More on Small Town Justice
A deep tradition rightly under scrutiny.
Expanding on a point Steven Taylor made in “Small Town Justice?” NPR’s Amanda Marie Martínez observes “Jason Aldean’s ‘Small Town’ is part of a long legacy with a very dark side.”
Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” which ignited controversy this week over claims that the song and its new video promote white supremacy and violence, is far from the first country song to attack cities using racist dog whistles. “Try That” is most clearly a descendant of Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive” (1982), which claims, “You only get mugged if you go downtown,” while warning: “I got a shotgun, a rifle and a four-wheel drive, and a country boy can survive.” But Aldean’s latest release invokes and builds on a lineage of anti-city songs in country music that place the rural and urban along not only a moral versus immoral binary, but an implicitly racialized one as well. Cities are painted as spaces where crime, sexual promiscuity and personal and financial ruin occur, while the “country” is meanwhile framed as a peaceful space where happiness reigns.
The urban-versus-rural divide, and the antithetical moral characteristics projected onto them, is not unique to country music and has roots hundreds of years deep, at least. Raymond Williams’s 1973 book, The Country and the City, analyzes this binary in literature dating back to the 16th century. The Bible contains cautionary tales against leaving home in search of indulgence, as described in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
The discourse over city and country has evolved over time, and taken on its own identity within country music. Songs that pine for an idyllic rural past have been a part of country music since the genre was first invented as a marketing category for rural white Southerners in the 1920s. Some of the earliest country songs, like Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” recorded in 1923 and often celebrated as one of the first country records, yearns for a rustic home. Carson’s song, like many others in popular music at the time, was a minstrel tune, commonly performed in Blackface, and written in 1871 and presented from the perspective of a former slave who longed for a pre-emancipation past. Carson also regularly performed at KKK rallies.
Animosity towards urban areas in country songs grew particularly pronounced in the post-World War II decades — just as the majority of country listeners urbanized. Songs like Ray Price’s “City Lights” and Stonewall Jackson’s “Life to Go” (both recorded in 1958) depicted cities as dirty, lonely, violent places. Cities outside the South were a frequent target, as in Bobby Bare’s “Detroit City” (1963), Ben Peters’s “San Francisco is a Lonely Town” (1969), Buck Owens’s “I Wouldn’t Live in New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Damn Town)” (1970) and George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “Southern California” (1977). Most often, the city was framed as a place that led to immorality for women, as heard in Bare’s “Streets of Baltimore” (1966) when a man takes his woman to the city but she’s left “walking the streets of Baltimore.” Elsewhere, one could only expect to find murder, heartbreak and decay in the city. The country, as described in hits like Dottie West’s “Country Sunshine” (1973), Merle Haggard’s “Big City” (1982) and up to more recent years in songs like Tim McGraw and Faith Hill’s “Meanwhile Back at Mama’s” (2014), continued to be depicted as idyllic.
But, as with everything in American culture, there’s no escaping the intertwining with racial politics.
The rise of anti-city songs during the affluent, post-World War II era coincided with a moment when the formerly rural and heavily white country music audience was rapidly suburbanizing and achieving social mobility through home ownership. At the same time, selective availability of home loans in suburbs and racially restrictive housing covenants in cities furthered white flight, making cities synonymous with non-whiteness.
By the mid-1960s, an accelerating civil rights movement provided opportunities for conservative politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon to capitalize on white anxieties surrounding urban centers. Following racial uprisings that occurred through the second half of the decade, what came to be referred to as “law and order” politics were deployed to quell these uprisings, and social protests more broadly. At the end of that decade, Merle Haggard released perhaps the most famous anti-city country song, “Okie from Muskogee,” which celebrated small-town life and lambasted college protests, anti-war demonstrations and those who let their “hair grow long and shaggy like the hippies out in San Francisco do.” While some argue Haggard’s lyrics were tongue-in-cheek, generations of country music fans since, along with presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who both invited the singer to perform at the White House, have not taken it as such.
Being born at the tail end of this period, I never received these “code words” as racial. The hippies and the counterculture writ large were, after all, white. Yet, while whites commit the majority of violent crime, there’s little doubt that “law and order” and the “soft on crime” trope have racial connotations. And, certainly, “inner city” and “urban” have long been ways to talk about race without talking about race.
Still, much of the analysis of Aldean’s song strikes me as over the top.
