Needless to say, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not an aficionado of country music. In fact, his personal vision of hell includes a soundtrack of trite faux patriotic lyrics and twangy vocals. If you’d asked him a few days ago who Jason Aldean is, he’d probably have been more likely to guess that he’s a minor league infielder included in some trade package for a star player than a country singer. But Aldean is apparently rather a big deal: Billboard lists him at #7 on the country charts for 2022, ahead of a handful of people Curmie’s actually heard of, and he has ten platinum albums.
Be it noted, Gentle Reader, that if you’re a fan of country music in general or Jason Aldean in particular, that’s fine, as long as you don’t make Curmie listen. (He similarly promises not to foist his musical tastes on you, except, perhaps, via a link you can choose not to click.) But Curmie does believe he knows something of small town life, having lived in towns or cities of fewer than 85,000 people for over 66 years (and in places under 35,000 folks for 58+ years), as opposed to Aldean’s [checks notes] literally never.
Curmie is amused but unoffended by Aldean’s inauthenticity. Yes, an earlier song of his, “Rearview Town” paints a very different picture of small towns. No, Aldean has never actually lived in one. But Bruce Springsteen has sorta passed his sell-by date as a voice of the working class, too. And Curmie is still a fan. Songs don’t have to be about personal experience.
It’s also worth noting that “Try That in a Small Town” was actually written by the quartet of Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison, not by Aldean. Still, it’s Aldean at the center of the controversy, so we’ll continue as if this is all his doing, even though he’s just singing someone else’s lyrics. In other words, Gentle Reader, please mentally insert “…and the songwriters” after Aldean’s name in the ensuing discussion. If you’d similarly change the verbs to match their newly plural subjects, that would be appreciated, too.
The song starts by describing behavior which we’d all agree is both reprehensible and illegal: sucker punching someone, carjacking an old lady, robbing a liquor store. But then things start getting a little more divisive: “cuss[ing] out a cop” and “stomp[ing] on” or “light[ing] up the flag” may not be activities Curmie would recommend, but they’ve been consistently reaffirmed as protected speech.
The response: “Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya 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 recommend you don’t / Try that in a small town.” Whoa. Stop right there. “See how far you make it down the road”? Really? The appropriate response to the exercise of First Amendment protected speech you disagree with is to chase someone down, and prevent them, presumably by force, from going down the road?
Here it’s worth pointing out that, especially given the immediate reference to “a gun that my granddad gave me,” that we’re not talking about being “shunned” or
“unpopular,” however much Jack Marshall of Ethics Alarms might try that spin in a comment on his post on the subject. (Today’s apophasis is that we’ll let the Tin Foil Hat paranoia of “they say one day they’re gonna round up” go without comment for now.)
What’s being advocated here is not adopting a music hall French accent and declaring you fart in someone’s general direction. No, this is absolutely and literally a paean to vigilantism. The fact that it doesn’t rise to the level of a “true threat” in legal terms means only that the song shouldn’t be censored, which, of course, is different from whether a private enterprise like Country Music Television decides to broadcast the video or not.
This invocation of violence then continues with a reference to a small town being “Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right / If you’re looking for a fight.” Curmie finds it difficult, given the preceding verses, to think the fight in question is anything but literal. This is what “raised up right” means? Jolly.
Of course, it’s the video, even more than the song, that is really drawing fire from the left. There are scenes of rioting that suggest we’re looking at the BLM-inspired violence of a couple of years ago. A fair share isn’t, of course; Rolling Stone reports that a lot of the imagery comes from stock footage of demonstrations in Toronto and Montreal. Go figure, right?
Plus, of course, the backdrop for the shots of Aldean himself is the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, which seems to be literally the source of light in the video. Oh yeah, it’s also the site of the lynching of Henry Choate in 1927 and of the Columbia race riot of 1946. Charming.
