Jason Aldean and the Three Possibilities

The list of things Curmie has started to write about, or started the research to write about, without ever finishing the job keeps growing. Add the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes to that compilation. He’ll get back to them if they remain relevant. But for now, let’s talk about the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” kerfuffle. You can find the song on YouTube or Spotify. Curmie won’t provide links, though, because he doesn’t want to be directly responsible for even one more hit. Curmie listened; call it taking one for the team. 

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.

Not a Good Week for Netflix

Before long, no one will know what this is.

When last we checked in on Netflix, about eleven months ago, the company had just experienced its first ever decline in subscriptions. 

Believing there to be at least some merit in the allegations from some on the right that they’d gone too Woke, corporation executives reaffirmed their intention to work with the likes of Dave Chapelle (whose special was the subject of no little discontent among employees) and actually chastised their workers who didn’t agree with the policy of “let[ting] viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.” 

This week, Netflix is in the news again, and Curmie is unimpressed. On Tuesday afternoon, Curmie received an email from the company saying they would be suspending their DVD service about six months hence. They of course have the right to do whatever they want, but this is just dumb. Yes, “the DVD business continues to shrink,” but whereas Netflix faces competition in the streaming business from Amazon, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, and a host of others, they pretty much monopolize the DVD-by-mail business. 

They have a stock of millions of copies of tens of thousands of titles, and they’re going to just stop? One thing Netflix appeared to understand in those halcyon days of… well, a week ago was that there’s a lot of good (at least in someone’s mind) material that is available on disc but not to stream. As an example, on the date he received the email, Curmie had 258 separate titles (i.e., not counting, for example, later seasons for a television series) in his queue. Of these, precisely four are available to stream on Netflix. Curmie hasn’t checked the entire list yet, but it appears that a little over 20% of the titles are not available to stream anywhere. 

There’s a reason these items were in Curmie’s queue: they’re things he and/or Beloved Spouse want to see, but we don’t need it see them immediately. Some of these titles are available to watch either free (perhaps with ads) or as part of subscriptions we already have (basic Prime, Britbox, PBS, etc.). Most, however, would incur a fee per viewing (e.g., Prime Video) or would involve a substantial monthly fee (e.g., HBO Max or Disney+) for a much narrower range of options than the status quo provides. Not to mention that there are more such companies than one might imagine: Curmie has already counted over a dozen different such vendors for films currently in his queue, each with their own monthly charges. Jolly. 

To be sure, Netflix has been pandering to a younger demographic, one which may not even have DVD players, for some time now. (This is perfectly fine, by the way.)  The algorithm that suggests how much we (as opposed to the average viewer) would like a particular DVD is actually rather good. Almost always the rating we’d give a film is within one or two tenths of a point on their 5-star scale of the algorithm’s projection: even when our taste differs significantly from that of the general population. But some marketing genius decided that for streaming content, a simple thumbs up/down system was just peachy. Curmie can’t figure out what the “percentage match” scale is even trying to tell us, but he does know that he’s seen stuff with a personal 97% match that’s absolute dreck. 

Of course, there are also the young’uns who at least pretend to have been unaware that Netflix still shipped DVDs. “You just might have assumed that era ended years ago” chirps one Michael Walsh, who is clearly one of those damned kids who needs to get off my lawn. (No shootings here, however; that’s the story Curmie hasn’t written about yet.) 

Ah, but there’s a financial angle. You see, Netflix brought in a mere $145.7 million in revenue in 2022 from DVD rentals. Curmie isn’t a corporate accountant, but that seems like a fair amount of money in this neighborhood. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably not worth the expense of getting a gazillion copies of every hot new movie that comes out. So… don’t. Stop buying new stuff, but continue the DVD service for older films and for material that doesn’t stream anywhere for whatever reason. You’ll still make tens of millions of dollars for not much work. This also calms the anger of those folks who watched you put your competition out of business and then proceeded to abandon the customers you purport to value so much. This strikes Curmie as a no-brainer, which is, no doubt, why his degrees are in theatre instead of finance. 

Anyway, we move on to the other Netflix story of the week: the brouhaha over the casting of the Cleopatra episode(s) in a Netflix series called “African Queens.” The title character of this venture is played by Adele James, a mixed-race actress who presents as black. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this. Cleopatra was Macedonian and almost certainly not black, but the “almost” in this statement allows for some wiggle-room if indeed any was needed. Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms points out that “no one cared” when Leslie Uggams played the role in Her First Roman, a musical that had a brief Broadway run in the autumn of 1968. Curmie doesn’t want to associate with anyone who objects to James playing the role. But… 

The problem is in the marketing. The Daily Mail reports that “The trailer released last week features claims that Cleopatra was black with ‘curly hair.’ One historian asserts in the preview: ‘I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don't care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’” This isn’t strictly accurate: the trailer does not identify those voices we hear as historians. If that’s what they are, one would imagine that the producers would make damned sure to identify them as such. They don’t. Next! 

