Guest Column: ‘Small Town’ Song’s Cancel Culture Context

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by JOEL SAWYER

I largely stay away from manufactured culture war controversies. As soon as I see the same cast of characters crowing about owning libs on one side, versus the crowd who claims math is racist on the other side, I kind of tune it out as grift-y nonsense aimed at generating clicks and cheap merchandise sales.

The controversy over Jason Aldean’s song, “Try That In A Small Town” hit me a little differently, because far from being confined to a made-for-Twitter drama, one of my kids brought it up to me. So I felt compelled to dive in.

For transparency’s sake: Country music is not my cup of sweet tea. I like and appreciate a lot of older country music, but the vast majority of country music produced since the mid-1980’s is manufactured, soulless, inauthentic garbage. The meta-joke added to the end of Steve Goodman’s “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” when David Allan Coe covered the song in 1975 has proven a bit on the nose. Songs about trucks, drinking cheap domestic beer from the can, and fishing are written and performed by folks who drive luxury cars, drink IPAs from a glass, and probably don’t have a clue how to bait a hook.

Put simply, the pop-country genre Aldean represents is inauthentic drivel masquerading as authenticity, harkening back to a time that never existed for many of its purveyors, and increasingly, seems to not have existed for a lot of its fans either.

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So to start, let’s dispense with the idea that there is anything authentic about this song, or about Aldean as it relates to this song. Though to his credit he has written a number of his own hits, this isn’t one of them. Attesting to Coe’s prescience regarding country hits needing to check certain boxes, this Aldean song was written by a team of four songwriters, and Aldean isn’t among them.

As for lionizing small town America, I’m a proud small town boy myself (Lyman, South Carolina, population hovering around 1000 when I was a kid). I’m not sure which small town he’s talking about in the song, but Aldean hails from Macon, Georgia – a city bigger than literally any city in my state.

Whatever this city boy is trying to sell me, I ain’t buying it. Momma and Daddy taught us small town boys to not get suckered by city slickers cosplaying as one of us. 

Digging into the lyrics of the song, it’s hard to oversimplify the pablum being pedaled here, but at the risk of doing so, the song is fundamentally about vigilante justice. The lyrics mention a litany of behaviors that Aldean believes wouldn’t fly in a small town, ranging from actual crimes like carjacking (note: to be clear, crimes are bad) to Constitutionally protected free speech like yelling at a police officer or burning an American flag.

Aldean’s lyrics (I’m going to call them his lyrics because he sang them, even though he didn’t write them) seem to intentionally conflate crime and protected speech into a weird mishmash, while suggesting that the answer to dealing with both is “a gun that my granddad gave me.”

I’m a conservative, and two ideals I hold in higher regard than almost any other are respect for the rule of law, including due process, and protecting free speech – even speech I might view as unpatriotic and disgusting like burning an American flag. I find it baffling that anyone who hails from a conservative political tradition would find either vigilantism or violent suppression of free speech laudable or song-worthy, but I suppose that’s the world we live in today.

So while I find the song hackneyed, fake, and anathema to my values, the video accompanying it is absolutely contemptible.

Let’s start with the location, the site of the infamous lynching of Henry Choate in 1927. I use the words “infamous lynching” purposefully, because of the thousands of lynchings that occurred between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Act, many of those names have been lost to history, simply disappearing, while others have certainly been lost to the public consciousness.

Henry Choate is not one of those names. He was accused of raping a white teenage girl, without evidence. The girl herself did not identify him as her attacker.

Henry Choate was dragged out of his jail cell by a mob of 250 men. He was murdered feet outside his cell with a sledgehammer to the head. His dead body was tied to a car and dragged through the streets, before it reached its final destination – hung from the courthouse balcony, a location prominently featured in Aldean’s video.

This is the location chosen for a video celebrating small-town, vigilante justice.

(Click to View)

Now, I’m not suggesting for a second the choice was made intentionally. I’m suggesting that it was made out of completely avoidable ignorance and a raging case of tone-deafness – as evidenced by the production company’s response, in which they noted among other things that the Hannah Montana movie had been filmed there. I’ve never seen the Hannah Montana movie, but I’m fairly confident in assuming it in no way celebrates small town residents solving their problems with violence.

Jason Aldean didn’t pick the location. He doesn’t own that decision, but he owns his response. He could have said, “Yeah, we absolutely should have picked a different location given the racial violence that occurred where we filmed.”

Predictably, he didn’t apologize and instead doubled down, railing on “cancel culture” during the Riverbend Music Festival in Cincinnati. How he kept a straight face complaining about being “cancelled” – while on stage in front of thousands of fans – is, I suppose, a testament to his range as a performer.

But perhaps the worst part of the entire video is the accompanying imagery, featured in B-roll and projected on the courthouse behind Aldean and his band as they lip-sync the song.

Like with the song’s lyrics, the video conflates acts of violence and property destruction (which again, for the record, are bad things that everyone should be against) with constitutionally protected protest – much of which was centered on the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd. There is no conclusion one can reasonably draw other than it’s all supposed to be equally bad in the eyes of the viewer.

(Click to View)

Weirdly, no footage from the manifestly un-American January 6 riots – where property was destroyed, police were beaten, and Congress was impeded from doing its job – was featured in Aldean’s “bad things” montage. I’d personally like to get back to an America where those criminals would be universally rebuked by both sides of the political aisle, but I digress.

Aldean’s initial response to the controversy was very telling, and as a former public relations flak myself, I did appreciate the sleight of hand his PR team pulls here: “There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it.”

Fair enough, the lyrics don’t – but there’s a problem. The “bad stuff” shown in the video is a multiracial mix of white, black and other minority faces. But when the video closes with a montage of Americana from a small town that Aldean isn’t from – a family playing flag football, old veterans looking up approvingly at the flag, a farmer surveying his field – there is not a single black face to be found. There are a couple of silhouetted figures for whom the race is indistinguishable. But among those who can be seen, the only black people in the video are doing bad, un-American things, and no black people are doing good, pro-America things.

Context matters. You have a song celebrating vigilantism, filmed in front of a courthouse where hundreds of white vigilantes murdered and desecrated the body of black man, accompanied by imagery that features zero black people doing the kinds of things Aldean looks favorably upon.

Does that mean Jason Aldean is a racist? I have no idea. I can’t look into his heart and know one way or another. But to accompany that song with that video, regardless of what’s in his heart, he deserves every bit of smoke he’s catching for it – especially since he’s refusing to acknowledge any of the readily apparent context of combining those lyrics with those images.

One thing I can say for certain that Aldean is not is a victim. By resorting to the all-too-familiar playbook of whingeing about cancel culture, he’ll cash in, likely becoming wealthier than ever before, and even further removed from a life resembling that of the actual small town Americans who do not see through his chicanery.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …

Joel Sawyer is a political consultant who was Communications Director for former Governor Mark Sanford, and is past Executive Director of the SCGOP. 

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