While “Try That” echoes the anti-urban sentiment of “Okie,” it goes further, imagining city folks invading the country and expressing a desire to assert control over them and defend the small town from city influence. The song addresses those who might “carjack an old lady at a red light” or “pull a gun on the owner of the liquor store,” and footage in the video makes clear references to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. As Andrea Williams, a Nashville-based author, journalist and cultural critic, told me, “The video reflects a desire to control the actions of people in and outside of these towns, people who have grown tired of the exclusionary, oppressive antics of Aldean and his ilk — people who are, most often, Black.”
[…]
“Try That” ‘s invocation of “law and order” politics also distinguishes it from “Okie From Muskogee.” Kevin Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University who specializes in 20th-century America with a particular interest in the making of modern conservatism, says that “Try That in a Small Town” builds on and evolves from common conservative rhetoric, but where the song departs is in its demands. “He’s calling for people who aren’t law enforcement to mete out violence against people who haven’t broken any laws,” Kruse explains. “This sounds like a ‘law and order’ appeal, but it’s actually a call to lawlessness.” Such calls vividly echo events such as the January 2021 insurrection that have come to define modern, far-right extremism.
So, this just isn’t true. Carjacking, armed robbery, and rioting are in fact criminal actions. But, yes, the calls for vigilante justice are in fact lawless. They are, however, quite commonplace in the culture that’s the subject of Martínez’ essay.
Like Steven, I haven’t paid much attention to Aldean. While I’m more of a country music fan than Steven, Aldean’s brand of “bro country” has never particularly appealed to me. I suspect that’s largely a function of age, although, at 46, Aldean isn’t exactly a kid. Still he’s a genuine superstar, having won the ACM Top New Male Vocalist award in 2005 and many awards and top-selling albums since.
What he isn’t, though, is a songwriter or videographer. As far as I can tell, all of his big hits, including “Try That in a Small Town,” were written by others. And he certainly didn’t choreograph the video for the song or research the history of courthouses that are in the backdrop.
Martínez’ rightly notes that the “small town” trope has long history in country music. Indeed, it’s inherent in the folk-rock tradition as well. See, for example, John Mellencamp’s (hardly a right winger!) 1985 classic:
Well, I was born in a small town
And I live in a small town
Probably die in a small town
Oh, those small communities
All my friends are so small town
My parents live in the same small town
My job is so small town
Provides little opportunity, hey
Educated in a small town
Taught to fear of Jesus in a small town
Used to daydream in that small town
Another boring romantic, that’s me
But I’ve seen it all in a small town
Had myself a ball in a small town
Married an L.A. Doll and brought her to this small town
Now she’s small town just like me
No, I cannot forget from where it is that I come from
I cannot forget the people who love me
Yeah, I can be myself here in this small town
And people let me be just what I want to be
Ooh nah, nah, nah, yeah, ooh yeah yeah
Got nothing against a big town
Still hayseed enough to say
Look who’s in the big town
But my bed is in a small town
Oh, and that’s good enough for me
Well, I was born in a small town
And I can breathe in a small town
Gonna die in a small town
Oh, and that’s probably where they’ll bury me, yeah
What’s notably absent, though, is the violent overtones. But, again, those aren’t exactly new, either, in country music. Off the top of my head:
“A Country Boy Can Survive,” Hank Williams Jr. (1982)
The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River, she’s a-goin’ dry
The interest is up and the stock market’s down
And you only get mugged if you go downtown
I live back in the woods you see
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun, a rifle and a four-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive[…]
Because you can’t starve us out and you can’t make us run
‘Cause we’re them old boys raised on shotguns
We say grace, and we say ma’am
If you ain’t into that, we don’t give a damn[…]
I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me by my name, just Hillbilly
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land
And his taught him to be a businessmanHe used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights
And I’d send him some homemade wine
But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For 43 dollars, my friend lost his lifeI’d love to spit some Beech-Nut in that dude’s eyes
And shoot him with my old .45
‘Cause a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive
“Simple Man,” Charlie Daniels Band, 1989
I ain’t nothin’ but a simple man
They call me a redneck I reckon that I am
But there’s things goin’ on that make me mad down to the core
I have to work like a dog to make ends meet
