The left can’t stand Jason Aldean’s new music video because it proves they don’t completely control popular culture.
Update your playlists accordingly: Jason Aldean is canceled. Following howls of online outrage, CMT has pulled Aldean’s latest video from rotation. The song, “Try That in a Small Town,” was released in May, but the video dropped just days ago. It features Aldean singing in a small-town square at night, American flags in the background, news footage of riots, looting, and violent crime projected onto the county courthouse behind him. A sample lyric:
“Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road.”
To a legion of outraged urban critics, Aldean’s song promotes lynching. That’s a heavy charge, but the mob has its evidence: The video was filmed in front of the Maury County courthouse, where a real lynching did take place in 1927. Surely, this is a racist dog whistle! Surely, the choice of location signals Aldean’s longing to return to one of America’s darker chapters when summary justice was dispensed in the streets!
Or – bear with me – maybe Maury County is part of Greater Nashville, and for a video-production crew, it is a short drive from Music Row to a set that offers an authentic small-town aesthetic. You know the left, though. They’ll never attribute to practicality what they are oh-so-certain is better explained by bigotry.Why Now?
I’m not the first to point out that Aldean’s new single treads a well-worn path. For decades, country music has pushed back against the cultural and rhetorical excesses of the urban left. In an America where the “correct” art is produced in cities for other city folk, country music has sounded a consistent note of defiance. Think of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” or Hank Williams, Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Think of Willie Nelson joining Toby Keith in “Beer for My Horses.” Each of these classic songs – and hundreds more – push back against urban disorder and violence. (Left-leaning music critics will argue that Merle and Willie never really meant what they sang. Willie Nelson is, after all, now a darling of the left, and his indiscretions can be excused.)
If Aldean is walking such a familiar road, why the upset now? The first answer is that we live in a much-more polarized culture than we did when Merle, Hank Jr., and Willie topped the country charts. To the contemporary urban liberal imagination, shaped as it is by the hysterics of MSNBC and the only slightly-more sober pronouncements of The New York Times, angry white rural men now constitute the Great Existential Threat. Aldean’s song is part of the soundtrack that sustains and inspires that threat. (“Albert, I bet those January 6 insurrectionists were listening to Jason Aldean as they marched into the capital!”) Therefore, the song must be canceled, its listeners re-educated, its singer exiled.
The second answer is less about paranoia and more about power.
