The Anti-P.J. Playlist #1: “Try That in a Small Town” by Jason Aldean
It’s not easy being a leftist country music fan these days. The genre holds a lot of nostalgia for me, as it was the music most commonly played in the car whenever my parents would drive my siblings and me to doctor’s appointments and after-school activities and the like. Even as I’ve grown older and expanded my interests into genres as diverse as New Age and melodic death metal, country music has remained relatable to my country mouse sensibilities. But, like many good things in my life, Trump had to come along and ruin it.
Granted, it’s not like the more right-wing strands in country music weren’t always there. In the wake of superstar Morgen Wallen being caught on tape drunkenly shouting racial slurs in February 2021, several black people working in the music industry came forward to state that country music has always had a race problem. For every Charley Pride and Darius Rucker and Mickey Guyton that makes it big, there are about ten more white guys (and almost no Latino or Indigenous people). Maybe it’s the Southern pride inherent to the genre often going hand in hand with nostalgia for the Confederacy (“If the South would’ve won, we’d have had it made!” as Charlie Daniels once put it). Dolly Parton’s younger sister Stella even took to Twitter to say that “country music has always been racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. Don’t believe them if they say otherwise.”
I have lost so much respect for many country artists I used to love growing up, either from what they’ve done or said since Trump took power (Travis Tritt, Charlie Daniels, John Rich, and, of course, Morgen Wallen) or songs from their past that didn’t age well (i.e., Toby Keith and Darryl Worley’s songs advocating for the war on Iraq in the wake of 9/11).
But none of these incidents has exposed the ugly bigotries hiding in the Nashville establishment quite like bro-country icon Jason Aldean’s most recent single, “Try That in a Small Town,” which takes the common country trope of boasting about how life is so much better in small-town America and taking it in a much darker direction.
So let’s, very reluctantly, talk about it.
The Song
The song was written by Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison, which Aldean released as a single on May 22, 2023, and subsequently included on the album Highway Desperado, released on November 3. Lovelace and Thrasher have had a long career as songwriters in the Nashville scene. Lovelace is best known for his frequent collaborations with Brad Paisley, helping to co-write his first #1 single, “He Didn’t Have to Be,” as well as others like “The World,” “Ticks,” “Online,” “Start a Band,” and “Water.” Some of Thrasher’s work includes Kenney Chesney’s “There Goes My Life,” several Rascall Flatts hits (“I Melt,” “Fast Cars and Freedom,” “Why Wait,” and others), and several previous Jason Aldean singles, like “Tattoos on This Town” and “Flyover States.”
The song is described by Wikipedia as “composed in the key of C minor with a 4/4 time signature and approximate tempo of 72 beats per minute. It mainly follows the chord progression of Cm-A flat-B flat.” I’m not that well-versed in music terminology, but I assume that’s what gives this song its yearning, ballad-like feel. But it’s hard to take this inspirational sound seriously with the absurdly dark subtext that is to come with the lyrics.
Verse 1 describes all the horrible things supposedly taking place in those degenerate urban environments:
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk.
Carjack an old lady at a red light.
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store.
You think it’s cool.
Well, act the fool, if you like.
Let’s unpack all the imagery here. Most critics have interpreted the first line as referencing the “knockout game,” a type of assault where the attacker tries to knock a victim unconscious with a single punch. Over the years, There have been doubts about whether or not this game is a real phenomenon distinguishable from simple random assaults. Indeed, according to this NPR article, several police departments have dismissed the knockout game as a mere urban legend. In a Twitter thread he wrote about the song in July 2023, Black author and activist Michael Harriot argued that Aldean used the first of many dog whistles throughout the track, pointing out how news media disproportionally portrays young black men participating in the game. This, he says, hearkens back to a long tradition in America of portraying black people as gleeful thugs constantly going out of their way to assault white people.
The second line is also interesting in Harriot’s eyes because it refers to carjacking rather than car theft. Carjacking is a specific type of vehicle theft in which the car is forcibly taken from the owner, sometimes even involving physical violence or even sexual assault. What’s interesting about Aldean’s use of the word “carjacking,” says Harriot, is that carjacking victims are disproportionally black. But we all know that Aldean and the songwriters weren’t thinking of old black ladies when they wrote or performed that line, right?
