategy trying to convince their base that the very existence of LGBTQ people is a result of ‘wokeness’ that comes from where else? The ‘big city.’
If small towns really ‘take care of’ everyone in their midst, why do so many LGBTQ people flee?
“We take care of our own.”Really?
Fentanyl and meth are burning a deadly trail through rural communities. If we take care of our own, who’s selling the drugs — are they “taking care of their own”? Have those communities prioritized data-driven treatments and solutions for this crisis, or supported the movements to rise up against the criminality of the pharmaceutical profiteering Sackler family?
“We take care of our own.” Really?
Go-Fund-Me has become America’s third largest private insurer. Aldean is clearly courting the MAGA crowd, and they consistently vote against health care for all, which means they’re hoping their neighbor, when they get sick, will be able to get by on private donations as though that’s a system that will prevent the crippling medical debt that sends millions of Americans to bankruptcy or premature death.
“We take care of our own.”
Except immigrants who work as farmworkers consistently report exclusion, prejudice, unjust wages and labor conditions.
“We take care of our own.”
Except Black and BIPOC people still fear “sundown towns”, police harassment, violence and stripping away of voting rights all across America, especially in Red States, country music’s supposed stronghold.
“We take care of our own.”
Except mass shootings have occurred in small towns. Except that anyone who studied the shooting in the small town of Uvalde can’t say that when the time came, the police took care of their own, not even when it was the town’s children. And for that matter, when the mass shooting started at Aldean’s concert in Las Vegas, did he take care of the audience? Or did he run?
After a while, you can’t help but notice that the lyric for the song, if it was accurate, would actually read “we take care of some of our own. Sometimes.” And you wonder: who’s the some, who’s the ‘we’?
LIE #4: “GOT A GUN MY GRANDDAD GAVE ME, THEY SAY ONE DAY THEY’RE GOING TO ROUND UP”
Much as I personally would like to live in a gun-free country and world, this lyric is a prime example of right-wing self-pity. It’s fear-mongering. Nobody’s rounding up your guns. Driving around to confiscate your guns: this isn’t in any gun control legistlation. (Unless of course you are illegally buying weapons or using illegal weapons — that would be CRIMINAL.)
In fact, the proliferation of guns not only continues at a rapid pace in America, and mass shootings are near-daily occurences in the US, but ‘open carry’ laws are the far greater agenda, one that’s being pushed by the NRA, gun profiteers, and politicians (and country musicians) who push fear of ‘gun round-ups’ to gain votes and sell concert tickets. If you’re a person of color or an LGBTQ person or marginalized, and you see someone walking around with an open-carry weapon, it does not seem to you like we’ve moved in the direction of “rounding up” guns; it’s the opposite.
When Jason Aldean sings a list of criminal problems this country is facing, he cites liquor store crime and “spitting at the police” and sucker punches and carjackings.
You know what he doesn’t cite: mass shootings, the one violent act he is tied by history to forever.
Schoolteachers in the United States now regularly lead their students in ‘active shooter’ drills. We have regularly seen children covered in white sheets or holding each other’s hands as they flee a gunman. But the man who faced the largest mass shooting event in the country doesn’t see that as a significant enough criminal event to put into his song; he goes for the cheap shots. Instead of using his unique position to maintain a focus on solving one of the violent criminal acts everyone feels terrorized by in America, he instead stokes fear that someone’s going to come to his door and demand his granmpa’s present of a weapon to him?
Nobody’s coming for your gun, Jason, and you uniquely know it.
LIE #5: “GOOD OL’ BOYS, RAISED UP RIGHT, IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A FIGHT, TRY THAT IN A SMALL TOWN.”
Let’s make this brief. If you’re truly good, and truly raised up according to wholesome (or in country terms, “Christian”) values, should violence be your first response of choice? Did Jesus say the Golden Rule was “make sure you instill fear in other people?” Did Jesus say, “Before you focus on the splinter in your neighbor, take the log out of your own eye”, or nah? Isn’t what happens to Jesus in the very first part of the gospels exactly what’s described in the song — the people of the small town of Nazareth perceive Jesus is protesting intolerance and selfishness in a way they don’t like, and so they attack him and try to run right off a cliff?
When Jesus encounters the horrors of vigilantism, he spends the rest of his ministry preaching against it.
Perhaps what Aldean’s songwriters literally mean is to be parented well, you have to be “raised up right, and not “left?”
Is getting violent what makes you “good”? Is a violent fight what Aldean thinks makes you a “boy?”
Who’s really the one ‘looking for” (or hoping for) a fight here, Jason?
LIE #6: “CANCEL CULTURE IS REAL” (Jason Aldean at his July 21st concert)
Aldean told a sold-out crowd at a 20,500-capacity arena, without a trace of irony or self-reflection, that he was the victim of “cancel culture.”
He said this as his nefarious song climbed the music charts to number one and got posted and re-posted by many conservatives who have never lived in a “small town”, again as their way of “owning the libs.”
Jason Aldean said he was a victim of cancel culture and yet in the past week he became a household name.
And his song is joining an infamous list of songs they play at MAGA rallies to stoke up the crowd.
Jason Aldean said he was “canceled” as the ‘Try That…’ video climbed to 18 million views.
As he claimed unawareness and innocence that his video was filmed in front of a courthouse that was the site of horrific lynchings that any true American who believes in the constitution should see as a grotestque, immoral stain on America. But no one in this superstar’s management did their research to figure that out?
His wife is “canceled” even as she gets thousands of likes for her message taking the ‘media’ to task (the same media that she employs regularly for publicity?) and tries to use human trafficking (an acceptable conservative cause) as a smokescreen?
But they’re canceled? Claiming to be “canceled” is the new right-wing ‘victim-signaling’, in which members of the dominant power group in society see themselves as the true victims, the ones who are attacked. (Check out the polls of white Americans who have come to believe that the only racism that is significant today is the supposed “racism” against “white people”. For a group of people who brag about their self-reliance and independence, they sure love to see themselves as victims.) Aldean, like many right-wing “victim signalers”, professes to be blameless and simply misunderstood as they fatten their bank accounts. (Trump is their role model in this.)
Jason and Brittany Aldean, multi-millionaires, owners of several pricey homes, exploiters of the American flag, are actually doing something very un-American in their doubling-down defensiveness. Instead of considering any validity in the outcry, which would be in the spirit of true “small town humility”, they fully embrace Jason’s tone-deaf and insensitve choice, out of all the hundreds of songs available to a superstar who doesn’t write his own music, out of all the Nashville-written lyrics submitted to him, the one he picked to put out in his own name was “Try That in a Small Town.” Please feel sorry for his “cancellation” which clearly had nothing to do with his choices. (What version of manhood is that?)
The Aldeans and all his defenders are saying if you’re part of the 80 percent of Americans who live in an ‘urban’ area, you’re not as protective, concerned or patriotic as they are. Far from American’s stated values of egalatarianism, it’s an assertion of superiority hiding in an ‘aw shucks’ twang.
If you fall for these lies, you can get this blast of true anti-patriotism and insulting disregard for the majority of the country at Aldean’s concert. For $200 you can get a ticket to the show, parking, and merch that will tell everyone whose side you’re on.
Oh, and of course: that red cup.
