So if you haven’t heard, a song that country music star Jason Aldean released a few months back has people talking. After some concerns were raised about it’s message and where it was filmed, CMT, the country version of what MTV once was, pulled the song from their rotation and conservatives lost their minds. I don’t think the song was really on very many liberal’s radar and am not sure who was actually mad about it to begin with but a lot of people are mad about the supposed anger that I’m not sure was actually really there. There is a now an unironic boycott of CMT to show them what happens to those that participate in “cancel culture.”
It’s called “Try That in a Small Town” and the general idea is that things like violent protest, armed robbery and general hooliganism might be tolerated in a big city but if you try that shit down south you’re likely to meet the business end of a gun that once belonged to somebody’s grand pappy. Also, don’t think these people are ever going to give up those guns.
The song has gone to #1 on a bunch of charts and I’ll admit that I have played a part in that. I’ve watched the video multiple times now and feel like the real problem with the song is going mostly unmentioned.
I don’t think that the song is overtly racist. The original complaint seems to be that the Tennessee courthouse where it was filmed was the site of a lynching in 1927 and a race riot in 1946 that almost led to the lynching of future Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas but those events were a long time ago and a lot of bad things happened in a lot of places in the south. Coloring his face black to dress as Lil Wayne for Halloween in 2015 was probably a poor decision but I’m not willing to say that Aldean purposefully chose that location for the video because he is pro-lynching.
The problem isn’t the footage that is used to depict the lawlessness that good ole boys are the last defense against. I’m assuming that there was great care taken to not depict all of the rioters and ne’er do wells as people of color so it’s not surprising that a lot of the footage isn’t actually from our country or any of the Black Lives Matter protests that I’m guessing we are supposed to think that they are. Some of the scenes are from Ukraine, Spain and Germany over the past decade or so. There are a lot of Canadian scenes from student protests about tuition hikes and some others from a G20 summit ten years ago. The woman spitting in a cop’s face is actually from a rally in Manhattan but she is there to protest the continued counting of votes in 2020 that were going against Donald Trump. I guess she’s lucky she didn’t try that in a small town.
The problem isn’t that Jason Aldean didn’t grow up in a small town but Macon, Georgia, a city of 150,000. Kid Rock grew up in an affluent neighborhood with parent’s that owned multiple car dealerships but claims to be from the trailer park and has seen an increase in popularity since posting a video of him shooting Bud Light cans in a whole other ridiculous controversy. Travis Tritt hasn’t had a hit song since the late 90’s but was an opening act for Kid Rock on his most recent tour after carrying on about transgender folk. Pandering to your audience is smart business and everyone across all genres does it.
The problem is that the song sucks. Jason Aldean has some clunkers but for the most part I like a lot of his songs. I don’t listen to as much country music as I used to but “The Truth” and “Why” are all time classics.
This song isn’t one of them. Besides how vapid the lyrics are there is no rhyme or any sort or rhythm. It’s got one of the most generic guitar riffs ever and doesn’t sound like a man singing his truth about where he grew up but a disgruntled teenager writing Kyle Rittenhouse fan fiction. If there had never been any controversy around this song I probably wouldn’t have heard it until the temperature dropped to a number that made a night time sit around the fire pit reasonable and I would have rolled my eyes and hit the skip button. Maybe I’m not the best barometer for what makes a good country music song but I find it hard to believe that most of the people defending it aren’t doing so just because they feel that they are “owning the libs.”
At some point it would be nice if people started thinking for themselves again and didn’t just get angry because somebody told them that somebody else was being too “woke.”
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Previously Published on Thirsty Daddy and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Flickr