The line about pulling a gun on the owner of a liquor store also seems tone-deaf when one remembers that over three-fourths of all business losses due to crime happen thanks to embezzlement and forgery, which, as Harriot again points out, is not a crime often associated with black people. Indeed, he goes on to point out that 52% of embezzlers are white women.
The verse continues with more “crimes” that small-town America supposedly hates:
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face.
Stomp on a flag and light it up.
Yeah, you think you’re tough.
The first line is a blatant middle finger to the #DefundthePolice movement that gained significant traction after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the massive Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country afterward. Leaving aside how hypocritical this line sounds, given how the chorus is an explicit endorsement of vigilantism, the idea that small-town people never insult police officers is obviously a lie. An earlier Aldean hit from 2011 called “Dirt Road Anthem” even contains the lyric “Better watch out for the boys in blue,” which doesn’t sound all that respectful of his local law enforcement officials to me.
Then, of course, there’s Aldean complaining about how these godless un-American protesters don’t respect the flag and saying that burning a piece of fabric is a crime equal to carjacking and robbery. He seems to be restating the thesis of Creed Fisher’s 2016 song “If You Have a Right to Burn My Flag (Then I Have a Right to Kick Your Ass).” Sure, guys. Never mind that the Supreme Court has ruled that flag burning is protected as free speech by the First Amendment, whereas assault and battery conjured by patriotic fervor is not.
Then we get to the chorus, which has some lines that are… troubling, to say the least:
Try that in a small town.
See how far you make it down the road.
Around here, we take care of our own.
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out.
I reccomend you don’t.
Try that in a small town.
Now, to someone not well versed in history and politics, this might seem like Aldean is simply stating a fact of life about small-town America, that small-town people have a much more robust sense of community than city dwellers, who are much more belligerent and isolated despite having more people around.
Others have noted, however, that the line “see how far you make it down the road” brings up uncomfortable memories of sundown towns, in which the “whiteness” of a town was preserved by chasing out all people of color (especially Black people) out by a combination of violence, intimidation, and local laws, most infamously with signs warning “colored people” to leave town by sundown, lest they get arrested… or worse. The bit that starts with “You cross that line” can be interpreted as a less profane way of saying, “fuck around and find out.”
We then reach the second verse, in which Aldean gives voice to the American right’s paranoia around their Second Amendment rights being taken away:
Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they’re gonna round up.
Well, that shit might fly in the city, but good luck…
Granted, I’m pretty sure it’s the handguns and AR-15s that the left is worried about nowadays. I mean, Jason is clearly describing an antique gun here. When was the last time you heard of some maniac shooting up a school or grocery store with an 1873 Winchester rifle or a Civil War-era Colt percussion revolver?
After repeating the chorus, Aldean describes the inhabitants of said small towns as…
Full of good ol’ boys,
Raised up right.
If you’re looking for a fight,
Try that in a small town.
The term “good ol’ boys” is usually used to describe residents in Southern rural communities who are strong-willed and traditional (i.e., often conservative) in nature, especially as they are depicted in fiction. They can certainly be sympathetic, both in fiction and in real life. These good ol’ boys, however, don’t sound very friendly. Some have even speculated that the lines reference the “Good Ol’ Boys Roundup,” an annual celebration held by ATF officials stationed in southern Tennessee between 1980 and 1996, which was, as described by a report by the Justice Department, a den of “shocking racist, licentious, puerile behavior” characterized by “an atmosphere hostile to minorities and to women.”
The song then mercifully ends with one last repetition of the chorus almost precisely three minutes after it began.
Jason’s Statement
Perhaps the best place to start with stating my personal feelings on this song would be to respond to the statement Aldean put out on Twitter on July 18 after the song’s music video attracted a significant backlash:
In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it- and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage -and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music- this one goes too far.
For reference, the music video was released on July 14, directed by Shaun Silva, and filmed at the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. This proved to be a controversial choice given the Courthouse’s place in African-American history. Critics of the song noted that the Courthouse was where Henry Choate, an eighteen-year-old black teen, was hanged from a second-story window after being dragged behind a car from the Columbia County jail. He had been accused of assaulting 16-year-old Sarah Harlan, even though Sarah couldn’t identify him as the culprit. Sarah’s mother even begged the mob to spare his life, to no avail.