Moreover, the opening sequence of the trailer describes this episode as part of a “Netflix Documentary Series.” Whatever this is, it isn’t a documentary. If you want to play around with history, Curmie doesn’t get terribly upset as long as the product—play, novel, film, whatever—stays in the realm of story-telling and doesn’t pretend to be a representation of fact. Both “this isn’t likely, but it’s plausible” and “wouldn’t it have been interesting if…” are reasonable places from which to start a story. 

Ay, there’s the rub (Curmie had to do something for Shakespeare’s birthday, after all…): this program asserts as true that which is extraordinarily unlikely, and does so while pretending to be grounded in fact. Jada Pinkett-Smith, the show’s producer, claims she was interested in this story because “we don't often get to see or hear stories about black queens.” Were he of cynical disposition, Curmie might wonder why she chose to tell, instead, the story of an almost-certainly white queen as if she were black. 

That, by the way, is precisely how the imdb page described this program at least through three days ago: “A fictional account of what the life of Cleopatra was imagined to have been like if she was a black woman.” Now they’ve changed it to read: “Fictionalized Netflix-story about Queen Cleopatra of Egypt of the Ptolemaic lineage from Macedonia, Greece, that ruled for 21 years, between the years 51 BC and 30 BC, ending with her suicide.” Interesting capitulation, don’t you think, Gentle Reader? They still list it as a documentary, however. Don’t try to figure that one out; it’ll only give you a headache. 

By way of contrast, here’s the imdb description of the first film in the series, “African Queens: Njinga”: “Expert interviews and other documentary content with premium scripted docudrama about different queens.” Holy 17th Century, Batman! That sounds like it might actually be a documentary! 

The controversy over the Cleopatra episodes is reminiscent in some ways of a similar casting decision a couple of years ago, when black actress Jodie Turner-Smith was cast in the title role of a BBC mini-series on Anne Boleyn. There are several differences, though. 

First is a fundamental difference in the way the casting of a major role was presented. The BBC would have us believe that race doesn’t matter, so long as it’s “surprising.” (Having the role played by a holographic image of Hervé Villechaize would also have worked, apparently.) The forthcoming Netflix series is at least honest that being black (or mixed race and appearing black, in this case) was a prerequisite for an actress being considered for the role of Cleopatra, who almost certainly was, shall we say, significantly lighter-complected. 

Thus, presenting “Queen Cleopatra” with a black or black-presenting title character isn’t inherently problematic. We know who Cleopatra’s father was, but her mother’s identity is unknown, so she could, hypothetically, have looked rather like Adele James. There’s no evidence of that, but neither can it be denied with absolute certainty. But whereas the BBC just wanted to be “surprising” (i.e., they wanted a gimmick), this project not merely presents Cleopatra as black, but hints at some sort of conspiracy among, well, actual historians and archaeologists to deny that “fact.” 

Of course, another difference is that no sentient adult would believe that Anne Boleyn was black, but there’s a tiny chance that Cleopatra was. Interestingly, this makes the current incident more problematic, since a black 16th century English noblewoman is, by definition, fictional, whereas a black Egyptian queen from the 1st century BCE is remotely possible, and cannot as easily be rejected outright. (It can, and should, be rejected as fact.) 

What actually is a fact is that at least some actual current-day Egyptians are incensed by the casting in a way that Brits were not a couple of years ago. There were, no doubt, a fair number of UK residents who were put off by the casting of Turner-Smith as perhaps the most famous English queen not named Elizabeth or Victoria. But there were, to the best of my knowledge, at least, no claims similar to Mahmoud al-Semary’s accusation that Netflix was trying to “promote the Afrocentric thinking … which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity.” 

It’s difficult to say, of course, to what extent the reported outrage is representative of the feelings of the Egyptian public at large. The Daily Mail can be counted on to tell one side of that story at the expense of the other, and there is a good chance that some of the response is indeed motivated by anti-black racism, which certainly exists in Egypt. Still, whereas the attempt to shut down Netflix in Egypt is perhaps an over-reaction, these people are serious about the accurate portrayal of their history. In this country, of course, utterly specious claims (especially but hardly exclusively about race) from both the left and the right pop up faster than zits on prom night. 

Whatever ultimately happens in Egypt, Netflix and Pinkett-Smith have done considerable harm to their reputations. Well, they would have if they had one to begin with. 

It’s been a bad week for Netflix. But hey, the disc we got from them that we watched Friday night was really good. There’s that… 

(Note: a good share of the discussion of “Queen Cleopatra” was adapted from a comment I wrote on the Ethics Alarms blog linked above)