Jason Aldean And Country Music Are Standing In The Way Of The Left’s Total Cultural Hegemony

[Kamaji]

Jason Aldean And Country Music Are Standing In The Way Of The Left’s Total Cultural Hegemony

The controversy over Jason Aldean’s latest single has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with the fact that country music still embraces traditional values.

BY: HUGO SCHWYZER
JULY 19, 2023

Update your playlists accordingly: Jason Aldean is canceled. Following howls of online outrage, CMT has pulled Aldean’s latest video from rotation. The song, “Try That in a Small Town,” was released in May, but the video dropped just days ago. It features Aldean singing in a small-town square at night, American flags in the background, news footage of riots, looting, and violent crime projected onto the county courthouse behind him. A sample lyric:

“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.”

To a legion of outraged urban critics, Aldean’s song promotes lynching. That’s a heavy charge, but the mob has its evidence: The video was filmed in front of the Maury County courthouse, where a real lynching did take place in 1927. Surely, this is a racist dog whistle! Surely, the choice of location signals Aldean’s longing to return to one of America’s darker chapters when summary justice was dispensed in the streets!

Or – bear with me – maybe Maury County is part of Greater Nashville, and for a video-production crew, it is a short drive from Music Row to a set that offers an authentic small-town aesthetic. You know the left, though. They’ll never attribute to practicality what they are oh-so-certain is better explained by bigotry.

Why Now?
I’m not the first to point out that Aldean’s new single treads a well-worn path. For decades, country music has pushed back against the cultural and rhetorical excesses of the urban left. In an America where the “correct” art is produced in cities for other city folk, country music has sounded a consistent note of defiance. Think of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” or Hank Williams, Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Think of Willie Nelson joining Toby Keith in “Beer for My Horses.” Each of these classic songs – and hundreds more – push back against urban disorder and violence. (Left-leaning music critics will argue that Merle and Willie never really meant what they sang. Willie Nelson is, after all, now a darling of the left, and his indiscretions can be excused.)

If Aldean is walking such a familiar road, why the upset now? The first answer is that we live in a much-more polarized culture than we did when Merle, Hank Jr., and Willie topped the country charts. To the contemporary urban liberal imagination, shaped as it is by the hysterics of MSNBC and the only slightly-more sober pronouncements of The New York Times, angry white rural men now constitute the Great Existential Threat. Aldean’s song is part of the soundtrack that sustains and inspires that threat. (“Albert, I bet those January 6 insurrectionists were listening to Jason Aldean as they marched into the capital!”) Therefore, the song must be canceled, its listeners re-educated, its singer exiled.

The second answer is less about paranoia and more about power. In Variety this week, Chris Willman declares “Try That in a Small Town” to be “the most cynical song ever written” and “the most contemptible country song of the decade.” (I remember, wistfully, when editors at the flagship journal of American entertainment still tried to rein in hyperbole.) Willman’s foaming denunciation seems wildly over-the-top until you remember that country music is one of the very few types of popular culture that the left does not yet control. Willman, CMT, and the other supreme arbiters of acceptability hate Aldean’s fan base. They hate that Aldean’s support for Donald Trump hasn’t cost him dearly in terms of streams, sales, and tour revenue.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/19/jason-aldean-and-country-music-are-standing-in-the-way-of-the-lefts-total-cultural-hegemony/

[sneakypete]

To the contemporary urban liberal imagination, shaped as it is by the hysterics of MSNBC and the only slightly-more sober pronouncements of The New York Times, angry white rural men now constitute the Great Existential Threat.

@Kamaji

If they only knew how freaking true that really is,they would be dumping in their diapers.

And the way  things are going,they just might find out how true it is.

[berdie]

The hulabaloo over this song is crazy. It's not racist in the least...unless it's become racist for people to say "No, you people, of whatever race, color or creed, are going to tear up my town/home." I sincerely doubt that anyone knew that the courthouse that in 1923 had lynchings was a feature in this song. Until someone had the time to sit around and make it an issue.

The other minor issue that leaves me shaking my head is an outcry over a c/w artist (Luke Combs, I think) doing a cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car". He does a good job. Chapman is happy. Getting paid and named the first black female writer to chart on c/w. So evidently, people are upset...because there are no white, country homeless people.


People have way, way too much time on their hands.

[Fishrrman]

berdie wrote:
"People have way, way too much time on their hands..."

No, Comrade Berdie -- there's more to it than just that.

It's what "critical theory" is about. And it exists as a core element of The Party's strategy.

EVERYTHING must be criticized and dissembled, even an otherwise innocuous "country" song. Because EVERYTHING is political, and it remains The Party's objective to keep things that way.

Wonder if Merle Haggard would be singin' "Okie from Muskogee" these days...?