Try That in a Small Town
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I have no problem admitting that I never heard of Jason Aldean until 2021. That’s when I found out he’s a country radio bro, but for the life of me I can’t tell any of these guys apart. One bleeds into the other. They all look the same and sound the same and wear the same silly hats…either the John Deere variety or the cowboy lids. I think it’s because most of ‘em are going bald.
Anyway, I think Aldean’s wife was twittering some transphobic stuff back then, and then later went all anti-Biden on other posts, and that made the news because she was married to this famous country bro who until then didn’t really do the political thing. Or something like that. It was hard to give a shit then and it’s hard to give a shit now.
I’ve since listened to Jason Aldean. I once spent a day listening to Morgan Wallen, so I felt prepared. Actually, if you laid their songs side by side I still can’t tell the difference. All of it sounds, in Tom Petty’s immortal words, like “bad rock with a fiddle”. If Willie and Waylon and Johnny are the “Breaking Bad” of country stars, these guys are “Days of Our Lives”.
The songs are interchangeable connect-the-dot singalongs dealing with women or tractors or whiskey or raisin’ hell, songs churned out by a plethora of Nashville hacks with rent hanging over their heads. The production is fine. The voices are auto-tuned to within an inch of their lives. It’s clinically, chillingly competent, and destined to be about as historically significant as Barney the purple dinosaur.
Aldean released a song called “Try That in a Small Town” a few months back. Nobody really noticed because it was surrounded by a pile of other soundalike songs on his latest record and thus got lost in the dog pile. It’s practically tuneless, the sort of thing a seasoned writer throws away the next morning. But these days it’ll do. A few days ago the video for the song was released, and….well…..let’s just say that captured everyone’s attention.
It features Aldean performing the song in front of a Tennessee courthouse infamous for lynchings and race riots, interspersed with footage of BLM rallies and protests, equating this sort of non-white-people-dissent as unpatriotic and suggesting that it would not be tolerated in God fearing (and white and apparently crime-less) small towns…
But let’s check on some lyrics, shall we?
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you're tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Subtle, eh? Sounds like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse at 2am after splitting a case of Miller Lite cans. Or, you know, a paean to sundown towns and lynchings.
Later we get this piece of Americana….
Got a gun that my granddad gave me
They say one day they're gonna round up
Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck
No word yet in who “they” are, or when this “round up” might take place. It should be noted that Aldean was onstage at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas in 2017 when a gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing 60 concertgoers and injuring more than 400 others. At the time he seemed horrified over such carnage. Now he’s Charlton Heston, suggesting we pry his AR from his cold dead hands?
As Abraham Lincoln once said….”WTAF”?
(All this tough guy posturing from a guy who couldn’t handle the heat in Connecticut last week, suffering heat exhaustion and rushing himself off the stage. If his current tour sends him to Arizona or Vegas he might not get through sound check.)
To be fair, Aldean didn’t write this song. A lot of these country bros are introduced to 3 chords, a capo, and some tight Wranglers…and that’s about all they can manage. It took FOUR professional songwriters to write “Try That in a Small Town”, which might be the most interesting thing about it. After all, you can’t expect just one dude to come up with Dylanesque nuggets like this…
Full of good ol' boys, raised up right
If you're looking for a fight
Try that in a small town
It’s dopey and lame. Even AI wouldn’t come up with lunkhead shit like this.
The usual lines have been drawn, with MAGAs adopting the song as their new anthem, the same way they circled the wagons for their boy Wallen when he was spewing the N word on everybody’s RING camera. Right on cue Aldean is crying about being “cancelled”, despite the fact that cynics like me might think something like this was planned all along. Overnight he’s the most famous country singer in America.
Interesting, no?
In a bit…
—tf