On the menu today: Perhaps it’s the midsummer lull, but there seems to be an endless appetite for arguments about Jason Aldean’s country song, “Try That in a Small Town.” Credit Aldean for managing to push a whole lot of culture-war buttons in just a matter of minutes, with opening lyrics that sound like he’s narrating some B-roll on a Fox News Channel report on “rising crime in America’s cities.” Alas, the song’s implication that crime thrives in the big cities because of a lack of “good ol’ boys, raised up right” is not borne out by the real-world crime data, and offers listeners a flattering, soothing oversimplification.
A Country-Music Culture War
People really want to argue about Jason Aldean’s country song, “Try That in a Small Town,” huh?
For those who are completely unfamiliar with Jason Aldean, he is a multi-platinum-album-selling superstar in the world of country music, but perhaps not so well known in the broader pop culture. He’s been nominated for five Grammys, won a slew of Country Music Awards, played some of the biggest stadiums in the country, ranks among the highest-paid country stars, and has raised more than $4 million for breast-cancer research.
He’s also grown more open about his politics in recent years. Back in late November 2016, he dipped his toe in the water, telling Rolling Stone:
My Kinda Party had an anthem for rural and Middle America, “Flyover States,” that feels especially timely today. You told us back in September that the folks you sing about in that song are “stereotyped.” Do you think they’re marginalized? They played a big role in the presidential election.
The common man is highly underestimated. I heard a lady say it on the news the other day. She’s talking about Trump speaking to people who made under 60 grand a year. And she’s in New York, and she says, “To be honest, I don’t even know anybody that makes under 60 grand a year.” No offense, but that’s where I came from. And that’s the issue. The common person out there, the everyday guy who is going to work and wanting a normal life for his family, he doesn’t work on Wall Street . . . that guy still has a voice. And there is a lot of them out there who feel like they’re forgotten about.
When it comes to elections, anybody just wants to feel like they’re being heard, no matter who you are. You saw that in a huge way this time around. Trump, like the guy or not, he was out there busting his butt on the campaign trail, talking to these people and putting it in laymen’s terms for them, listening to what they had to say. He wasn’t just focusing on the big companies and the big cities. He was digging in to the heartland of America. You saw those people come out in a big way to support that because they want to feel like they have a voice too. He shocked the world with that.
But in that same interview, Aldean said he didn’t vote in the 2016 election because he had just moved and hadn’t registered in time. When asked whether he would have voted for Trump, he answered, “I don’t know if I’m going to cross that road with you. That’s one subject I do stay away from. Politics is a no-win.”
By 2022, Aldean and his wife, a former American Idol contestant, no longer saw giving political views as a “no-win,” growing much more open and outspoken about their political views on social media:
Wife Brittany Aldean‘s reposting of an image alleging two men involved in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attacks were Antifa (an image later deemed baseless) really turned the spotlight on the couple, and in the months that followed, they expressed their ideology with separate posts critical of vaccine mandates and images of Brittany and the couple’s two kids in anti-Biden t-shirts. Then, on New Year’s Eve, Aldean attended Trump’s party. The two men also played golf together.
And now, with “Try That in a Small Town,” Aldean is at the center of a national pop-culture political firestorm. Trump himself has weighed in to defend Aldean, declaring on Truth Social last week, “Jason Aldean is a fantastic guy who just came out with a great new song. Support Jason all the way. MAGA!!!”
My colleague Kathryn Lopez wrote a column under the headline, “Jason Aldean Isn’t Helping.” You should read the entire column, but here is the crux of Kathryn’s view:
Aldean is right that we have our challenges. I’ve watched more robberies in stores in the past year than in my entire life. But one of the other things I’ve seen is the obvious sadness and hopelessness that people feel. . . .
Part of the reason abortion is so prevalent in America is that people don’t know what a gift their own lives are. That’s why we don’t need songs about pulling out guns to take care of problems that come from a deficit of love.
I’m pretty sure John Mellencamp and I have different politics. Indeed, googling, I see that he describes himself as a socialist. But I am grateful to that socialist for inserting some gratitude into our culture in an aspirational way. And I hope that Republican Aldean in future songs can find himself encouraging people toward the good, rather than adding anger and violence, which are already a plague of our time.