So all of this raises the question of just what the hell is going on. It strikes Curmie that there are three possible explanations. The first is that Aldean really is a racist, and that Curmie’s friend who suggested that the reason the song is called “Try That in a Small Town” is that “’Try That in a Sundown Town’ wouldn’t have the same ring to it” might be on to something. The possibility that a MAGAmaniac who dressed his kids in t-shirts reading “Hidin’ from Biden” might be evincing the predilections of a small but demonstrable contingent of that red-capped horde cannot be discarded out of hand.
The carefully manipulated video, the racial implications of the distinction between urban and rural, and the choice of backdrop all could reasonably be perceived to point in that direction. Curmie is insufficiently attuned to dog whistles of that particular variety to have a strong opinion, and he refuses to engage in the kind of straw man arguments he sees all too often online. Curmie doesn’t like it when some ultrapartisan conservative decides what progressives think, and he declines to do the same thing in reverse. So… is Aldean’s song (or the video) racist? Perhaps, but Curmie would take some more convincing, and isn’t going to label someone he’s never met without more evidence than this.
The second alternative is that Aldean is a garden-variety idiot. (All racists are idiots; not all idiots are racists.) Were this to be the case, he’d be unaware of the symbolism of the setting and of the overtones associated with the distinction between the urban and the rural (or semi-rural). He’d honestly believe that not mentioning race per se in the lyrics would mean the song wouldn’t be interpreted as being about race.
He’d still view vigilantes as people “raised up right,” and threats of violence as appropriate responses to those whose politics are different from one’s own. But thuggery against people who see the world a little differently than you isn’t the same as doing so because their melanin count is higher than yours, right?
The third possibility is the most intriguing. No one is going to call Jason Aldean an intellectual giant, but, as Mitch McConnell has proved, being smart and being shrewd aren’t the same thing. So what if the brouhaha, the removal of the song from CMT, the defiant stand at a concert in Cincinnati (in front of a lot of fans, none of whom appear to be more darkly complected than Curmie)… what if it was all a set-up? “One high-level exec” told Mikael Woods of the Los Angeles Times “Aldean is irrelevant today — a sideshow all the way.” And what is the current hubbub if not a sideshow?
Curmie has argued for years that not all seemingly bad work (or bad results) ought necessarily to be read that way. To choose an example from Curmie’s field: the deus ex machina (literally!) ending to Euripides’ Orestes has been decried by many critics as faulty dramaturgy because it is so utterly implausible. But was one of the great classical tragedians really that sloppy? Or is it just possible that we’re supposed to notice the awkwardness, that the most famous atheist of his era might just be suggesting that it’s unreasonable to expect the gods to fix our problems, that the best way out of a difficult situation is not to get into it in the first place?
Similarly, might Aldean or his handlers have anticipated that CMT pulling the song was the best possible outcome in a world of YouTube and Spotify? That he’d have every Republican talking head or Presidential candidate singing his praises? That morons like “Veteran Biker” would claim that Aldean “may be on the Mount Rushmore of country music”? (As above, you can search out the link if you choose, but there’s no question about the coded messages and dog whistles in this one.)
Might they have guessed that people like Curmie, who’d never heard of Aldean, now know who he is, and even listened (once) to the song? That the song would rocket up the charts as an immediate response to the controversy? That even otherwise intelligent people would valiantly attempt to defend the song’s message as opposed to simply his right to sing it?
Did Aldean dangle the song and the video out there, hoping (not without cause) the leftie press would rise to the bait like a Kardashian who’s spotted a camera? Is Aldean that cunning? Are his handlers? Did Aldean’s people actually leak the bit about the Maury County Courthouse? Maybe. After all, a boycott of something you weren’t going to buy anyway doesn’t carry much of a threat, and appealing to the base has its advantages.
What Curmie knows for sure is that actual small towns are both better and worse than Aldean’s fantasized imaginings. That the same Constitution that allows Aldean to sing “Try That in a Small Town” also allows Curmie to call it violence-excusing crap. And that if Aldean ever actually ventured into the actual small town Curmie calls home, Curmie sure as hell wouldn’t go to his concert… but he also wouldn’t get a bunch of friends together to beat him up. Or even threaten to.
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