![]() Though he doesn’t write these songs - Aldean has worked with a long list of veteran Nashville lyricists, including Neil Thrasher and Josh Thompson - he’s often spoken of developing a curator’s ear for the sort of music he wants to sing. And the small towns that populate his work are often defined by what they don’t have, with their single stoplights and quiet Friday nights. His hits are the sort of country songs that detractors love to parody, full of dirt, trucks, beer, and country girls. There’s not much more to be found in Aldean’s music. When speaking to a local TV station to promote Georgia, the album’s second half, he demurred on his hometown’s influence: “I just tell people it was a great place for me to grow up.” He loves to note that some of his favorite musicians (like Otis Redding and the Allman Brothers) grew up in Macon, or that he was a budding baseball star there. But that didn’t stop him from admitting that his 2021 album, Macon (the first part of a double-album, Macon, Georgia), was a tribute to “that small-town vibe that just always sort of burned into me.” Of course, Aldean never digs much further into what that vibe was. ![]() The irony is Aldean doesn’t even hail from a small town, having grown up on the edge of Macon, Georgia, one of the largest cities in the state. Aldean, who wore blackface less than a decade ago, has countered that his song and video couldn’t be racist because “there is not a single lyric in the song that references race.” “Try That,” he claimed, is about “the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.” ![]() Days after the video’s release, CMT took the rare step of pulling it from the air. Aldean’s message of who the bad guys are is obvious: He wants viewers to think these clips are from Black Lives Matter protests in America (even though, according to Rolling Stone, a chunk of the footage is actually from Canada). In it, he and his band perform in front of the Maury County Courthouse - a site where, less than 100 years earlier, a white mob displayed the lynched body of a Black man, Henry Choate - as fiery footage of protestors clashing with police gets projected onto the building. The sundown-town imagery went somewhat under the radar when Aldean first released the song in May - the website Taste of Country even celebrated its promotion of “country justice.” But this month, Aldean made his message all the more obvious with an accompanying music video. In the chorus, he goads, “Try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road.” If you still don’t get the point, he uses the next verse to flaunt “a gun that my granddad gave me.” His current single, “Try That in a Small Town,” turns those same small towns into communities besieged by violence, laying out in his lyrics a series of crimes that double as racist dog whistles: carjackings, liquor-store robberies, assaults on police. Today, Aldean paints a far grimmer picture. ![]() If they could only meet farmers in Indiana or see the moon from Kansas, Aldean reckoned, “they’d understand why God made those flyover states.” Another track, “Country Boy’s World,” finds a similar scenario in a relationship, with a boy showing a doubtful city girl his favorite parts of the country, like smelling wildflowers on a dirt road and drinking sweet tea with homemade ice cream. The record’s final single, “Fly Over States,” placed him on a plane, listening as two big-city businessmen trashed the fields below them. On Jason Aldean’s 2010 album, My Kinda Party, the country star perfected his image as a champion for small-town America.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |