The recent Jason Aldean song "Try That in a Small Town" has caused a stink. Because some people can stretch any idea into the territory of evil thoughts, country artist Aldean is now accused of preaching the idea of lynching as a proper response to civil unrest and rioting. Most of the dust-up happened when the video was noticed, since it played scenes from recent unrest and rioting projected onto a small-town courthouse while Aldean sang about the contrast between urban and rural life. He focused on the difference between the kind of unrest and rioting recently prevalent in cities and the firm resolve to "act right" held by small town people -- specifically, "good ol' boys raised up right." CMT, the country music video channel, pulled the video from rotation because some people decided Aldean was, indeed, singing the praises of lynching. The video currently has 16 million views on YouTube and the song is one of the top downloaded tracks on several music sites.
Some folks see proof of the lynching call by the video's use of the Columbia, Tennessee courthouse - the site of the 1927 Henry Choate lynching. I don't think Jason Aldean knows that much history. While the song doesn't promote lynching, it is awful. Although Aldean is a star, few, if any country musicians of the 2050s are going to be singing a song called "Jason Aldean" the way Aldean covered the song "Johnny Cash."
Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing in National Review, points out that "Try That in a Small Town" picks up none of the small-town attributes that could actually help make our nation and culture better. She cites John Mellencamp's "Small Town" from 1986's Scarecrow as a song that proclaims the kind of gentle, slowed-down vision of small-town life that actually counter the Instant Rage that is so easily created by people on every side of every issue at any time.
As a bona fide X-er, I'm also on board with Mellencamp's understanding of the actual virtues of small town life, although I think Alan Jackson's semi-biographical ode to his father, "Small-Town Southern Man" from 2008's Good Time, is just a hair better. Neither shows the whole picture. But which has the best potential of helping people heal the hurts society and hatred have put on them? Being "raised on ways of gentle kindness" (Jackson)? "Yeah I can be myself in this small town/and people let me be just what I wanna be" (Mellencamp)? Or "See how far you make it down the road" (Not actually Aldean because he doesn't write his songs)?
Neither Mellencamp nor Jackson dwell on the totality of small-town life (for that, check into Lora Webb Nichols photographs of her life in small-town Wyoming). And neither spend any time on the underbelly of rural life. They do in fact leave out unemployment, racism, cronyism, alcoholism and drug abuse, the sexual assaults covered up to protect the "good boys who made a mistake," and other such sins as may be found wherever there are human beings. And the way a small-town can twist such sins by everybody cementing their evaluation of a person based on the worst thing they've ever done or that everyone thinks they've done.
The virtues they extoll are not the whole picture, of course. But "Small Town" and "Small-Town Southern Man" do extoll virtues. All "Try That" does is tell you, "We'll beat your ass if you do stuff we don't think is right." That's the message that rioters and anarchists know well, and adding fuel to that fire helps nobody and nothing.
Plus, as mentioned above, it's a lousy song and it's tough to believe it took four guys to write it.
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