One person’s view: “[H]ere you have these violent and evocative lyrics, and the composers couldn’t even bother to give them a musically exciting vehicle? … Jason could’ve just as easily been singing a love song with the exact same instrumentation.” – Torches @ Rate Your Music
The public’s view: 0.79 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of all-time
Some passage of time is usually needed before we can judge the merit of an endeavor. On rare occasions, however, we don’t need this historical perspective to know how things are going to shake out in the long run. For example, it was painfully obvious by 2005 that President George W. Bush’s visage was never going to replace Lincoln’s on the $5 bill. After only three or four episodes had aired, it was already clear that The Simpsons was destined to outlast its bitter rival The Pat Sajak Show by many decades. Likewise, it’s safe to assume that Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” will still generally be considered a bad #1 hit in 2050 just as it is in 2025. While I would prefer not to include any songs released after 2020 on this blog, Aldean has earned an exception to this rule.
Many people have slammed this hit for being nothing more than a right-wing grievance ballad. I don’t think this is an entirely fair criticism, because conservatives need protest songs too. They deserve better efforts than this, however. Even with four experienced Nashville songwriters helping him out, Jason Aldean ain’t exactly a match for Woody Guthrie. Guthrie proudly adorned his guitar with the slogan “This machine kills fascists.” If Aldean’s guitar ever kills anyone, it will be by stereotyping them to death.
Aldean’s earlier songs had established him as a defender of rural America. “Amarillo Sky” was one of his first singles, and he put some passion into that performance. He sounded like he wanted to punch Jesus in the face for cursing the farmers of the Texas panhandle with drought and damaging hail. On an artistic and emotional level, “Try That in a Small Town” doesn’t give him as much to work with. The clanging, dissonant guitar chord is a great beginning, but the rest of the track is a three-minute exercise in cashing a paycheck. I can’t think of many other #1 hits that work better as a slogan or a meme than they do as a piece of music. Indeed, you’re more likely to see someone wearing a “Try That in a Small Town” T-shirt than you are to hear the tune playing anywhere. “Don’t Worry Be Happy” at least had a melody – this song barely does.
In his 2012 country hit “Fly Over States”, Aldean derided two coastal city slickers who refuse to visit the wheat fields and funny-named villages of Indiana and Oklahoma. Those two guys don’t know what they’re missing. They will never see the two-headed calf at the Osgood farm, the 12-foot-tall egg beater outside of Debbie’s Daybreak Diner, or the plaque commemorating the birthplace of Orville Redenbacher. But the “small town” described in Aldean’s later chart-topper is not a welcoming tourist attraction. It is more like the setting of Deliverance. This town is where your girlfriend’s best friend’s uncle mysteriously vanished after stopping for a drink at the local bar and asking if one of the TVs could be changed to a women’s soccer game. The town sounds a siren at 6:15 every evening to warn anyone with red hair or a hard-to-pronounce name that it’s time to hit the road. The speed limit here is 25 m.p.h. Are you thinking of driving 26? I recommend you don’t. While “Try That in a Small Town” strikes a forceful blow against the flag-burnings and cop-spittings that are a daily hazard in large metropolitan areas, it fails to convince us that less populated locales are any safer.
This song’s effectiveness as a protest evaporates in the second verse when Aldean whines that Uncle Sam may someday try to confiscate the gun that his grandpa gave him. Of all of the unlikely ways in which the government could trample on his rights, this is perhaps the unlikeliest. Why not complain about one of the many things that the feds have actually taken from U.S. citizens? Thanks to owl-coddling bureaucrats, I can no longer obtain the leaded gasoline that I need to keep my Edsel running or the DDT that I need to kill the ladybug that got into my kitchen. I can’t purchase a box of Sudafed without presenting two forms of ID, a clean criminal background check, and a mucus sample that proves I am congested. Worst of all, the safety-obsessed alarmists in D.C. have banned the sale of lawn darts, making it impossible to replace these enjoyable outdoor game sets after some of the darts get stuck in the neighbor’s kids. Menthol cigarettes, high fructose corn syrup, and red dye #3 are the next everyday products that regulators have in their sights, but Aldean is more worried about the one possession that is specifically protected by its own constitutional amendment and hundreds of Federalist Society judges. Paranoid much, Jason?
I will, however, defend the song from the accusations of racism that have been leveled against it. Its video was filmed in front of a Tennessee courthouse where, in 1927, a violent mob hanged a young black man who had been misidentified as a rape suspect. This has been a point of controversy for Aldean, as the lyrics seem to endorse this type of vigilante justice. Also, the original version of the video included scenes of unruly Black Lives Matter protesters. These segments were later removed for copyright reasons, and much of the remaining footage is of unrelated demonstrations in Toronto and Montreal. Although these protest clips have nothing to do with the liquor store robberies and carjackings described in the song, they contain some of the most violent imagery ever to emerge from Canada outside of a hockey broadcast or the mosh pit of a Gino Vannelli concert.
Aldean says that he was unaware of the courthouse’s sordid history, and I believe him. He selected this spot because it is where he renews his car tags, and he wanted us to feel the same joy that he does during that annual trip to the BMV. (Maybe he’ll film his next video at his dentist’s office.) He pointed out that there are no racial references anywhere in his song’s lyrics. Aldean’s ideal small town is a color-blind utopia where lynching is an equal opportunity sport that can be enjoyed by people of all backgrounds and ethnicities. And it isn’t like his video director could have found any footage of white Republicans assaulting police at a political protest, right?
This is the last hit that I will feature on this blog. For those of you just now joining me, feel free to go back to the beginning and catch up on the history of “bad” #1 records. Without the groundwork laid by Lawrence Welk, Tony Orlando, and Air Supply, we never could have had Lewis Capaldi, 6ix9ine, or Jason Aldean.
My rating: 2 / 10
No comments:
Post a Comment