An Unforced Error in a Small Town
One of the latest kerfuffles to erupt regards Jason Aldean’s country song, “Try That In a Small Town.” The song itself is pretty forgettable but the setting for the music video has caused problems because of its connection to a lynching which does not pair well with the video’s depiction of scenes from the BLM protests.
While the lyrics to the song talk about the seamier side of city life, they don’t explicitly mention race. Instead, Aldean recites a litany of crimes and offensive behavior of city folks:
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 likeCuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough
Beyond the first couple of stanzas, the song is pretty much repetitive tough talk about what the “good ol’ boys, raised up right” will do to city dwellers who try that stuff in their small towns. It’s a macho, chest-thumping message that isn’t for everyone, but okay.
The bigger problem that the setting for the video is the county courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. This building in the county seat of Maury County was also the setting for an unfortunate event in 1927, and that’s where the controversy comes in.
As NBC News explains, in 1927, Henry Choate, an 18-year-old black man was accused of assaulting a 16-year-old white girl. Choate was jailed in Columbia, but a white mob broke him out of his cell, dragged him through town behind a car, and eventually lynched him in front of the same courthouse that provided Aldean’s backdrop. Taken together with the lyrics and pictures that allude to the BLM protests, many see a sinister side to the song.
In a tweet, Aldean defended the song and video, “These references are not only meritless but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it- and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage -and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music- this one goes too far.”
Aldean goes on to say, “‘Try That In A Small Town,’ for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief. Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences.”
I’m a small-town guy myself, but to me, it’s a bit troubling that Aldean’s view of small-town community involves taking the law into his hands to force violence on outsiders. This isn’t real community, but a parody of it.
Rather than being the “Andy Griffith Show,” Aldean’s song and video are more like “The Hills Have Eyes” or “Deliverance.” The image of angry, rifle-toting rednecks isn’t really an image that most small towns want to convey these days.
America isn’t about small towns fighting big cities. The most unity that I can remember in America was after September 11 when small towns and big cities pulled together to help the victims of the terror attacks. Small town firefighters traveled to Manhattan and around the country people donated blood and prayed for the survivors and the families of the victims. Since then, I’ve seen that pattern repeated as Americans rally to help their brothers and sisters who have experienced disasters. In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, I saw Americans from towns of all of sizes load trucks with relief supplies and head to Houston. Now that is community.
As the artist formerly known as John Cougar Mellencamp sang in a much better ode to small towns, “Got nothing against a big town… But my bed is in a small town, and that’s good enough for me.”
I don’t know whether Aldean was aware of Maury County’s sordid history when he filmed his video, but as much as I like small-town life, there can be a dark side to small towns.
Anyone who has ever moved into a small town from the outside knows how distrustful and cliquish small towns can be. If you aren’t from there, it can be really hard to become accepted. The cliques have the backs of their members but not necessarily everyone.
And yes, small towns can be violent and corrupt. Back when I wrote for The Resurgent, my wife was featured in one of my articles in which she detailed how a small-town police force seemed to have covered up her rape by a local basketball star. Sometimes, it isn’t that bad things don’t happen in small towns, but rather that they don’t get talked about.
All too often, as in Columbia, a lot of the violence that didn’t get talked about was violence against blacks. In many small towns, there was a lot of overlap between the local police and the Ku Klux Klan. They had each other’s backs but no one had the back of black men like Henry Choate.
When you combine those two factors, you find that small towns may not really be as safe and community-driven as Aldean’s lyrics would have us believe. In fact, statistics tell us that on a per capita basis (that is, when the data are adjusted for population size) small towns can be more violent than big cities.
Per a recent study by NeighborhoodScout that uses the most recent census and FBI crime data, the most violent town (of more than 25,000 people) in the country is Bessemer, Alabama. The suburb of Birmingham has just over 25,000 residents and has a violent crime rate of 33.1. This means that your odds of being a victim of a violent crime are about one in 30. New York and San Francisco don’t even make the top 100.