There’s crooked politicians and crime in the street
And I’m madder than hell, and I ain’t a-gonna take it no moreWe tell our kids, “Just say no”
And then some panty-waist judge lets a drug dealer go
He slaps him on the wrist and he turns him back out on the town
But if I had my way with people sellin’ dope
Take a big tall tree and a short piece of rope
I’d hang ’em up high and let ’em swing ’til the sun goes downWell, you know what’s wrong with the world today
People done gone and put their Bibles away
They’re livin’ by the law of the jungle not the law of the land
Well, the Good Book says it so I know it’s the truth
An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
You better watch where you go and remember where you been
That’s the way I see it, I’m a simple manNow I’m the kinda man wouldn’t harm a mouse
But if I catch somebody breakin’ in my house
I got twelve-gauge shotgun waitin’ on the other side
So don’t go pushin’ me against my will
I don’t want to have to fight you but I dern sure will
If you don’t want trouble then you’d better just pass me on byAs far as I’m concerned there ain’t no excuse
For the rapin’ and the killin’ and the child abuse
But I got a way to put an end to all that fast
You just take them rascals out in the swamp
Put ’em on their knees and tie ’em to a stump
Let the rattlers and the bugs and the alligators do the rest
“Beer for My Horses,” Toby Keith and Willie Nelson (2002)
Willie, man, come on the 6 o’clock news
Said somebody’s been shot, somebody’s been abused
Somebody blew up a building, somebody stole a car
Somebody got away, somebody didn’t get too far, yeah
They didn’t get too far
Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas find a tall oak tree
Round up all them bad boys, hang them high in the street
For all the people to see
That justice is the one thing you should always find
You got to saddle up your boys, you got to draw a hard line
When the gun smoke settles we’ll sing a victory tune
And we’ll all meet back at the local saloon
We’ll raise up our glasses against evil forces singing
Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses
We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
Too much corruption, and crime in the streets
It’s time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send ’em all to their maker and he’ll settle ’em down
You can bet he’ll set ’em down
There are certainly many other examples. (And I excluded Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” from the list because the recipients of the violence are external.) It’s endemic in the culture and while, again, there’s no escaping the intertwining with race, it’s too simplistic to say that it’s mainly about race.
It goes beyond country music and into the broader popular culture as well. Most Westerns and a good deal of the post-Dirty Harry cop genre* feature heroes who take the law into their own hands because the system can’t keep people safe. It’s inherent in the superhero genre as well, especially darker ones like Batman, Daredevil, Green Arrow, and the Punisher.
_______________
*A personal, relatively recent favorite is the Timothy Olyphant vehicle “Justified,” a sequel to which is now airing.
My one coherent thought about this dust up is that whether or not he knew the courthouse was a lynching site, his protestations that he didn’t aren’t worth jack. He’s a Trump fan, which is all we need to be certain that he is perfectly OK with saying anything, true or not, if it even marginally helps your case.
Small-town justice in America is more about a bunch of racist idiots screwing up and murdering an innocent person for what they imagined was the crime of breaking into a truck. Aldean’s song is of that genre: what gets him angry is the myth of stomping on flags and black people disrespecting white cops. It’s the real John Wayne versus the John Wayne of The Searchers.
I’m definitely going back to bed. I’m too slow this am to keep up with the state of humanity
@Flat Earth Luddite:
Jason Aldean, Ted Nugent, Kid Rock…who cares.
Wanna mess with a MAGAt? Tell them Trump lost because they didn’t fly enough flags off the back of their truck.
Isn’t this what Mu is always telling us about his
bedroom suburb of the state capitalsmall town? This meme was old when Dreiser wrote Sister Carrie.Still, I’m living in a small town now (using Mu’s definition–I really live at the exurban outer ring of Metro Portland and about the same distance as Mu from Madison by his accounting), but grew up a city kid. And to riff of a song by Al Stewart called Sand in Your Shoes, I do enjoy “standing by the traffic signs with taxis at [my] feet” and do “know that in my city skin, [I’m] feeling more complete” even as the tent communities on side streets, parking strips, and back sides of strip malls kill me inside. Getting priced out of my studio apartment this rent increase doesn’t trouble me much. I won’t be sorry to go.
@Modulo Myself: Not sure what you mean. The John Wayne of The Searchers was a genocidal monster who was ready to kill her niece rather than see her continue to live among the Comanches who abducted her. Not quite the John Wayne of flag-waving movies like The Green Berets.
