Jason Aldean, the country singer who was most famous for being on stage in Las Vegas when Stephen Paddock started raining bullets upon the crowd, is in controversy over a new song and video.
Aldean released a song in May called, "Try That in a Small Town", which was a right-wing anthem regarding small town police (and citizens) having little tolerance for lawlessness and rioting.
The song got relatively little attention, despite some of its provocative lyrics, presumably because the country music space is generally right-leaning, and there have been many conservative-leaning country songs over the last few decades.
However, when Aldean released the video, which had real-life rioting and violent crime scenes interspersed, it got much more attention. CMT (Country Music Television) controversially pulled the video without explanation, which then caused a big backlash, and all of a sudden there's a lot of discussion on social media about this 2-month-old song.
Many of Aldean's critics are levying the following complaints:
- The song and video are racist, and is a thinly veiled attempt to justify lynching
- The song and video are conflating legitimate political protest with rioting/criminal behavior
- The song and video are a criticism of the BLM protests, which is therefore racist
- The courthouse Aldean performs in front of had two major racist incidents between 1927 and 1946, and this is secretly symbolic
- The song is meant to scare rural America into believing that big cities are cespools of lawlessness, and outsiders need to be either chased out or beaten
- The song and video promote vigilantism rather than traditional rule of law
- Aldean is glorifying guns, despite being present during the worst incident of gun violence in US history
I am a longtime country music fan. I'm also a conservative, as all of you know. I liked '80s and '90s country music much more than today's version, which is derisively referred by many today as "bro country".
The song itself is not great. They lyrics are not particularly creative (and some don't rhyme when they're supposed to), and the tune/chorus is mediocre at best. However, I have no problem with the message itself, and its left wing critics are completely misunderstanding it, much like they did with Toby Keith's "Brought to You Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" in 2002, which was also mistakenly branded racist.
The message of the song is simple: Unlike in big cities, where police stand down (at the direction of woke city officials) and crimes are lightly or not prosecuted, small town America is still keeping order. If you try to loot, riot, smash-and-grab, or commit acts of violence, you will be met with both force and justice.
There was no statement in the song, either made or implied, against protest. There was nothing about race in the song, and all of the footage shown was real. If this disturbs people on the left, they should ask themselves why city officials allowed things like this to occur with little-to-no consequence.
The left wants you to ignore what's happening in the big cities, and if you do notice, you're supposed to believe that it's because of systemic racism. They don't want you to see an increasingly permissive system where entire classes of crime are not prosecuted by policy, where violent criminals are released with no bail, and where slap-on-the-wrist sentences for violence and rioting are common.
In short, "try that in a small down" means, "We're not putting up with violence here. Try it and we will defend ourselves." That's a good message, and I wish the "big towns" would do the same.
Aldean made a statement on Instagram, but strangely deleted it today. Part of it is quoted in this NY Post article: https://nypost.com/2023/07/18/jason-...amid-backlash/
I believe that this will help Aldean's career, just like Toby Keith's similar controversy in 2002 helped him. The core base of country music listeners can easily relate to the message in the song. This isn't like the controversy the Dixie Chicks had (also in 2002), where they torpedoed their career by criticizing America and President George W. Bush while performing on foreign soil.
Aldean should not have deleted his statement, and rather should keep leaning into this.