Talentless hack Jason Aldean released a song titled “Try That in a Small Town” with an accompanying music video. It’s loaded with racist dog whistles with nods to lynching; which is what got the video pulled off CMT.
It’s basically just a poorly arranged tirade insinuating that small, white, christian towns are safe while black, lefty, cities are dangerous. The imagery in the video strongly suggests that all of the riots, dissent, protests, and problems in the US are everyone else’s fault except God-fearing white people. Typical fascist shit, blame LGBTQ people, black people, migrants, atheists, literally anyone else in order to avoid responsibility and justify killing/jailing - LYNCHING - those they seem to be causing all their woes.
Now, I am originally from a one red light town in the South and can personally vouch for the fact that these “small towns” are pits of rape and misogyny fueled by the same old Catholic concept of illiterate congregation lead by an evil fuckface telling them what they should believe and do. Just because many of these ignorant dipshits are Baptists or some other pointless protestant denomination doesn’t change that the playbook is always the same. I mean this, I graduated high school in 2008 with people who literally couldn’t read, if you needed any reassurance that the plummetting literacy rate in the US was accurate.
I’ll finish off my soapbox here with this. I love country music. But like all other genres, there’s what’s on the radio, and there’s everything else. I’m not gonna sit here on a pedestal and say that I never get a pop-country tune stuck in my head. A lot of them are fine; pandering and rehashed same old lyrics and chords, but they’re catchy for a reason. This Jason Aldean song isn’t even that. It’s poorly written and the music is objectively not good. It’s just loud. That’s it. It’s just talentless noise. One thing that has made me happy as a country music fan, is that the country community has largely come out against the song and it’s message. If you happen to read more about this, you’ll see plenty of country artists slamming it for being garbage. You’ll also see that most of the “celebrities and influencers” standing up for Aldean are MAGA republican politicians and washed up performers who can’t get work anywhere because of their shit ass opinions.
/Rant
Someone shared this link the other day, and I had not seen it before.
People like to forget that country spawned out of folk music (“folk” as a genre was attacked for being a hotbed of leftism under HUAC, so a lot of folk artists rebranded themselves double-quick) and a large amount of people who grew up with the country music that came from that movement, and then went on to do it themselves, actually listened to what the lyrics were saying.