Country music superstar Jason Aldean has come under fire for a song that condemns violent crime and promotes the Second Amendment. But the people trying to cancel “Try That In A Small Town” are desperate race-baiters who have evidently never visited a small town (the song has been playing on country stations since May, but the left has only just now become outraged by it). Though their charge that the song is a “pro-lynching” anthem is obvious nonsense, Aldean is correct in saying such absurd rhetoric must be addressed, as leaving it unchecked is “dangerous.”
The song lists a series of crimes — sucker-punching somebody on a sidewalk, carjacking an old lady at a red light, pulling a gun on the owner of a liquor store, cussing out a cop and spitting in his face and stomping on the flag and lighting it up — before the refrain asserts such behavior is unacceptable in small towns, where people “take care of our own.”
Small towns, Aldean sings, are “full of good ol’ boys, raised up right” who are not about to let their guns be taken away. “Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck,” he says, “Well, try that in a small town.”
“Both the lyrics and the video, which interlaced clips of BLM protesters vandalizing cities with lines endorsing traditional values… have caused outrage online,” reports the Daily Mail. The song is racist, declares Yahoo News, because it “seemingly takes aim at Black Lives Matter protesters — if not the entire urban population.”
Aldean is pushing back. On Twitter, he pointed out, “There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it, and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage — and while I can try and respect others to have their own interpretation of a song with music — this one goes too far.”
Far from having anything whatsoever to do with race, “Try That In a Small Town” extols the virtues of a tight-knit community and the tradition of small-town neighbors looking out for one another and protecting their way of life, in the same way Hank Williams Jr.’s 1981 classic, “A Country Boy Can Survive” did. The song is about the desire “to get back to a sense of normalcy where we go at least a day without a headline that keeps us up at night,” Aldean said. “‘Try That In A Small Town,’ for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.”
If progressives in the media could, for one moment, stop being blinded by their own obsession with race, they would recognize how far-left policies aimed at defunding the police, promoting soft-on-crime prosecutions and gun control that are prevalent in cities and much less common in more conservative small towns, do indeed increase sidewalk sucker-punches, carjackings and the other evils Aldean laments in his song.
I cite plenty of research proving Aldean’s point in my forthcoming book. Pew research, for instance, shows, “Rural areas tend to have a higher concentration of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, while a majority of Americans in urban communities identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party.” There is also research showing rural people are much more likely than their urban counterparts to call their neighbors ‘good friends.’ What’s more, Heritage Foundation research finds, “the rate of gun ownership is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but urban areas experience higher murder rates” and “there is no clear relationship between strict gun control legislation and homicide or violent crime rates.”
Meanwhile, big city, big government policies lead to increased crime. Bernard Goldberg wrote in a piece published by the Hill in 2021 — a point when “the share of Americans who say crime is the most important issue facing America” had markedly increased since Joe Biden became president — that, “The surge in crime we’ve been witnessing in New York (murders up 14 percent over last year during the first three months of 2021) and Chicago (homicides up 33 percent) and Los Angeles (homicides up nearly 36 percent) is evidence that, while progressives may know how to get elected, they don’t have a clue about how to govern.”
Similarly, Jason Rantz noted in 2022 how “reimagined” social justice reforms, “championed by Black Lives Matter activists, grew out of a progressive ideology that views criminals as victims — victims of a justice system steeped in white supremacy… have been disastrous, particularly on the West Coast, where a culture of lawlessness has taken hold as police departments have lost funding.”
No, neither Jason Aldean nor his song are racist. Aldean, like many Americans, is concerned about radical, “woke” ideologies that are destroying our nation, and he recognizes that small towns, where people tend to be more self-reliant and neighborly, are the last bastion of sanity and peace.
Were the people attacking “Try That In a Small Town” to spend any amount of time in a small town, they’d understand. They’d also probably become more conservative, thereby adopting a more optimistic outlook and increasing their happiness all at once. The people who listen to country music know all about this way of life, and something tells me the attempted censorship of Aldean’s song will go over about as well as the cancellation of Morgan Wallen.
