Small Town Song, Big Time Noise

As far as I know or have heard, small towns in America are not becoming the targets of roaming hoodlums hell bent on bringing violence, chaos and anarchy to them. Roaring into town menacingly, like the biker juvenile delinquents in The Wild One. Only not white. 

No, there is no such thing going on, no rampant phenomena of attacks on small towns, unless you count mass shootings, like what Jason Aldean witnessed while he was performing at the 2017 Las Vegas music festival. But if you just flew in from another planet and didn't understand the subtext of this whole thing, you'd reasonably surmise that "Try That in a Small Town" was being sung in reaction to some immanent threats, incidents of violence beginning to come into small towns, until they had enough and rose up in righteous rebellion. 

But no. This rebellion is not real, and the enemy is imaginary. They only people holding up gas stations in Jason Aldean’s small town America are hometown meth heads. The violence in large urban cities is their own problem to solve. The song is transparent agitprop. For those who don't know what that is, it means propaganda designed to rile somebody up. The kind of thing Fox News does best. First there’s fake news, so it stands to reason now there’ll be fake songs.

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

This is what you call a list of racial dog whistles. Coded stereotypes. The phrases "think it's cool.. act a fool" are taken directly from black vernacular, but are at the same time homogeneous to language in general, so no fingers can be pointed, which is the point. “I'm singin' to you, you know what I'm talkin' about,” Aldean winks to his audience.  

Well, try that in a small town

See how far ya make it down the road

Suddenly, it’s turned into very dangerous, threatening language. It makes no bones about the outcome - you'll be caught - not by the law, but by "the  good ol' boys, raised up right," and justice will be meted out. You won’t make it out of town. Now the picture of horror behind the ‘aw shucks’ small town ethos emerges. That picture, being drawn here on the imagination - by omission, by not saying it outright - is small town rule of law. See how far ya make it down the road. What is the actual racial history of small town rule of law in the south? Lynchings, beatings, dragging by car until dead. Emmit Till. Horror beyond normal human comprehension, on par with abominations of the most deranged serial killers humanity has ever seen. Monsters, pure and simple. The devil at work. This isn’t exaggeration, this isn’t distortion of the truth, these are facts, documented copiously, events of the recent past that occurred in certain small American towns. 

A song like this is the grandchild of George Orwell's Two Minutes Hate, in 1984, where for two minutes, citizens could scream and vent their hatred for the imaginary enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein. This from the book - "the horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in... A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness... seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will... And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp." Here, it's a catchy, well produced song, a 3:01 minute hate, with a sing along chorus. Orwell would be positively fascinated by the subtlety of our Big Brother. 

All this has more to do with the Republican/Democrat division, Governor DeSantis and his ilk, the erasing of black history in grade schools, the attack on "woke" culture, than it does to any events actually going on in small town America. No one wants violence, no one should accept violence in their community - but this song is an out and out lie, a response to a shadow of a threat. Its roots are in two things. First, the deeply ingrained racism that’s stuck in the heart of America like a malignant parasite. You can pull out the worm, but there’s still claws embedded in the flesh that will fester and grow into another. The second thing is the dominance of the male, the numb-brained notion that the way to fix things is to fight. They’re both the bedrock of America, what this country was founded on, and will be hard going down.