Needless to say, this is not what some people wanted to hear. Kathryn has the, er, “problem” of being driven by deep faith and approaching just about every issue with a deep-rooted, genuine desire to help others, and a worldview infused by a desire to see the best in everyone, with mercy for those who have erred. Kathryn’s profoundly Christian way of seeing the world is so alien and unexpected in today’s anger-driven, social-media-clickbait environment that some people genuinely don’t know how to handle it. It’s like throwing Maria Von Trapp into the post-apocalyptic landscape of Mad Max.
In “Try That in a Small Town,” Aldean managed to push a whole lot of culture-war buttons in just a matter of minutes. The opening lyrics sound like he’s narrating some B-roll on a Fox News Channel report on “rising crime in America’s cities”; in the video, images of these crimes are projected onto the flag and courthouse behind Aldean. (More on that particular courthouse below):
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like
From there, Aldean shifts to taking a pro-police position — and brings up the issue of flag burning, which hasn’t been in the headlines much lately. Rest assured, Aldean is opposed:
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough
(I’m going to pause and point out that one of Aldean’s previous hits was “Dirt Road Anthem,” which included the lyrics “Yeah, I’m chilling on the dirt road, laid back swervin’ like I’m George Jones. Smoke rollin’ out the window, an ice-cold beer sittin’ in the console,” and “Jack and Jim were two good men, when we learned how to kiss and cuss and fight too. Better watch out for the boys in blue.” George Jones, sadly, was a notoriously self-destructive alcoholic with numerous run-ins with police and arrests for driving under the influence. So yes, it’s a little incongruous to hear an ode to police from a guy who once reminisced fondly of his good old days of drinking and driving and avoiding the cops.)
Then we get to the chorus of “Try That in a Small Town” and the implication that all the perpetrators of those terrible crimes might get away with them in the big city, but attempting those crimes in a small town will likely result in some rough justice. Aldean doesn’t quite come out and explicitly say vigilantes will track down and punish the perpetrators, but it sure as heck doesn’t sound like he’s warning about how diligent and effective the small town’s law enforcement is:
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
Then Aldean brings up an issue that could have generated a media firestorm all by itself, the prospect of national gun confiscation:
Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they’re gonna round up
Well, that s*** might fly in the city, good luck
Now, Aldean was never in favor of gun confiscation, but it wasn’t that long ago, 2018, when Aldean, in an interview with the Associated Press, sounded at least open to a more stringent system of background checks for firearms:
However, Aldean, who is a gun owner, said there are flaws in the nation’s laws regarding gun ownership that need addressing.
“It’s too easy to get guns, first and foremost,” Aldean said. “When you can walk in somewhere and you can get one in 5 minutes, do a background check that takes 5 minutes, like how in-depth is that background check? Those are the issues I have. It’s not necessarily the guns themselves or that I don’t think people should have guns. I have a lot of them.”
But I think what is really stirring intense emotional reaction are the closing lyrics:
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 townFull of good ol’ boys, raised up right
If you’re looking for a fight
Try that in a small town
Try that in a small town
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
“Full of good ol’ boys raised up right, if you’re looking for a fight.”
The irony is that the closing message, that Aldean and his good old boys are the toughest and nobody messes with them, is not that different from previous decades of gangster rappers telling us that they’re the toughest and nobody messes with them. It’s country mouse and city mouse, matching up puffed-up chests and daring anyone to challenge them. Lo and behold, the world is full of young men, brimming with testosterone, eager to prove that they are the strongest alphas, capable of protecting their turf.
Aldean filmed the video for this song in front of Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tenn. If you go back far enough, you can find some sordid racial history there: a 1946 race riot and a 1927 mob lynching of an 18-year-old black teenager named Henry Choate. Columbia, Tenn., has a population of about 41,000, which meets most people’s definition of a small town, but it is also considered part of the Nashville metropolitan area and the ten-county Nashville Economic Market.