@Kingdaddy: LGM Film Club did a post on The Searchers last week. Erik Loomis agrees with you,
@Kingdaddy:
The Searcher’s Wayne is more redeemable than the Wayne of The Green Berets. Anyway, it was his niece and not tools from a neighbor’s truck which he was hunting for. The real John Wayne was pissed and toughed up about a toolset rumored stolen.
@gVOR10:
I think your take on The Searchers depends on how deeply you feel the ambiguity. It’s hard not to think of it as a great American film, racist or not.
He selected the song, or at least approved of it. And he was perfectly fine with the BLM footage being part of the video. There’s also a lyric video with lots newspaper clippings in the background, most of which are the lyrics to the song, but some of which are some pretty deep cuts of small town white supremacy.
https://www.billboard.com/music/country/jason-aldean-try-that-in-a-small-town-tiktok-jim-crow-era-newspaper-clip-1235377144/
That was a man who tried that in a small town.
Being America in 2023, this was obviously discovered by someone on TikTok, who presumably wears cat ears.
What the article gets wrong is that it isn’t just the promo, it’s the official lyric video, which is put out to help Jason Aldean fans learn to read.
https://youtu.be/I8wRfWxQ_uA
Check out the newspaper clippings at 1:27 “see how far you make it down the road”, and then watch the TikTok linked in the article if you want more about the identification — the identification is pretty clear.
Is Aldean racist or a dumb meathead or both?
He certainly surrounds himself with racists and is comfortable with that. His wife was spouting QAnon “The real problem is all the child trafficking” nonsense when asked about this kerfluffle.
@Modulo Myself:
I always thought John Wayne’s character was meant to be a monster in that movie, and that was the entire point of it. A very early attempt at deconstructing myths of the old west.
Jame’s first quote mentions the prodigal son. This country virtue v city decadence thing goes back at least that far, probably back to the invention of the first town.
@MarkedMan: Whether Aldean himself knew the lynching history of the town, if the publicists didn’t plan this they lucked into a gold mine. Didn’t one of our entertainment connected commenters note yesterday that checking out the history of a location is standard due diligence.
I’ll repeat my misquote of Churchill, “Never in history have so many been so pissed about so little.” What is it these people want? Respect? I got a flash. They’re not being disrespected by us city folk, we hardly ever think about them at all. Except, of course, for things like Obama having to fight Republicans to get them health insurance. Look around. Your schools and whatever medical facilities you have are probably your biggest employers and they’re heavily supported by us city folk. A chunk of your population are dependent on SS and Medicare. Any of your kids with ambition and talent are leaving to get jobs in cities. I’m sorry you pine to get back to Mayberry, but Mayberry was a movie studio in an L. A. suburb.
There is a deep tradition in music, be it Hip Hop, Rap, Country, or Rock N Roll, to be simplistic and provincial in describing us versus them. If we are going to criticize Aldean (who I never heard until the past week) for inciting violence, then please expand the cancel list to include all songs that offend and that seem to urge violence.
Well, let’s not let Hollywood off. I grew up in the 1970s where the weekly TV movie was either of some poor smalltown/suburban girl who had runaway to the big city and ended up working the streets. Or the many shows like ‘Beretta’ about the cop working to keep peace in his urban neighborhood. The movie ‘Adventures in Babysitting’ was also based on suburban kids venturing “downtown”.
On the other hand, I never really trusted “small town” as it was usually run by a corrupt sheriff, see the ‘White Lightening’ movies or ‘First Blood’ that didn’t take to strangers. Even the based on a true story original ‘Walking Tall’ was a man who returned home to his small town from the war.
Historically, cities were places to make money, but the kids, assuming you wanted to make adulthood, were raised in the country. It wasn’t until the 18th century that the childhood death rates dropped in London and Tokyo showing it didn’t have to be that way. Cities also offered a “freedom” of sorts for the villein or Scottish coalminer (17th century) who was able to avoid capture and return to their master for a year or so.
I’m always amused to see how the crime/filth of NYC streets was used as almost a third primary character in the early seasons of ‘Law and Order’.
