Jason Aldean’s MAGA small town
Dominic Green
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“I was born in a small town,” John Mellencamp sang in 1985. “And I live in a small town.” Actually, according to a recent issue of that small-town staple Architectural Digest, Mellencamp currently resides in Montecito, California, on “six acres of land at a mountainous peak.” It’s not a little pink house. It’s a rambling, white-painted former ranch with Spanish-style decor inspired by Karl Malden’s house in the movie One-Eyed Jacks. Ain’t that America.
Mellencamp also has a loft in SoHo in New York City. He must have meant it when he sang, “Got nothing against a big town.” America is a big country made mostly of small towns. It is rich on paper, but the map abounds in dead and dying towns. It also has purple patches where fugitives from the blue states are settling in red states. Between 2020 and 2022, Idaho, Montana, and Florida, all red states, had the fastest population growth in the U.S. Blue states New York and Illinois had the largest population losses, and California’s population shrank for the first time in a century.
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Last year, another small-town favorite, Fortune magazine, warned blue-state fugitives that defecting for the red states could “blow up big time.” Red-state people, Fortune warned, have “less money, worse health conditions, higher rates of gun-related deaths,” and “lower levels of education.” Translated into the kind of language that red-staters can understand, this makes them poor, fat, trigger-happy, and ignorant. Blue-staters, meanwhile, live longer, “primarily because of state policies on everything from seat belt laws to abortion laws.” This is class war dressed up as sociology. The economy must be doing better than we think if people are getting paid for writing this stuff.
The rich, big blue ZIP codes despise the less rich red ones. Naturally, the small red towns return the favor. This has been going on at least since that Roman redneck Horace praised the country over the city in his Satires. In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830), the country boy Julien Sorel is raised the right way by the church, then goes off the rails in secular, lefty Paris. Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) describes how the split between rural, Tory England and big-city liberalism created Two Nations.
As this is America, the bifurcation of reality has reached a demented extreme. You don’t have to have the prophetic powers of the Sybil to know that it does nobody any good. As this is America, there are songs to be written about it and money to be made. Horace might agree with the sentiment of Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town.” But Horace, who was a teenager when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and whose lifetime was overshadowed by civil war, might also be alarmed by the degree of hostility.
The video for “Try That In A Small Town” intercut footage of blue-state leisure activities (rioting, looting, spitting at the police, robbery at gunpoint, setting fire to the flag) with Aldean and his group performing at night in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. “Try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road,” Aldean sings. “Round here we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won’t take long / For you to find out.” If the feral gummint tries to take his gun, he says, he’ll go full Charlton Heston.
If Quantrill’s Raiders had given up raiding and formed a commercial country band, they might look like Aldean and his group. They’re all dressed in black. The band all wear mirror shades which make them look like Hunter Biden. The white courthouse is floodlit and ghostly. We are a long way from The Dukes of Hazzard. They may still be “good ole boys,” like Waylon Jennings sang in “The Dukes of Hazzard” theme, but now they’re “meanin’ harm.” As Jussie Smollett might say, this is MAGA country music.
The song and video are Manichean and military, a skilled maneuver in the culture war. The liberal blue-state media obliged. In 1927, a white mob lynched a black youth named Henry Choate at the courthouse after he was accused of crossing a line. Aldean didn’t pick the location and didn’t know this, but was nevertheless accused of glamorizing those notorious red-state leisure pursuits, racism and murder. The Country Music Television channel dropped the video.
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As John Mellencamp sang in the memorable outro to “Small Town,” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” The courthouse has previously been used as a location by Hannah Montana: The Movie, A Nashville Country Christmas, and Steppin’ Into the Holiday. Miley Cyrus has done many terrible things, but celebrating lynching isn’t one of them. Aldean’s lyrics threaten, as Waylon Jennings sang, to do “just a little bit more than the law will allow.” They’re pretty mild compared to rap music’s celebration of murder, drug-dealing, and pimping.
Aldean was attacked because he is a white Trump supporter who plays red-state music and “backs the blue.” The confected controversy won the video 18 million views on YouTube and sent the song to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Meanwhile, in 2021 the states with the fastest-rising black populations were Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Ain’t that actually America?