Critics also noted that the Courthouse was the site of a race riot in February 1946, which was started when local white repairman Billy Flemming sold a radio belonging to the mother of Black WWII veteran James Stephenson. Their dispute turned physical, and Flemming tried to charge the Stephensons with attempted murder. In response, the residents of the black business district started armed patrols to keep the whites from lynching the Stephensons. The state Highway Patrol came in after four police officers were wounded in the standoff, resulting in two deaths, 100 arrests, and several businesses being destroyed.
Now, I can give some benefit of the doubt that Aldean and co. simply weren’t aware of this history when they filmed the video. Indeed, Aldean said he chose the Courthouse because it was only five minutes from his house and that he wouldn’t have chosen the Courthouse if he had known about its history. Still, though, he wasn’t doing the song’s poor notoriety any favors by using it.
As for his claim that “there is not a single lyric that references race,”… well, that’s the point of a dog whistle, isn’t it? To communicate controversial opinions by disguising them as innocuous phrases so the unconverted won’t notice and get mad. It’s why the modern alt-right uses phrases like “globalists” and “George Soros” instead of “the Jews” or how evangelical Christians have adapted the term “family values” to denigrate anything they don’t like (abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, divorce, environmentalism, pornography, feminism, sex education, etc.). Granted, it’s possible the songwriters might not have had any ulterior motives when writing the track, but given lines such as “see how far you make it down the road,” I have my doubts.
Also, Aldean’s claim that “there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage” is false, as viewers have identified several shots that are clearly stock footage (the shot with the Molotov cocktail being the most egregious example).
Aldean’s statement continues:
As so many pointed out, I was present at Route 91-where so many lost their lives- and our community recently suffered another heartbreaking tragedy. NO ONE, including me, wants to continue to see senseless headlines or families ripped apart.
For the probably five of you who are unaware, Route 91 refers to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting that happened on October 1, 2017, when Stephen Paddock opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest Festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel while Aldean was performing. While he escaped unscathed, 61 lost their lives (including Paddock, who took his own life), and over 800 were injured, making it the deadliest mass shooting incident in American history.
One would think witnessing such a tragedy would lead Aldean to adopt a much dimmer view of guns. Indeed, he conceded in interviews shortly afterward that guns were “too easy to get” in America. But “Try That in a Small Town” reveals that he’s backslid into the standard NRA narrative about Second Amendment rights.
Also, it strikes me as ironic that Aldean says, “no one…wants to continue to see senseless headlines or families ripped apart,” considering that he’s been photographed golfing with then-President Donald Trump, whose family separation policy regarding Latin American immigrants has been widely condemned for its senseless cruelty.
Aldean’s statement ends with this third paragraph:
Try That In A Small Town, for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief. Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences. My political views have never been something I’ve hidden from, and I know that a lot of us in this Country don’t agree on how we get back to a sense of normalcy where we go at least a day without a headline that keeps us up at night. But the desire for it to- that’s what this song is about.
Many have noted how fallacious Aldean’s claims to small-town authenticity are, given that he grew up in Macon, Georgia (pop, 157,346), grew up in Homestead, Florida (pop. 80,737), and was educated at a Christian private school in Bibb County, Georgia, called Windsor Academy that initially started as a “segregation academy” (take a wild fucking guess why it was called that).
In light of this, it’s easy to see where Aldean’s politics come from. In addition to golfing with Trump, he’s also courted controversy for demanding that his concertgoers not wear masks during the COVID pandemic, dressing his children in clothes with the phrase “Hidin’ from Biden” on them, and supporting his wife after she made transphobic comments in an Instagram post.
This makes me wonder what he means when he says “Try That…” is about a desire for a return to normalcy. Does he really think that using vigilante justice to “protect” small towns from Black Lives Matter activists is going to help with that? Because that doesn’t sound like a pathway back to law and order to me.
Final Thoughts
For those unaware, that’s Ahmaud Arbery.
