We’ve had a lively debate here at NR on Jason Aldean’s hit country song “Try That in a Small Town.” The song and its video have raised the ire and contempt of the cultural Left and been banned from Country Music Television, prompting a rally-around-the-flag effect that has driven the song to No. 1 on iTunes, among other things. The song isn’t musically very good, but that’s not the point. (Full disclosure: I’m a lifelong New Yorker who appreciates some good country music of the Johnny Cash/Willie Nelson variety, but I’m a rock, pop, and to some extent Big Band guy, not a country fan. The only Jason Aldean song I own or really know is, predictably, the duet he did with Kelly Clarkson that topped the country charts in 2011.)
Kathryn kicked up a lot of resistance — including from many of our readers — by criticizing the song as essentially un-Christian, a view that’s consistent with how she writes on every topic. Jim followed with what amounts to a fact-check of Aldean’s view of small towns and the law. Dominic defended cultural criticism of entertainment media, although I don’t think it’s really as rare as he claims; there’s a whole cottage industry of that on the left. Charlie, on the Editors, argued that there’s no reason to have moral panics about the content of music unless it’s something that really needs to be kept away from children.
These are all fair perspectives, as you’d expect from our writers, but it seems to me that the elephant in the room is the extent to which this level of scrutiny feels so hostile to conservatives because so much music — whether emanating from artists who are politically left-leaning or just vacuous and dissolute — escapes the same treatment. As Hugo Schwyzer wrote at the Federalist, this is part of a broader pattern of moral panic aimed at country music precisely because the Left doesn’t have gatekeeping power over what country fans like and what they consume. In that sense, I’d echo what Luther wrote when this story broke:
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.
Why do left-leaning writers think country is more dangerous than rap or other genres? At bottom, not because they think the music is more dangerous, but because they think rap fans are harmless friends and country fans are menacing cultural enemies, so there is a need to more carefully censor what they listen to. That is why people are defensive about complaints directed at Aldean’s music, and why he’s selling so much of it.