Like most Nashville stars, Jason Aldean spent years steering clear of politics to avoid alienating a portion of his audience. But with the rise of Donald Trump and the outspokenness of Aldean’s wife, a MAGA Instagram influencer, Aldean stopped hiding his conservative views.
The result — Aldean’s latest single, “Try That in a Small Town” — is an exercise in belligerent rural hostility, and it will almost certainly make him the right’s latest hero who was “canceled” for speaking the truth. Don’t be surprised if Republican presidential candidates start playing the song at their rallies.
Here are the first verse and chorus of the song:
Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
You think it's cool, well, act a fool if you like
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, you think you're tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far you make it down the road
'Round here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town
The song’s video juxtaposes scenes of urban violence and chaos against gentle rural imagery. This is precisely the message you’ll hear from countless Republican politicians and right-wing media figures: Cities are hellholes; rural towns are where real Americans live. And if the latter want their ideals to survive, they might have to protect them with force.
As criticism began to mount, the Country Music Television network pulled the video from its playlist, prompting a message of support for the song from South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R). Aldean also issued a statement insisting that his work was being unfairly treated. It “refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up,” he said, “where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.” (Aldean grew up in Macon, Ga., which is not a small town.)
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But that isn’t at all what the song is about. “Try That in a Small Town” is a fantasy of violent retribution against outsiders — those who would bring the supposed lawlessness of the city to the small town. It even includes a line about how the government might try to confiscate the “gun that my granddad gave me.”
Were it not for Aldean’s recent political feuds with other artists and the provocation in the video, the song might have simply been cast on the gigantic pile of country songs about small towns. There might be no theme more ubiquitous in the genre: what makes rural life worthwhile, what people in rural areas enjoy and how they live their lives.
Follow this authorPaul Waldman's opinionsSome of this music is earnest — even sentimental — about finding pride and meaning in the place where you come from. Much of it manifests as a kind of lyrical Mad Libs in which a series of signifiers — pickup trucks, dirt roads, cold beer, girls in Daisy Dukes — are endlessly reassembled into an indistinguishable progression of party songs.
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But there is also a long history of songs in which rural people are presented as right and true and cities are the source of chaos that must be resisted. Merle Haggard’s 1969 “Okie From Muskogee,” for example, became something of an anthem of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.” Haggard even played it at the White House. Hank Williams Jr.’s 1982 “A Country Boy Can Survive” similarly tells of a friend from New York who was robbed and murdered, proclaiming, “You can’t starve us out and you can’t make us run/’Cause we’re them old boys raised on shotguns.”
This is the real lineage of “Try That in a Small Town.” And as befits the Trump era, the song takes the implicit and makes it explicit. Its violent revenge theme is common in conservative rhetoric, whether it’s gun advocates talking about how they need AR-15s to fend off home invaders or wage war on the government or Trump telling cheering crowds about his desire to inflict violence on liberals. (“I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said about a protester.) It’s why Kyle Rittenhouse is seen by conservatives not as a dumb kid who put himself in a dangerous situation with tragic results, but as a hero and a righteous avenger because he killed two people during civil unrest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020.
This is the dark side of the “small-town values” Republican politicians often advocate, which are supposed to be about things such as honesty, integrity and hard work. Don’t be fooled into thinking that “Try That in a Small Town” is anything but a wishful fantasy. It might sound as though it’s addressed to urbanites, but they’re not the real audience. It’s not a warning against city people coming to small towns; it’s a dream of how great it would be if they did. Then they could finally get what they deserve.
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If Aldean’s song is disturbing in its implications, it’s also utterly banal, as usually happens when art is put to right-wing ends. Like political ads full of stock photos, it slaps together cliché and resentment into something you’ve heard a thousand times before.
Nevertheless, the song — and the controversy CMT heightened by pulling it — will no doubt make Aldean more popular. There will always be a market for the idea that you can be the hero of your own violent drama of retribution.
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