Sure, Bessemer’s eight murders seem like a lot less than the 462 reported in New York City, but when Bessemer’s smaller population is taken into account, Bessemer residents are much more likely to be directly affected by violent crime than a New Yorker.
And Bessemer isn’t an isolated example. Three of the top 10 most violent cities on the list are in Alabama and eight are in the South. Small towns have some serious problems.
Granted, these statistics are for towns with more than 25,000 people, but smaller towns can be violent as well. The small town where I grew up, population 4,500, has had at least three murders and a seemingly random shooting in the past couple of years. That small number of total crimes among a small number of people makes it a very violent place statistically speaking.
So Jason Aldean presents an idealized version of small-town unity to begin with, but that’s his right as an artist. On the other hand, CMT has the right to remove his video from their rotation. That’s their right as well. It’s not a First Amendment violation or censorship or cancel culture. It’s a private company’s decision on how to run their network.
I’m willing to give Aldean the benefit of the doubt on his song. His production company says that he didn’t pick the location and the people involved may not have even been aware of the location’s history of lynching. Whatever the truth, Aldean is benefitting greatly from the controversy with streams up 999 percent and the song debuting at number two.
And if Aldean’s fans want to post memes marking them “safe from being offended by a country song” while simultaneously being snowflakes about the Barbie movie or a Bud Light commercial or the fact that Snow White isn’t white in a new version of the old story, that’s their right as well.
But that brings us to the unforced error. This didn’t have to become a political issue. Republicans are now rushing to defend Aldean, a man who doesn’t really need a defense. At worst, Aldean is racist whose song is a dog whistle. At best, it’s a mediocre song with an unfortunate connection to a racist incident. Either way, Aldean is profiting quite handsomely.
But what do Republicans hope to gain from the incident? Maybe it’s a rally-the-base issue, but at some point rallying the base can become counterproductive to winning over new voters. That seems to be the case when Republicans rush to defend people accused of racism without regard for facts and appearances.
And that seems to be what Republicans almost always do. I’m hard-pressed to think of a time when the party criticized racist behavior. It may be that the last time was in 2019 when they mostly abandoned Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican congressman infamous for his racist comments.
On the one hand, Republicans need and seem to want to do better with minorities. On the other hand, they reflexively jump to the aid of people accused, often credibly, of racism. That’s a problem for the party in that they are throwing up roadblocks that prevent minorities from supporting them.
In 2020, most Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to utter the words, “Black Lives Matter,” and even today most have trouble acknowledging that black Americans have legitimate and unique concerns. Tim Scott, one of the few black Republicans, is also one of the few Republicans to be overtly sympathetic to black concerns about police.
I’m going to give Republicans some free and unsolicited advice: If you want to win support from black and other minority voters, stop doing things that make you look racist.
Remember that politics is, to a great extent, about perception. You may have the greatest ideas in the world, but if people think that you hate them, they aren’t going to give you a chance. It’s difficult to convey how cringy it is when white Republicans start explaining to minorities that they shouldn’t be offended by something that seems racist. That also goes for pushing stories that allege black racism or decry encroachments on white territory. See the Fox News’ coverage of “Snow White” mentioned above for an example.
At the very least, Republicans should just stop to think about how they sound to people who aren’t part of the Fox News set. Of course, I do believe that for some (on both sides) being offensive is the point. And others are just too deeply into their bubbles to know they’re being offensive.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Republicans need to get out and march with BLM protesters, but not rushing to defend everyone accused of racism would be a good start. In many cases, as in this one, it’s possible and even advisable to simply say nothing. And as Steve Berman wrote yesterday, don’t defend slavery (the same advice applies to defending and quoting Hitler). Just don’t. This is really the low-hanging fruit of racial politics and Republicans are still mucking it up.