I did see a video of a Nebraska farmer out at sunset fixing a pivot. When done, he takes in the corn to horizon and sunset “I love it out here, just me and the food”
This song was our National Anthem in the ’60s when demonstrations and riots were in full swing in Campus Towns across the land including here at Sleepytown U.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
The Rolling Stones
Street Fighting Man
Hey so my name is called Disturbance
I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants
@just nutha ignint cracker:
30 miles to Madison–which isn’t exactly a big city. 3,000 people in my city. 6k in the area supported by the school district. “Down town” is 1 block long.
Madison has multiple shootings every week. Last one we had was 6 years ago.
I used to get the weekly police blotter for the city. 90% were traffic stops (almost all of which got a warning). Another 8% were welfare checks and security checks. Maybe once every couple of months there’s a drive-off at the gas station. And there were 2 burglaries in 2 years.
Now… there was a rash of home-invasions for a while. But that was tracked to a gang working their way up from Chicago.
So… yeah. Things are pretty damn peaceful here. And that’s not just personal bias. It’s backed up by the numbers.
@just nutha ignint cracker:
30 miles to Madison–which isn’t exactly a big city. 3,000 people in my city. 6k in the area supported by the school district. “Down town” is 1 block long.
Madison has multiple shootings every week. Last one we had was 6 years ago.
I used to get the weekly police blotter for the city. 90% were traffic stops (almost all of which got a warning). Another 8% were welfare checks and security checks. Maybe once every couple of months there’s a drive-off at the gas station. And there were 2 burglaries in 2 years.
Now… there was a rash of home-invasions for a while. But that was tracked to a gang working their way up from Chicago.
So… yeah. Things are pretty damn peaceful here. And that’s not just personal bias. It’s backed up by the numbers.
@gVOR10:
To be a big fish in a small pond.
A HUGE part of the resentment in country vs city is that small towns mean the mediocre can rise to the limited top and be King of Something. If there’s 2,000 people in your town, you got a pretty good chance of being known as One of the Smart Ones, Great at Sports, Jesus’ BFF, etc. A small reference pool means every interaction and relationship going back generations deeply matters- YOU matter in a way that even a mid-sized town can’t replicate. I graduated with 30 kids and we knew everything every minute detail of each other’s lives in a way that Meta would sell their souls for. I’m one of the friendliest people in my neighborhood and couldn’t tell you the names of 10 of my neighbors where I live now, let alone who their grandmother was and why her fight with Abbie Smith in 4th grade means Jackie and Bobby can’t get married or that Dell isn’t getting that job he applied for because Sam knows about it too. It freaked me out at first but I soon grew to love the idea of privacy in my life and that what happens at work won’t have my next door neighbor trying to gossip about it as soon as I get home.
The idea of a city where you can walk past hundreds of people and never notice a thing about them – or more importantly, they never notice you- bothers them in a way they can’t really quantify. It drives home that you’re nobody and you’ve always been nobody since outside of your small pond, nobody cares about your drama. Antifa’s not coming to invade East Bumfuck, Al-Qaida was never coming to blow up your trailer and traffickers aren’t trying to kidnap you outside the only Walmart in 3 towns. If WW3 breaks out, your tiny town isn’t getting a direct strike and no invading army is headed your way.
I’m sorry your tribe is small by choice and you’re mad those in larger tribes get more attention, praise, control and power. That’s because their tribe is bigger and thus stronger – tale as old as time. We talk about Rome, not Ascrivium when discussing the Roman empire and I’ve sure the dynamic existed back then too. Small towns are not better, they’re just smaller. Being proud of being the biggest fish in a small pond doesn’t make you the best fish or have the best ecosystem. It means you never found your way back to the rivers or ocean.
@Modulo Myself: That was Erik Loomis’ take, not mine. However I agree with him. As to ambiguity, Loomis ranks it one of the ten great American films. I’m not sure I’d go top ten, but it is a great movie. And as I recall it, once you get past the whole looting, pillaging, and raping thing, a more realistic treatment of indians than common at the time.
@JKB: I completely agree that media has always played a role in helping create and circulate ideas of Town and Country. And what resonates isn’t always a particularly strong match to the experience.
To that point:
Yup, 100% this. “Law and Order” has done almost as much damage to NYC’s visual representation as it’s done to criminal legal system reform.
Being in a place you like with food is one great version of life. I reflect on that often when I’m travelling (often in a city) and enjoying a meal.
@mattbernius:
I think you misunderstood, the corn, and there may have been some soybeans in the vast expanse, in the fields was the food he was talking about.
