Jason Kempin/Getty Photos
Jason Kempin/Getty Photos
Jason Aldean’s “Attempt That in a Small City,” which ignited controversy this week over claims that the track and its new video promote white supremacy and violence, is way from the primary nation track to assault cities utilizing racist canine whistles. “Attempt That” is most clearly a descendant of Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Nation Boy Can Survive” (1982), which claims, “You solely get mugged should you go downtown,” whereas warning: “I acquired a shotgun, a rifle and a four-wheel drive, and a rustic boy can survive.” However Aldean’s newest launch invokes and builds on a lineage of anti-city songs in nation music that place the agricultural and concrete alongside not solely an ethical versus immoral binary, however an implicitly racialized one as nicely. Cities are painted as areas the place crime, sexual promiscuity and private and monetary break happen, whereas the “nation” is in the meantime framed as a peaceable area the place happiness reigns.
The urban-versus-rural divide, and the antithetical ethical traits projected onto them, isn’t distinctive to nation music and has roots tons of of years deep, not less than. Raymond Williams’s 1973 e book, The Nation and the Metropolis, analyzes this binary in literature relationship again to the sixteenth century. The Bible incorporates cautionary tales towards leaving house looking for indulgence, as described within the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
The discourse over metropolis and nation has developed over time, and brought by itself identification inside nation music. Songs that pine for an idyllic rural previous have been part of nation music for the reason that style was first invented as a advertising class for rural white Southerners within the Nineteen Twenties. A few of the earliest nation songs, like Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “Little Previous Log Cabin within the Lane,” recorded in 1923 and sometimes celebrated as one of many first nation information, yearns for a country house. Carson’s track, like many others in standard music on the time, was a minstrel tune, generally carried out in Blackface, and written in 1871 and offered from the attitude of a former slave who longed for a pre-emancipation previous. Carson additionally usually carried out at KKK rallies.
Animosity in the direction of city areas in nation songs grew significantly pronounced within the post-World Warfare II a long time — simply as the vast majority of nation listeners urbanized. Songs like Ray Worth’s “Metropolis Lights” and Stonewall Jackson’s “Life to Go” (each recorded in 1958) depicted cities as soiled, lonely, violent locations. Cities exterior the South have been a frequent goal, as in Bobby Naked’s “Detroit Metropolis” (1963), Ben Peters’s “San Francisco is a Lonely City” (1969), Buck Owens’s “I Would not Reside in New York Metropolis (If They Gave Me the Entire Rattling City)” (1970) and George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “Southern California” (1977). Most frequently, town was framed as a spot that led to immorality for girls, as heard in Naked’s “Streets of Baltimore” (1966) when a person takes his lady to town however she’s left “strolling the streets of Baltimore.” Elsewhere, one may solely anticipate finding homicide, heartbreak and decay within the metropolis. The nation, as described in hits like Dottie West’s “Nation Sunshine” (1973), Merle Haggard’s “Huge Metropolis” (1982) and as much as more moderen years in songs like Tim McGraw and Religion Hill’s “In the meantime Again at Mama’s” (2014), continued to be depicted as idyllic.
The rise of anti-city songs in the course of the prosperous, post-World Warfare II period coincided with a second when the previously rural and closely white nation music viewers was quickly suburbanizing and reaching social mobility by means of house possession. On the similar time, selective availability of house loans in suburbs and racially restrictive housing covenants in cities furthered white flight, making cities synonymous with non-whiteness.
By the mid-Nineteen Sixties, an accelerating civil rights motion offered alternatives for conservative politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon to capitalize on white anxieties surrounding city facilities. Following racial uprisings that occurred by means of the second half of the last decade, what got here to be known as “legislation and order” politics have been deployed to quell these uprisings, and social protests extra broadly. On the finish of that decade, Merle Haggard launched maybe probably the most well-known anti-city nation track, “Okie from Muskogee,” which celebrated small-town life and lambasted school protests, anti-war demonstrations and people who let their “hair develop lengthy and shaggy just like the hippies out in San Francisco do.” Whereas some argue Haggard’s lyrics have been tongue-in-cheek, generations of nation music followers since, together with presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who each invited the singer to carry out on the White Home, haven’t taken it as such.
Whereas “Attempt That” echoes the anti-urban sentiment of “Okie,” it goes additional, imagining metropolis of us invading the nation and expressing a need to claim management over them and defend the small city from metropolis affect. The track addresses those that may “carjack an previous girl at a crimson gentle” or “pull a gun on the proprietor of the liquor retailer,” and photographs within the video makes clear references to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. As Andrea Williams, a Nashville-based creator, journalist and cultural critic, informed me, “The video displays a need to manage the actions of individuals in and outdoors of those cities, individuals who have grown bored with the exclusionary, oppressive antics of Aldean and his ilk — people who find themselves, most frequently, Black.”
Such a message displays Tennessee state-controlled efforts to manage native politics in Nashville (together with efforts to shrink town council, and management the Nashville airport), and occasions reminiscent of the current vote to expel Tennessee home members Justin Jones and Justin Pearson — two Black males who symbolize areas in Nashville and Memphis, the state’s two largest cities — from the legislature.
“Attempt That” ‘s invocation of “legislation and order” politics additionally distinguishes it from “Okie From Muskogee.” Kevin Kruse, a professor of historical past at Princeton College who makes a speciality of Twentieth-century America with a specific curiosity within the making of recent conservatism, says that “Attempt That in a Small City” builds on and evolves from frequent conservative rhetoric, however the place the track departs is in its calls for. “He is calling for individuals who aren’t legislation enforcement to mete out violence towards individuals who have not damaged any legal guidelines,” Kruse explains. “This seems like a ‘legislation and order’ enchantment, nevertheless it’s truly a name to lawlessness.” Such calls vividly echo occasions such because the January 2021 riot which have come to outline trendy, far-right extremism.
Controversy surrounding “Attempt That in a Small City” comes because the nation music enterprise has been pressured in recent times to reckon with systemic racism that is outlined the style all through its existence. Regardless of claims that the trade is working to make nation music extra inclusive to artists and followers of coloration, information that the video for “Attempt That” was filmed on the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the place a lynching occurred in 1927, suggests the nation music enterprise is at worst deeply complicit in sustaining the style’s racist fame, and at finest woefully inept to right it.
It shouldn’t come as a shock that the Maury County Courthouse has such a horrific historical past. As Betsy Phillips, a author for the Nashville Scene and a historian and creator of the forthcoming Dynamite Nashville: The FBI, The KKK, and the Bombers Past their Management, explains: “There have been not less than two lynchings in Columbia, however I am unable to stress sufficient that there have been many, many lynchings within the surrounding counties.”
Requested whether or not she believes Aldean had direct data of the Maury County Courthouse’s scary historical past, Phillips factors to interviews the place Aldean has boasted, “I have never learn a e book since highschool.” Regardless, Phillips describes an extended legacy of white supremacy in Columbia and neighboring communities — together with Pulaski, Tenn., the place the Ku Klux Klan was based — that ought to not have escaped the consideration of the strong music trade personnel behind the video.
The controversy over “Attempt That in a Small City” is prompting but extra pleas for the Nashville music trade to take better care in making it a extra inclusive area. However given how such controversies have developed in recent times, Williams predicts little will change, saying these within the trade “who ignore the every day, slow-simmering racism and emerge solely when the pot boils over will return to no matter else they have been taking note of earlier than.”
Once we consider “Attempt That in a Small City,” as utterly distinctive, as one other pot-boiling-over second, we lose sight of how neatly it and Aldean truly match inside deeper nation music traditions, and why nation music continues to be a daunting area for marginalized communities.
