One of the roles of this blog is to explain American conservatism to European conservatives. It is unlikely that Europeans will understand the controversy over Jason Aldean’s No. 1 country music hit “Try That In a Small Town,” and why it matters. But it really does matter, and you can’t really understand what’s happening in the U.S. culture war unless you take the Left’s smear of Aldean seriously.
Jason Aldean is a popular country music singer who, this past May, released a song called “Try That In a Small Town.” It’s a bog-standard country tune, undistinguished musically or lyrically. The song is a taunt to criminals and violent protesters, of the sort that flooded American cities during the Summer of George Floyd in 2020, and afterward. It tells them that if they try to get away with crime, or violently disrespecting authority, in a small town, they will be met with violence. Aldean has a line referring to the fact that small town people are armed.
Nobody cared about the song until Aldean released a video this month. Suddenly, left-wing media and commentators assailed it as a celebration of violence. Then somebody discovered that the small-town Tennessee courthouse, in front of which the video was filmed, had been the site of the lynching of a black man nearly a century ago. Ah ha! said the Left. A black Tennessee lawmaker denounced Aldean’s tune as a “vile lynching song.” Country Music Television (CMT) took the video off the air.
Country music fans responded by pushing the song to the top of the charts.
What to make of this? This is entirely a phony controversy ginned up by the Left. The idea that life is better in small towns, and that people in small towns will not tolerate the kind of disorder and criminality that rules in the cities, is a familiar one in country music. Forty years ago, Hank Williams Jr. scored a huge hit with his song “Country Boy Can Survive,” which explores the same themes, though with a more explicit celebration of violence.
In the song, the narrator speaks of a childhood friend who lives in New York City, and who looked down on him as a “hillbilly.” The friend was killed in a mugging. The narrator says he would like to take revenge on the murderer thus:
I’d love to spit some Beech-Nut in that dude’s eye / And shoot him with my ol’ .45.
Beech-Nut is a brand of chewing tobacco, which is associated with the rural way of life. The narrator voices a desire to humiliate the murderer by spitting a calling card of hillbillies in his eye, before killing him with a .45 caliber handgun.
This might not be everybody’s idea of moral correctness, but it is a very common view among rural and small-town people. These are people who know they are looked down on by urban sophisticates. Hank Williams Jr.’s song is so potent because it proclaims the resilience and superiority of the rural and small-town way of life, over the feeble and clueless sophistication of liberal cosmopolitanism, which, in the view of country folks, cannot deal with evil.
In a terrific 2012 essay on the psychology of country music, Will Wilkinson wrote that country music appeals to people who have “low openness” to life’s varied experiences, and who are therefore naturally conservative. He goes on:
More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through life’s stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I was a girl with a mother, now I’m a mother with a girl. My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them. I was once a teenage boy threatened by a girl’s gun-loving father, now I’m a gun-loving father threatening my girl’s teenage boy. Etc. And country is full of assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives.
My conjecture, then, is that country music functions in part to reinforce in low-openness individuals the idea that life’s most powerful, meaningful emotional experiences are precisely those to which conservative personalities living conventional lives are most likely to have access. And it functions as a device to coordinate members of conservative-minded communities on the incomparable emotional weight of traditional milestone experiences.
This is not a criticism of country fans, to be sure. It’s just how many of them are. I grew up in the rural South, and know this firsthand. The worldview expressed in country songs is the worldview with which I was raised. In fact, though I’m a conservative by political and philosophical conviction, my family back home think I’m a liberal because I moved away and don’t like all the things they like.
Wilkinson again, on country music lyrics celebrating the ordinary things of rural life:
What high-openness liberals feel as mere nostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?
Exactly right. Though Wilkinson focuses on the nostalgic depiction of life within country lyrics, the sense that the cities are full of chaos and violence, and that city people lack the courage to deal with these problems forthrightly, is also a key part of the country-boy mentality. It’s one that I, a city dweller for most of my adult life, agree with. In the Zombie Apocalypse, I’m going to fly to my rural hometown, where everybody is armed and knows how to shoot.
In the United States, the Left is ignorant and hypocritical about guns—and this is something that Europeans often don’t get about American gun culture. I agree that we have too many guns in America, and that American life is too violent. What Europeans rarely realize—and that American liberals can’t bring themselves to admit—is that not all gun owners are alike.
To be precise, in the South, where I grew up, most families had guns. The men used them for hunting, primarily, but also for protection against poisonous snakes, and to defend the home in case criminals showed up to rob the place. Europeans should understand that guns have always been a big part of American life, because settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries needed them for hunting and protection. In the Old West, the sheriff was often far away. It is still the case in much of rural America that law enforcement is a meaningful distance away.
Here’s the thing: though guns were prevalent in Southern hunting culture, almost nobody misused them. As children learning how to shoot, my sister and I were taught great respect for firearms, and never to treat them lightly.
With the exception of some mass shootings by psychos, the overwhelming number of fatal shootings happen in the inner cities. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, that means that a disproportionate number of those using guns to rob and kill others are young black males. FBI crime statistics don’t lie.
The American Left are utter hypocrites in a specific sense. They bust Aldean’s chops for supposedly promoting violence, yet either say nothing about the incomparably more violent lyrics from black rappers, or celebrate them. As the black American writer (and sometimes rapper) Coleman Hughes wrote:
What disturbs progressives is not the fact that Aldean’s song contains macho, pro-gun lyrics—which are ubiquitous in rap. What disturbs them is the fact that Aldean is a straight, white, conservative male, and therefore must play by a different set of rules than black, left-leaning artists.
He’s right. And this double standard is what fuels conservative outrage at the media and other liberal-controlled institutions—including popular entertainment, of course, but also “woke capitalism,” a term referring to corporations that have embraced progressive militancy on race, sexuality, and gender.
The hypocrisy is acute because during the race riots of 2020, the media downplayed their severity (a CNN correspondent infamously described protests in one city as “mostly peaceful,” while standing in front of burning buildings), and one way or another blamed white supremacy for the violence. Rural and small-town Americans can now see video every day of urban violence, including robberies and open looting of stores, and cannot fail to notice that the criminals on film are disproportionately black. At the same time, the narrative promoted incessantly by the dominant culture blames white supremacy—especially white males—for all the ills of the country.
You can see why Jason Aldean’s fans would be so angry. When leftist ideologues constantly excuse criminality and other anti-social behavior, or even (as with violent and misogynistic rap lyrics) celebrate it, and at the same time damn white conservative males as bigots for writing songs defending law and order, and affirming the morality of violence to stop criminals—well, this is how Trump voters are made.
It’s important for Europeans to understand this. These are the dynamics at work in the American culture war—the kind of things that European media who report on American life either don’t pick up, or don’t understand. They matter.
