AN EMERGENT ANTHEM OF NORMAL MILITANCY.

Jason Aldean's Try That in a Small Town doesn't strike me as great instrumentation or great lyrics, and yet, because of the ongoing hectoring and scolding from Our Intellectual Betters, it has caught on as an unofficial anthem, and governors of the Free States have used their social media to endorse its performance and its premises.  "Jason Aldean ain’t getting canceled for this song. In fact, he’s getting more popular."

None of which stops the scolds from scolding, undoubtedly to the accompaniment of Andean folk music.

"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.

Yes, if you say something like "binary," you Sound Erudite, never mind that your argument subsequently lapses into incoherence.

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.

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."

Never mind that suburbanization isn't the same thing as country living, and nowhere in any of the "theorizing" of Try That have I seen any invocation of the small sundown towns.  Given the fuss over the courthouse shown during the recording, the culture studies types missed.

The controversy over "Try That in a Small Town" is prompting yet more pleas for the Nashville music industry to take greater care in making it a more inclusive space. But given how such controversies have evolved in recent years, [Nashville culture commentator Andrea] Williams predicts little will change, saying those in the industry "who ignore the daily, slow-simmering racism and emerge only when the pot boils over will go back to whatever else they were paying attention to before."

When we think of "Try That in a Small Town," as completely unique, as another pot-boiling-over moment, we lose sight of how neatly it and Aldean actually fit within deeper country music traditions, and why country music continues to be a frightening space for marginalized communities.

That's National Public Radio, and it's representative of what Our Intellectual Betters are carrying on about.  Not the Bee contributors read several similar fret-pieces, all from Washington's Post, so you don't have to.  "The Washington Post likes nothing better than a juicy scandal involving racist white supremacists being all supremacisty, and if there aren't any, why, they'll just make one up!"

There is no Narrative outside The Narrative.  "It doesn't matter what the song is actually about, what matters is whatever historical baggage people want to append to it, the better to further their political agenda, the purpose of which is the never-ending accumulation of power."

Meanwhile, something that happened at Country Thunder, a summer event in the Lake District of Southeastern Wisconsin, somehow has not become the kind of keep-the-pot-boiling incident the Grievance Lobby could use.

A TMJ4 reporter was "left humiliated" while reporting from Country Thunder's opening night in Twin Lakes Thursday after being yelled at and subjected to a racist slur.

Taylor Lumpkin, a Black multimedia journalist for WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) since 2020, tweeted Thursday night that "a guy ran up and yelled at me (unprovoked), and called me a N***** twice. No one helped. Everyone stared at me, and laughed.

The story rated a mention on the related WTMJ radio station this morning, but there's not the kind of ongoing Commentary, let alone People Taking to the Streets, that can accompany such outrages.  That article also noted a flag hoist including a Confederate battle flag.  I interpret that flag, and a few other flag hoists, as evidence of the Militant Normals' insurgency.  County fair season will be winding down shortly, and I will file field reports.