Jason Aldean’s ‘small town’ different from Mellencamp’s
I can only sigh at the bleak inevitability of Jason Aldean’s putative lynching anthem “Try That in a Small Town,” a tune that merges some of formulaic bro-country’s most enduring and obvious tropes — guns, granddads, and good ol’ boys — with a long festering right-wing paranoia à la Richard Hofstadter that threatens to metastasize into something truly inoperable, imperiling American democracy in the process.
The song’s puffed-up swagger paints an exaggerated portrait of Red State males extrajudicially meting out “justice” for crimes whereby perpetrators “cuss out a cop” or “stomp on the flag,” a depiction evoking racist Sundown Town vigilantism, belying the true state of today’s rural white male, a demographic beset by declining socioeconomic prospects, grappling with myriad pathologies including ill-health, addiction, domestic abuse, and suicide. If Aldean elevates these folks into self-reliant avengers unbound by law and order when they deem their way of life threatened — Aldean on gun control: “they say one day they’re gonna round up/ well that s— might fly in the city, good luck” — the harsh Hillbilly Elegy reality for most is both tragic and unsparing.
Hearing Aldean’s menacing take on small town America circa 2023, I can only think of John Mellencamp’s 1985 hit “Small Town,” a veritable love letter to his Seymour, Indiana, adolescence where even a future rocker can (paraphrase) “be himself in a small town and people let him be just who he wants to be.” Both Aldean and Mellencamp traffic in the “small town imaginary” — an intersubjective mythos of (mis-)remembered histories shaping how we understand the material/cultural geographies existing outside of big cities. Aldean reverts to reflexive GOP agitprop where cities breed crime and lawlessness (“sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk/ carjack an old lady at a red light”). Mellencamp embraces community and acceptance (“married an LA Doll brought her to this small town/ now she’s small town just like me”).
Although Mellencamp would doubtless dispute, much about the lyrics and video of “Small Town” evoke the optimistic underpinnings of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign commercial that came out a year before his single’s release, what with their simple imagery, humble ethos, and affirmative message. Conversely, just about everything in Aldean’s “Try That in A Small Town” — actually written by a team of four outside songwriters — elicits Donald Trump’s dark and divisive bombast. From a music video featuring clips of rioting and looting interspersed with footage of Aldean playing outside of Tennessee’s Maury County Courthouse — a site of both lynchings and race riots — to menacing lyrics dripping with loaded meanings, the song readily conjures up the rhetorical violence of the former president, who called Aldean “a fantastic guy who just came out with a great new song” after this controversy erupted.
At a time when country artists readily reference Mellencamp — Keith Urban’s “John Cougar, John Deere, and John 3:16” and Jake Owen’s “I was Jack (You Were Diane)” – as if his name and persona somehow equates with down-home American identity — it bears noting that the famously cantankerous singer/ painter has long espoused political causes and beliefs that fly in the face of what most anyone affiliated with Nashville’s Music Row would find acceptable. Besides vocally opposing U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, he also recently spoke out against American gun violence in “Hey God” from 2023’s Orpheus Descending, saying “weapons and guns are they really my rights?/ laws written a long time ago/ no one could imagine the sight/ of so many dead on the floor.”
With CMT quickly pulling Aldean’s video out of rotation and artists like Sheryl Crow and Jason Isbell taking him to task for promoting such reductive expressions of confrontation and violence, Aldean — who survived the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting that left 58 dead and almost 500 injured as he performed on stage — defended the song, saying in part, that it “refers to the feeling of community I had while growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of background or belief. Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences.” In the small town imaginary that Mellencamp crafted some four decades ago, such simple sentiments feel both possible and real. In Aldean’s version, they ring mostly hollow, doing little to impede the song’s inevitable embrace by GOP candidates and constituencies gearing up for 2024.