The thing to remember about small town vs. big city is that both the smallness and the bigness occurred as a consequence of choices people made. IOW, they left the country and moved to the city. No one put a gun to their heads, they could see that opportunity was in the city. The ambitious, the talented, the capable, but also the desperate and the chancers, left small town America. Leaving behind the slow, the cautious, the settled. Some people bet on city, others bet on country, and in general that latter group lost. They fell behind educationally, they fell behind economically, the world changed around them and now a lot of them (obviously, not all) seem resentful and defensive because they lost control of the culture. They’re trying to use their disproportionate political power to impose a rural agenda on the cities.
@gVOR10: @Gustopher:
The movie is realistic about what an extremely violent man is really like, which separates it from most of Wayne’s movies. Scorsese drew on The Searchers for Taxi Driver, iirc.
@mattbernius:
Yup, 100% this. “Law and Order” has done almost as much damage to NYC’s visual representation as it’s done to criminal legal system reform.
Maybe 25% of the actual taped-off crime scenes I’ve seen in NYC have been when I stumbled across Law & Order being shot. I once came out of the subway, saw a man lying on the roof the car with blood on his face, had a moment, and then noticed the production team around him.
@JKB:
No, I think I understood and I was intentionally expanding the idea of “food” from meaning only the raw ingredients (and the production thereof) to the entire cycle of food production (and consumption). In my mind, there are lots of incredibly pleasurable ways to be co-existing with “the food.”
I find the first view (which I’m not suggesting that the farmer was intending in the original clip) to be really reductivist and usually only done to make political and moral arguments that are really reductive.
It could also be that I don’t think raw soybeans are particularly tasty. Raw corn can be good in limited quantities.
@Modulo Myself: when the Coen brothers did their remake of True Grit, I remember wishing that they had tackled The Searchers instead.
Obviously there’s a lot of risk in remaking one of the great movies, but there’s so much there that a different perspective would shine a light on. If nothing else it would cause a reassessment of the original that I think it would hold up pretty well with.
I do wonder if John Wayne realized he was playing a monster.
@mattbernius: “Just me an the unseasoned, bland, repetitive food.”
Even if you just look at the raw ingredients, you end up with a pretty vast supply chain and people from different locations and cultures just to make something tasty.
If it was a pig farmer saying “just me and the food”, it would be a little more understandable. Mmm, pig.
——
Now I have the John Cale song “Fear is a man’s best friend” running through my head as “Gruel is a man’s best friend”
@Gustopher: WRT “The Searchers,” at the end where Ethan Edwards walks away from his brother’s home, I’ve always taken that as a confession that he knew he couldn’t live among what used to be called “polite society.”
@Gustopher:
Completely. Even when I’m trying to cook local, the spices alone make almost any meal an international production.
And as we know a lot of that “food” from that video being grown in the American heartland are destined to be shipped overseas (either pre or post-processing).
@Gustopher: In any situation with one part of the binary being “dumb meathead,” for most any country music star, I’ll be inclined to pick “both.” But I’m not a fan of the genre.
ETA: And for the record, I had NO IDEA AT ALL that Jason Aldean and his Qwife were even engaged in child trafficking let alone having problems with it.
@Steve Fetter:
Totally agree with this. I also think we need to call out that its much more accepted or at least ignored in some genres versus others. Rap, for whatever reasons (and I think they are plural), has gotten far more recent moral handwringing over these themes than country music.
So to some degree what we are seeing here is a Country artist receiving the same level of scrutiny as many rap and hip-hop artists have been getting for years (and for largely the same culture war reasons).
@KM: I think you’re right. It’s easier to be somebody in a small town. And I did it the other way. I once took a job in a smallish town in IN. We had a very active newcomers club. We’d stand around somebody’s kitchen drinking wine and complaining that nobody seemed to be able to make friend with the locals. It eventually dawned on us that it wan’t they disliked us, it was that they couldn’t recognize us. Without knowing who our parents were, which HS class we were in, what part of town we grew up in, they had no mental hooks to put us on.
There was a pervasive line, probably true, that there were more local HS grads in Indianapolis than stayed in their home town.
@JKB: Adventures in Babysitting??? REALLY???????????
That doesn’t even rate a “th’ f…” just a “wha?”
@Steve Fetter:
The main problem is that the song sucks. It’s no Fightin’ Side of Me. In fact, the video makes BLM and rioting look as cool as hell and preferable to being Jason Aldean.