As for the contention that small towns are safe and harmonious, and big cities are dangerous, violent, and chaotic . . . it really depends upon the small town and big city that you’re comparing. Unsurprisingly, a country as large and diverse as the U.S. has small towns that are safe, and small towns that have high levels of violent crime. (Meth use, and its related crimes, have cut through America’s rural communities and small towns like a buzz saw.) The U.S. has big cities with high rates of violent crime — Saint Louis, Mo., has nearly 15 violent crimes per 1,000 residents, and is rated safer than 1 percent of other U.S. communities — and big cities with considerably lower rates of violent crime. Ironically, the city with the highest rate of violent crime per 1,000 residents is . . . Bessimer, Ala., population 26,019. That city clocks in at 33.1 violent crimes per 1,000 residents, while the infamous New York City clocks in at 5.21 violent crimes per 1,000 residents.
Keep in mind, different studies have different criteria for what makes a town or city safe — violent crime, property crimes, vehicular-mortality rate, drug use, and overdose rate. I would also note that a lot of factors that don’t show up in police reports, such as abandoned property, graffiti, trash pickup, economic growth, and city services, contribute to the perception of a town or city’s safety.
In terms of sheer number of crimes, yes, of course, big cities have more crime, but that’s in large part because they have more people. Also note that the smaller populations of small towns can make their per capita crime rate seem terrifyingly high. If, God forbid, someone was a victim of a violent crime in tiny Dixville Notch, N.H., — population four — then the violent-crime rate would technically be 250 per 1,000 residents.
Aldean is flattering the small-town audience, assuring them that those terrible video-surveillance images they see on the news couldn’t happen in their towns, because in their towns, “We take care of our own.” Implicit in that contention is that big-city dwellers don’t take care of their own, which has a bit of a whiff of victim-blaming. There are tens of millions of decent, law-abiding American citizens living in big cities. They are not enduring high crime rates because they aren’t “taking care of their own.” They are generally being failed by local elected officials, ideologically driven prosecutors, and police forces that are variously undermanned, underfunded, facing recruitment problems, or attempting to overcome longstanding trust issues and past scandals.
Being the center of a hot pop-culture controversy is a really good way to increase sales of a song and album:
Luminate, which tracks music sales and streams, says the song’s on-demand audio and video streams have increased by 999 percent — from 987,000 to 11.7 million — in the week after the chatter about the song exploded online.
Sales for the song are up as well: For the week before the controversy, the track only sold 1,000 units; last week it sold 228,000 units, according to Luminate.
Probably the very best thing that could happen to increase Aldean’s sales was the Country Music Television channel announcing it would not air the video.
There’s no reason to doubt that Aldean means what he says, or sings, in “Try That in a Small Town.” And Aldean isn’t claiming to have put together a cohesive argument about the causes of crime and violence in America. He’s a country star, not a criminologist or legislator. I’ll leave it to you to determine whether he’s implying that if the rest of America had more good old boys “looking for a fight” and carrying out vigilante justice, it would have a deterrent effect on violent crime.
But there’s no getting around the fact that Aldean is offering his listeners an emotionally satisfying oversimplification. And it’s more than a little ironic that this is a hit in the genre of country music, which is filled to the brim with the stories of seemingly good but flawed people wrapped up in crimes of passion, or being falsely accused, or being imprisoned for a moment’s recklessness. Johnny Cash’s fictional narrator mama told him, “Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.” But nonetheless, he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. And Johnny Cash made us empathize with the sadness and regret of that narrator!
Our culture is full of stories about the dangers of citizens pursuing their vision of justice through violence, outside of the law, such as The Ox-Bow Incident. Twelve Angry Men and To Kill a Mockingbird are similar stories, warning about the dangers of jumping to conclusions in matters of guilt and innocence. Even in lighter fare, from The A-Team to The Fugitive to Harry Potter, we regularly see good, law-abiding protagonists falsely accused and on the run from police. There’s a reason we are supposed to rely on the law and our system of justice — with fair trials, with the presentation of evidence before a jury of the accused’s peers, with the state needing to prove the guilt of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt. Vigilantes don’t bother with any of that.
If all it took to prevent violent crime was the presence of good old boys raised right, there would be no crime in America’s small towns. Or in our big cities, either.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, almost two-thirds of likely voters support the Supreme Court striking down Biden’s plan to cancel student-loan debt, and President Biden’s staff is attempting to limit how many stairs he ascends and descends.