If Jason Aldean wants to defend a song and video that have racial overtones for many, he is free to do so. Republicans, on the other hand, have no obligation to further muddy their reputation by getting involved in the spat. If they can profess neutrality with respect to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they can be neutral in a fuss between a celebrity and the media. If they can remain silent about Donald Trump’s crimes, they can remain silent about a country music video.
And if they want to show their fealty to small-town life, they can sing the Mellencamp lyrics that describe a small-town utopia much better than Aldean’s combative words:
Educated in a small town
Taught to fear of Jesus in a small town
Used to daydream in that small town
Another boring romantic, that’s me
This, not grabbing your gun to fight off city folks, is the idyllic picture of small town life.
I think that the eternal problem is that we have two very different cultures warring a silly culture war and what Culture A finds offensive, Culture 1 doesn’t (and vice-versa) and they regularly pull the old “CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT THE OTHER CULTURE ISN’T OFFENDED BY THIS? THEY THINK IT’S GOOD!”
To wander away from something as silly as music for a second, I think that the best example is the old “abortion/death penalty” can’t believe.
“Can you believe that they are against abortion but actively *CELEBRATE* the death penalty? Pro-life, my hind end!”
“Can you believe that they don’t think that murderers should be killed but have no problem with killing babies means that they should be called pro-criminal, not pro-choice.”
Can you believe it?
To wander back to music, I’m not sure that pulling the old Tipper Gore will make the Democrats look hip any more than last time.
The best criticism of the song that I saw was a fun tweet that had one of the Uvalde cops singing the song. But that particular criticism seems to get to the nut of the problem. The problem isn’t that some artist out there is making some offensive song (heaven forfend!), it’s that the wrong people are listening to this song and feeling puffed up for a few seconds.
Gotta deflate them!
And that turns into a knock-down drag out fight over who does and who does not get to feel puffed up for a few moments. Which turns the debate into a really, really weird one.Report
“[W]e have two very different cultures warring a silly culture war and what Culture A finds offensive, Culture 1 doesn’t[.]”
See, I don’t think that’s actually true.
I think that Culture 1 absolutely finds the stuff offensive.
The issue is that they like seeing Culture A offended more than they care about doing something they find offensive.
And they honestly don’t understand why this is seen as Normalizing The Offensive Thing. Because that’s not why they did it. They just wanted to make you mad. They didn’t mean for you to do it too.
Like, brigading someone off the internet, that’s offensive, that’s bad, but sometimes one must hold one’s nose and do distasteful things when you’re dealing with internet transphobes.Report
I think that there might actually be a for-real disconnect at play. Like, they cannot comprehend the mindset of a different culture. They can only comprehend their own.
Which is kind of funny, if you remember the old stereotypes.Report
I assumed you used Culture A and Culture 1 to make them interchangeable. But this most recent comment indicates you had A and 1 designated.
I don’t see any reason to think that either culture genuinely finds the other’s values less offensive. Some confirmation bias will always make us remember the bad things about our opponents and the good things about our side, and if unchecked it will lead to something that functions like hypocrisy. But that said, the differences in principles and standards of acceptability are real.Report
I was hoping to avoid the “Why is Team Good Culture 2?” conversation. That’s all.Report
“I assumed you used Culture A and Culture 1 to make them interchangeable. But this most recent comment indicates you had A and 1 designated.”
(It’s a ‘Futurama’ reference.)