@Modulo Myself: “Scorsese drew on The Searchers for Taxi Driver, iirc.”
Well, certainly Paul Schrader did. Scorsese certainly got the references. In fact, he would refer to a scene he asked Schrader to add in which we see pimp Sport being nice to Iris as “the Scar scene” — that is, the scene that was never in The Searchers where we’d see why Natalie Wood would choose to stay with her Native American husband Scar…
@Michael Reynolds: On the other hand, some of us grew up in the city and left for small towns because we couldn’t afford the city anymore. In the early days of my teaching career, the town I live in now was the place that hired me. I moved back when I left Korea for the 50% lower rent differential, but that’s gone now. In October, my rent will be the same either here or in the city. The miracle of sprawl.
@Gustopher: Same question as yesterday and the day before. “Do the bigots realize they’re odious bigots?” Same answer, too, I think–“No, they’re [or he’s] probably not introspective enough to get that.”
@Mu Yixiao: Meanwhile my small home town has a violent crime rate that is way above average for the country. It also has a property crime right that is way above average for the country.
There’s been some murders too over the years. One highly suspicious “death” is considered a murder by a significant amount of the population. The reason it’s considered a death and not a murder might be because one of the still active police officers was involved and the victim wasn’t a white male. Of course if I compare it to a city of 300,000 like you (Madison) there’s obviously fewer murders. You know maybe because there’s 100x the people in the city?
Last winter there was basically a house fire every week because of squatters using open flames or meth heads stealing power wires from sometimes occupied houses. That resulted in several deaths. It’s hard to afford a place to live when the only employment options are minimum wage service jobs. Needless to say home invasions are still a problem and I’m not going to blame “city folk” like you…
Legit you’re sounding like the locals who complain that Chicago is the cause of all their ills despite Chicago being fucking +2 hours away at +65mph. Despite the fact that chicago’s taxes pays for everything in the county my small town exists in…
EDIT : OH yeah when I moved out of town 14ish years ago there was a cross burned in the front yard of the one of a handful of black families that lived in town….
One of the quickest ways to end up having a fatal “accident” would be to show up in drag or be a gay minority…
Growing up if you didn’t abide by what those small minded idiots considered “normal” then your life was going to be a nightmare and torture/death.
@KM: This is so freaking true.
Personally I’m so happy to be away from that crap where everyone knows everything about your family thus judging you before you even have a chance…
@mattbernius: I agree that law and order has also damaged our criminal justice system and the perception. Too much bullshit that only exists in a fantasy world where everything falls perfectly in line every time. Never is the viewer challenged with “maybe they don’t have the right person’ at the end of an episode. It sets unrealistic expectations in the minds of the viewers. Like forensics is always 100% correct and always 100% science!!!!
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
That alone earned the up-vote from me.
It was perfect.
@Steve Fetter:
That’s why we should only listen to House and Techno. Cause all the songs are about having sex or doing drugs (or both).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qOc4eVQmtQ
Stats for individual cities can vary widely. If you look at overall rates for urban vs rural you find that crime is higher in urban areas but they are overall safer than rural areas where you are much more likely to die from injury. So if Mu wants to avoid dying due to a crime he stays where he is. If he wants an unexpected early death or injury he should move to Madison.
I dont think you will find Aldean or any country singer doing songs about how Aunt Mabel died or was permanently disabled because they were too far away from quality medical care or Carol died after having a baby because maternal care sucked in her rural state.
Steve
– Juvenal, about 2k years ago (yes, I know he was a satirist)
City and country people have done this weird battle for centuries. The city folk focusing entirely on the worst downsides of country living and country people, with the country folks focusing on the worst downsides of city living and city people. Both sides very self assured in their judgments of the failings of the other.
It’s a circle that will never end. Even if Earth becomes an ecumenoplis, this pattern will probably repeat with any “country” planets.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have lived in urban, suburban, and country areas, and I try to see the advantages and disadvantages without sweeping moral judgments. I like each a lot but for different reasons. Like anything else, anywhere you live will come with trade offs.
@Mu Yixiao:
Of course it always depends on the small town. My hometown–the whole county is 9,000; town is about 2500–had 5 murders last year. Four of them were meth related, one was a jilted lover. Regardless, 200 murders per 100,000 people is a wee bit higher than the 74.3 homicides per 100,000 that New Orleans experienced last year, when they claimed the title of highest murder rate.
