With his new single and video, Jason Aldean has taken right-wing propagandizing to a whole new level. On Friday, July 14th — one day before he canceled a concert after suffering from heat stroke — the country singer shared a video for his new song, “Try That in a Small Town,” which not only promotes violence, but was filmed at the site of an actual lynching in Tennessee.
The song sells itself as being anti-crime and pro-community, beginning with lyrics condemning carjackings and liquor store robberies. But the facade ends after the fourth line, when Aldean begins equivocating these literal crimes with protesting, which is actually not only legal, but constitutionally protected.
Aldean doubles down with his anti-protest sentiment in the music video, which shows him playing with his band in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee. Images are projected of anti-police brutality protests from recent years, all while Aldean sings, “I recommend you don’t try that in a small town.” A tweet has since gone viral explaining that the courthouse was the site of a brutal lynching in 1927, in which 18-year-old Henry Choate was killed and hung from the building.
Choate’s death is a reminder of the violence inflicted on Black communities and oppressed populations in America to this day. The protests that Aldean seems so hell-bent on undermining were calling for a more humane approach to organizing society. Meanwhile, Aldean is advocating for vigilante “justice” on the site where an innocent teenager was murdered by a vigilante mob less than 100 years ago.
In the lyrics, Aldean also makes reference to right-wing disinformation claims that the government will someday “round up” guns from its citizens, warning that, though “that shit might fly in the city,” they shouldn’t try that in a small town. Let’s call Aldean’s bluff here: is he really going to use his guns to stop government officials? What, he’s going to shoot them? Isn’t this song supposed to be celebrating the police and condemning anti-government protests?
Amongst all of this, it’s also worth noting that Aldean is encouraging gun violence even after he was the headlining performer at the 2017 Las Vegas festival where the deadliest mass shooting in US history took place.
Here’s the bottom line: “Try That in a Small Town” isn’t about protecting rural towns, it’s not about preventing crime, and it’s not about regaining a “sense of community and respect,” like Aldean claimed in a tweet. Instead, it’s seemingly a racist dog whistle, one which stokes violence and promotes repressive class collaboration.
The only throughline moral of the song is that Aldean isn’t interested in making a better world for everyone in his community (like what the Black Lives Matter protests were calling for), but rather, wants to protect a status quo in which some people have more rights and privileges than others. And the story of Choate only goes to prove that those rights and privileges can include living life itself.