I included the example at the end because I was pretty sure that certain commentors would otherwise take it as an opportunity to say “YEAH THAT’S JUSt WHAT THOSE DARn CONSERvavTIVES ARE LIKE YOU KNOW THEY alwAYWSA WANT TO BE JERKS JUST TO b E JERKS!!!!”Report
“They”Report
Did you write that because you consider Jaybird to be too bound up in his political side to comprehend the other? If not, then why did you write it?Report
I was taught in grade school that every pronoun needs an antecedent. The word “they” is often used online to refer to some group the writer won’t or cannot name. It’s, at best, sloppy writing, though oftentimes the intent is a bit more nefarious.Report
We were talking about both sides of the culture war, so I’m sure that’s what “they” meant. Unless you’re obliquely implying something more nefarious that you won’t or cannot name.Report
There are more than two sides to the culture war, fwiw.Report
I don’t know that there are, for any contemporary US definition of “the culture war”. There may be factions, non-combatants, and neighboring countries with varying alliances, but there are two sides.Report
See the antecedent part of my comment.Report
Someone should make a cut of his song overlaid on video of Jan 6.Report
wait, I thought it was a good thing when strangers who come into town looking for trouble find more than they can handleReport
2019 FBI crime stats (per 100,000):
Metro areas versus nonmetro areas
Violent crime: 395.2 versus 207.5
Murder & non negligent manslaughter: 5.1 versus 3.9
Rape (revised definition): 42.0 versus 38.3
Robbery: 91.5 versus 11.2
Aggravated assault: 256.5 versus 154.1
Property crime: 2187.5 versus 1034.1
Burglary: 337.2 versus 304.9
Larceny – Theft: 1615.8 versus 618.6
Motor vehicle theft: 234.5 versus 110.5
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-2#:~:text=The%20violent%20crime%20rate%20was%20390.8%20per%20100%2C000%20inhabitants%20in,per%20100%2C000%20inhabitants%20in%202019.Report
In the US, there are about 1,200 cities with population 25k-100k, and 300 with population > 100k. Only 40 with population > 500k.
In fact, only four of the ten cities on that list (Bessemer, Monroe, and Pine Bluff, and Saginaw) have populations 25k have population < 100k. Detroit and Memphis both have populations over 500k, making up 20% of the top 10, despite the fact that less than 3% of eligible cities have populations over 500k.
Small cities aren't more violent on average; they just have a larger pool from which to draw outliers. Also worth noting that every city on that top ten list is at least 40% black, and eight are majority black. Ignoring the predictive power of race for violent crime rates is basically lobotomizing yourself. You can't even begin to think intelligently about crime, especially violent crime, in the US without accounting for it.Report
People always want to find some skeleton key which unlocks an understanding of human behavior, and always fail.
There is a “predictive power” of poverty and violent crime too, but its really just a statistical correlation.
Causation is still unexplained, and often deliberately so because it befuddles the priors and makes the skeleton key worthless.Report
“[N]ot rushing to defend everyone accused of racism would be a good start.”
And obviously all accusations of racism are inherently correct, philosophically so in an original-sin sense if not actually factually true, and therefore questioning an accusation is equivalent to a defense of the accused.Report
I hate to go all meta but I think this tempest in a teapot shows how dead social media, and in particular X-Twitter, is. Every time I see one of these things pop up it’s hard to escape how 2020 every one of the flash points is. It’s possible we aren’t scaling our new mountain of controversies and zeitgeists just yet but we are way closer to the foot than we are to the peak of this turd mountain.Report
The killer part of this is he didn’t even write this song. He’s just parroting someone else’s words. At least Merle Haggard (and Willie Nelson) wrote the words he was singing in Okie from Muskogee.Report
Heh, true story. Though if we’re talking tunes about the state of redneckery I always thought the below was a better one. Maybe a little more honest too.
https://youtu.be/EBBvXcpMzhkReport
Ever since I was a little kid in a small town in Tennessee, small town people have been terrified of the big city, convinced that they’re sure to be mugged, car-jacked, or murdered within minutes of entering even the safest of cities. I hear it all the time from people back home, or to make clear that it’s not just a Southern thing, from my partner’s mother, who’s lived her entire life in a small Connecticut town, and is terrified of every city from Austin to Paris. So it’s no wonder that someone from a small town (as I assume the songwriter is) would try to confront these fears by writing them out with a false bravado. Perhaps their therapist suggested it as a form of treatment for a phobia.Report
Some years ago, my wife and I were vacationing on the Maine coast. After a few days in Portland, by far the largest city in Maine, very nice, safe, and civilized with a cultural scene that punches well above its weight, we stopped in Rockland (where we have stayed multiple times since). We stopped at a store to pick up a few things and mentioned to the woman at the checkout that we had just come up from Portland. Her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, and she said, in all seriousness, that she would be afraid to go to Portland.Report
“Ever since I was a little kid in a small town in Tennessee, small town people have been terrified of the big city…”
similar to how some people are utterly convinced that if they’re stopped by the cops in a small town they’ll be dragged out of the car, beaten until they admit that they’re queer, and then executed.Report
Huh… Never heard that one.