It’s hard to know where to start with this one. Maybe the best place would be to present one last piece of information to refute the idea that the song has no racist undertones. In Michael Harriot’s Twitter thread, he asks, “But who are these people Jason claims to protect and love so much in the small rural town he’s protecting with his granddaddy’s gun?” If this graph is anything to go by, the answer is mostly white people.
The fact that the music video showcases real-life news footage of Black Lives Matter protests as examples of big-city moral depravity only underscores this fact. Probably the most heinous aspect of the video, however, was pointed out by Chris Willman in this article he wrote for Variety on July 18. When Aldean sings the line, “Cuss out a cop, spit in his face,” in the original cut of the video, we are shown footage of a Fox News chyron of Georgia declaring a state of emergency. This is referring to a large uprising that occurred in Atlanta after Venezuelan environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Teran was shot 57 times by police on January 18, 2023, while taking part in the Stop Cop City movement against the proposed building of a police and fire training center on the former grounds of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. People opposed to the project, myself included, argue that it will lead to further militarization of the police and increase economic disparity and ecological collapse in the surrounding Black neighborhoods. Police have claimed that they only shot Paez Teran after he shot at them and wounded a police officer. This has been disputed due to factors like exit wounds being found on his hands (indicating he had his hands up), no evidence of gunshot residue being found on his hands, and dialogue on the officers’ body camera footage indicating that the incident may have been a case of friendly fire.
To be fair, that footage was later edited out of the video, but only because Fox copyright claimed the footage. Even so, that didn’t save the video from getting pulled off the air by CMT, although they didn’t explain their reasoning for doing so.
In the end, while many will undoubtedly view this song as affirming the sense of hospitality and community that they feel in their own small-town communities, the only clear message I get from it is, “Small town America is far more morally upright than the big cities, and we will kill anyone who says otherwise.”
Now, songs about the superiority of country life over city life in country music are nothing new. Some of country’s most popular tracks are about that theme, from Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” to Hank Willams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive” to Tim McGraw’s “Where the Green Grass Grows.” However, plenty of country music songs also acknowledge how country life isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Miranda Lambert’s “Famous in a Small Town” points out the downsides of everybody knowing everybody, especially in how it’s very hard to live down your worst mistakes. The (Dixie) Chicks’ “Long Time Gone” highlights how small towns don’t offer aspiring musicians or artitistic types the infrasructure needed to fulfill their dreams. On the more poigniant side, Alan Jackson’s “Little Man” portrays how much small buisnesses suffer when big chain stores move in. And then, of course, there’s Hal Ketchum’s “Small Town Saturday Night,” especially the second verse:
Bobby told Lucy, “The world ain’t round;
Drops off sharp at the edge of town.
Lucy, you know the world must be flat
‘Cause when people leave town, they never come back.
They go ninety miles an hour to the city limit sign;
Put the pedal to the metal ‘fore they change their mind.”
So let me ask you, Jason: Is this really what you’re so gung-ho about defending? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a country mouse myself, but is a life like this really worth killing people to defend? Right-wing extremism isn’t going to make small towns better. It’s just going alienate the kinds of people who can help them with their plight. As Princeton University history professor Kevin M. Kruse explains in this NPR article, “He’s calling for people who aren’t law enforcement to mete out violence against people who haven’t broken any laws. This sounds like a ‘law and order’ appeal, but it’s actually a call to lawlessness.”
I know I’m probably not going to change any hardcore conservative country music fan’s minds with this screed, but you can never have too many people calling out a racist country music song when you see it.
So, this article took longer than I thought it would to write. That can be partially blamed on Thanksgiving and the various family gatherings I attended, but it probably has more to do with me not wanting to even talk about this song. That may seem weird to say, given the length of the article, but even thinking about this song puts me in a bad mood, especially given how many people have unquestioningly embraced it, including several well-known country music artists (Travis Tritt, Parker McCollum, Brantley Gilbert, Cody Johnson, etc.) and even my own parents.
Suffice it to say, I could use a much lighter topic for the next article, one that doesn’t put me in a bad mood. So next time, let’s take one last look this year at the “Cryptids of North America” and see what’s hiding in New Hampshire. Until next time, beautiful watchers!