When I bring that tidbit up to my friends decrying the dangerous city I live in (and no doubt about it, Indy is in the top 50 for murder and violent crime), they usually retort with “Oh sure, technically speaking…” No no, not technically, actually. I have a much higher chance of being murdered in that small town my large city.
@Neil Hudelson:
Again, the perception that “cities are dangerous” comes from the fact that they don’t know you in a city and people seem to think strangers are the ones to cause crimes. Most crimes are committed by people you know or interact with because that’s how motives and opportunities work. Your abuser/ killer likely to be a family member, friend or co-worker then some tweaked-out rando. Hell, even thieves and muggers are statistically likely to be someone from your general neighborhood due to sheer proximity. Still, this idea of grown-up “stranger danger” being the source of evil for cities flies in the face of facts when you consider that in small towns, all that’s true but definitely with people you know well.
There was an AITA recently where someone who just moved to a small town wanted to report the graduating class that broke in and had an all-day rager in his pool. Damages were over a grand, not including clean-up efforts. It was rightly noted by commentators that it would have been a B&E in the city but the cops treated it as “kids being kids” (the mayors’ kids in fact). That small town, noted as having about 5K or less people, now has a higher felony percentage then the cites (assume 500 kids total and a graduating class of 50 makes a 10+% criminal youth rate)…. and this is only from one instance caught on camera. How many more happened and what other crimes weren’t captured? Oh, it will get written off as “that one time” but when you realize a significant portion of the population was involved or knew and didn’t do anything, it shows how widespread the idea that crime is a primarily city thing really is. Crime definitely happens in small towns, it just gets classified differently by police and populace, swept under the rug and called something else.
@KM: You take the “who grew up in the smallest town” prize from me, and that ain’t easy. I endorse pretty much all you say. I note that I never got kicked in the balls and left to squirm on the sidewalk in the big city.
It seems as if you hold a bit more resentment for your hometown than I have for mine, but I’m sure there’s a good reason for that.
My approach to this would be to do the math: If you took a sample of 10,000 rural dwellers and 10,000 city dwellers you’d probably find the exact same proportion of sociopaths (5%). In the small town, everybody knows who that guy is, and takes steps to fence him in. Unless he’s the mayor.
Some small towns are isolated (mine wasn’t), and this can mean they can go off the rails in ways that aren’t good. Like the one Steven wrote about a few days ago, with an inherited mayor. That’s a pretty spectacular example, others are more mundane.
Lastly, I firmly believe that everyone has the right to love where they live. I expect it. It isn’t a problem per se. Love is blind, though. Or it can be.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Wait, are you saying Adventures in Babysitting WAS NOT a watershed moment in American culture??
@steve:
Or die from a heart attack, a stroke, during childbirth, etc. From what I understand about the condition of hospitals in rural America, this is only going to get worse.
When I had to have some minor surgery a few months ago, having an excellent hospital ten minutes up the road was pretty nice – in a life-and-death situation, that could well be the difference.
@Mister Bluster:
Hard to imagine today, but, but the Stones started out as a country western band…
@Jay L Gischer: In my small home town every good job was basically inherited even the ones that were supposedly up for election…
I think it’s pretty obvious by now that I generally don’t have a positive view of the inhabitants of small towns due to decades of personal experience.. Some nice people but most of them are small minded bigots who think their shit don’t stink and they know it all better than any expert….
@dazedandconfused:..Stones…
That came out in ‘64. I was headed to my Junior year in High School. We all thought it was kick ass Rock and Roll!
@JKB:
Who does this farmer sell his food to?
Not to his neighbors who grow the exact same crops he does. Not into the local economy. Nobody in their small town can eat raw field corn, soybeans, or wheat. The product of that farm has to be shipped, processed, packaged, and shipped again to make it salable.
Farmer Jo/Joe is the tiniest cog in a huge industrial corporate machine.
They sell cash crops to huge corporations for (hopefully) profit. It’s not an idyllic utopia. Cash crop farmers exist because a national and international market exists for those inputs.
Dairy farmers are a bit more local. Unprocessed milk does not travel far well. Hence the still proliferation of regional dairy packagers, manufacturers.
Cities cannot exist without industrial farming. Industrial farming cannot exist without cities.