Now, I know some big city folk who are anxious about being in extremely rural places, and I know plenty of big city folk who think small towns and the country are filled with backwards-ass people, and I know there are big city people who, for that reason among others, wouldn’t want to live in a small town, but I don’t know any city folk who are afraid of small towns generally, or who avoid small towns generally.Report
Neither does anyone else.*
*Standard disclaimer: there are 350-odd million people in America, many very odd indeed, so there is bound to be someone.Report
“I don’t know any city folk who are afraid of small towns generally”
*shrug* then you haven’t been paying attention to the queer people in your life.Report
“Urban” as a euphemism for “Black” is so standard as to be a cliché. Using it in a context such as this doesn’t not inspire me to confidence. At best it is a “stupid or evil?” question. In my old age I find the distinction less useful or interesting than I did in my youth. Combined with the location it was shot? That would be a hell of a coincidence. To complete the picture, the result was a mediocre generic song became far more lucrative than it otherwise would be.
As for the Republican “unforced error,” I have also learned in my old age to embrace the idea that when someone tells me who they are, I should believe them. This is unforced only in that the Republican base is very bad at hiding who they are.Report
You know who doesn’t think of “urban” as a euphemism for “black”? People in small towns.Report
I credit small town people with being somewhat better informed than that.Report
Not really. There were over three thousand documented lynchings.Report
The Wikipedia article on Columbia Tennessee discusses the lynchings there but devotes much more space to the race riot of 1946, where a crowd of black people shot four cops. I haven’t seen any stories about that though.Report
I’ve lived mostly in big cities OKC, Louisville, Denver, NYC and DC. and one small town Bolivar WV. In three of the big cities I lived in the so called bad side of town and really never had any problems.
Here is reporting from a small town area that I love to go visit but I sure as heck do not want to live there after hearing this https://t.co/n5QztSqtPgReport
Yikes. Meanwhile, here in the big city, a woman has just filed a wrongful conviction suit over being railroaded into prison. A suit she will no doubt win. A-hole cops are a-hole cops the world over.
Meanwhile, conservatives piss and moan about a biased press when all they want to do is sell some papers by covering juicy stories.Report
Did anything bad happen to you personally in that small town area while you were visiting it?Report
I’m about ten miles from Bessemer right now. If I drove there, there would be no break between towns. Bessemer is administratively a small town, but it’s small designation in a metropolitan area and in other respects part of a city.Report
But, surely, when you cross the border from metro to small town, you notice that the young men wear their ballcaps forward, and hitch up their trousers, and say “Yes, Sir”, “No, Ma’am” and “Hell yeah I’m “Merican”.Report
If we’re talking about what city is really a small town, Aldean is from _Macon_, which isn’t a small town in any manner at all. It’s the center of the major metropolitan area of over 200,000 people that is directly south of the Atlanta metropolitan area. It has two airports and is only an hour from the Atlanta Airport. If you’re going there from Atlanta, you’re going down the interstate, driving past offramps pointing at Atlanta suburbs until, at some undefined point, those signs are pointing at Macon suburbs instead.
And then the second you past Macon, you’re in Warner Robins, an _equally_ large city and new metropolitian area!Report
I think it’s pretty well-understood that Aldean himself is a bro-country dude, the type of city boy with an immaculate hat and a fancy pickup truck with the dually rear axle whose flatbed has never held anything dirtier or heavier than a large-screen TV still in its box from the Sam’s Club warehouse.Report