Progressives March on Jason Aldean and Nashville

Country musician Jason Aldean inadvertently summoned an online mob after posting a music video criticizing tangible mobs — the situation is now a cocktail of Twitter fingers and Molotovs. The song’s title, “Try That in a Small Town,” doesn’t fuss much with subtlety, and the music video, which was quickly pulled from Country Music Television (CMT), is set before an illumined courthouse shrouded in the smoke of civic unrest. Recordings of armed burglaries, assaults, and women spitting in the faces of police officers interpose every few seconds as Aldean hollers suggestively about how such behavior wouldn’t play in a small town.

“Try That in a Small Town” is a “f*** around and find out” anthem in A-flat major. It’s a refutation of the permissiveness toward criminality that cities such as Portland, Chicago, and Los Angeles have exhibited over the past several years. Aldean includes lines such as: “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up / Well, that s*** might fly in the city, good luck / Try that in a small town.” To you and me, those all sound like country-pride one-liners we’d hear down at Schmidt’s Corners bar in Iola after the car show. But to progressives, the song, and its attendant video, is a dog whistle for lynchings and other racial violence.

As an op-ed for Variety put it:

The setting, outside the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, has proven upsetting for some who know or learn the history of the building. It’s where, in 1927, a white lynch mob dragged a young man named Henry Choate through the streets behind a car before finally hanging him from a second-story courthouse window. Let’s give Aldean and video director Shaun Silva the benefit of the doubt and assume they had not indulged in a history lesson when they decided the same frontage where a Black man was murdered in front of a crowd would be a good place to alternate projected footage of protesters being put down with a draped American flag.

. . .

But the most heinous thing the small towns of today have to dread, and ward off with threats, is that somebody will “stomp on the flag and light it up.” Of all the tropes from bygone days that country songwriters are nostalgic for, it’s surprising to see flag-burning join the list. Jason, 1994 called, and it wants its straw man back.

I covered some of the riots in Portland. I saw flags, Bibles, and plywood fascia burned by the dispossessed and activists in the street before the federal courthouse. A compulsion to destroy the country exists among many of these rioters — and they’re certainly not made of straw. It’s delusion at best and malevolent projection at worst to suggest that Aldean calls for violence against black Americans because he condemns anarchy. As Aldean noted, and I’ll do again, the fact that progressives see the use of crime footage as racist implies that they think a particular group of people are the sole perpetrators of said crimes. Yeesh.

Zooming out a bit, Jason Aldean and his wife have received criticism for speaking out against youth transgenderism and masking. Amidst a push from various left-wing outlets to make country music more and more blue, as evidenced by almost-simultaneous hits from NBC, “Meet Four Queer Artists Helping to Shake Up Country Music,” and the New Yorker, “Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville,” the soul of country music is embattled — first by corporate pop, and now by progressive interests.

There are cheap arguments to be made that rap is violent, misogynistic music that the Left hypocritically accepts, but there’s nothing profound about that. To them, the rage of rap encapsulates the plight of black America . . . it is structural racism that breeds the abusive lines, not the rappers themselves. No, this has more to do with the Left’s assumed monopoly on public expression and violence. Conservatives have accepted that their favorite artists are, at best, ambivalent about them but probably detest the conservative fans’ politics. Much of the Left, and certainly the loudest bit, cannot abide heterodoxy (all puns intended). There’s no give, no concessions when everything is a battle for power.

Aldean offers his listeners a song contrary to the desires of left-wing revolutionaries, and they wish to make an example of him. They can certainly try, but every screech of discontent ensures this song will play in small towns well after we’re gone.