Jason Aldean Review: Praising the ‘Try That in a Small Town’ Song

This is a review in defense of Jason Aldean’s song and small towns everywhere. You won’t see these views on many liberal media sites, as the corporate media have rushed in unison to condemn and mischaracterize Aldean’s song.

As a news site, we have found ourselves constantly at odds with the corporate media over a growing number of big cultural moments tying into conservative views. While most of the elite media leapt in unison to condemn and mischaracterize them, we also gave a positive review to Matt Walsh’s documentary and to the film, “Sound of Freedom,” which had absolutely nothing to do QAnon.

Similarly, Aldean’s song has absolutely nothing to do with lynching, despite the elite media smears to the contrary. What is interesting is how hard the liberal, elite media have pushed back against these cultural moments. Meanwhile, they glorify or ignore rappers who use racial slurs and sing about shooting cops and raping women, while touting a criminal lifestyle.

They don’t have a problem with that type of creative expression. But a song about stopping crime is somehow over the line.

Something big is going on – people are finally pushing back – which has its roots in Elon Musk creating a free-speech space where people can organize and get the word out. This threatens the left, whether it’s a Bud Light boycott or Tucker Carlson still being able to have a show or Jason Aldean reminding people that rioting and liquor store robberies wouldn’t fly in a small town.

The left’s instinct is censorship. Liberal elites have recently expressed smug, arrogant views of small-town America, from Hillary’s basket of deplorables to Obama’s people clinging to their religion and guns. The deplorables are speaking back.

Check out Aldean’s song lyrics for yourself. They do not mention race. They do not mention lynchings. He does sing against carjacking old ladies, pulling guns on liquor store owners, and spitting in the faces of cops. Why are the elite media assuming he’s referring to blacks? Why are they positioning against being against those things?

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you’re tough

What Aldean’s song and video do condemn is a very recent phenomenon in which anarchy has been enabled, criminals have been turned into victims, cops have been turned into villains, and burning and looting cities (or blatant smash-and-grabs) are enabled by liberal DAs, radical politicians, and a complicit media.

Aldean’s song glorifies modern small-town values where social order exists and right from wrong is understood. We grew up in small towns in Wisconsin, Kewaskum and Ladysmith. They’re places where people still respect cops, they send their kids to the military, and you can leave your car running to go into the store and it’s still there when you come back. They’re places where people wave when they pass you on the road in their cars, where they go to church on Sundays, and where they have a dairy farmer work ethic. This is the kind of small town Jason Aldean means.

What Jason Aldean’s song is saying is that the anarchy and lawlessness we’ve been witnessing in big cities in recent years would simply not be allowed in a small town. Why? Because there’s social order. Because there’s an internal cohesion and value system that would prevent it. And, if necessary, because the police will enforce the law. Yes, if necessary, people will also defend their own property and businesses.

We saw the latter occur in the relatively small-town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the riots, where armed homeowners barricaded and guarded their subdivisions as the police let Kenosha’s downtown burn. We spoke to the owner of a used-car lot who, while armed, warded off arsonists who were headed toward his business. He preferred to leave it to law enforcement, but they were nowhere to be found; they had a strategy of not protecting property that night. This is the kind of action that Aldean’s song speaks of, not lynching.

What’s actually astonishing is that the elite media scribes, never more out-of-touch with the values of many in this country, see this as a bad thing, as something to cancel and twist.

The truth is that liberal polices on crime have been complete and utter failures, and Aldean’s song, in its own way, captures this truth. Just look at San Francisco, where businesses are fleeing the downtown, and the images of drug addiction and homelessness are dystopian. Would you want to live next door to a tent city or walk over syringes peppering the sidewalk? We see images of stores padlocking the grocery cases to ward off shoplifters or heroin users hunched over on sidewalks and are amazed how quickly liberal policies have failed.

What is happening in many large American cities, Milwaukee included, is the opposite of the Broken Windows theory of law enforcement. This theory helped mitigate crime in major cities for decades; it holds that you crack down on the lower signs of neighborhood disorder (public drinking, littering and the like) to send a message to the criminal element that larger signs of neighborhood disorder (i.e., robberies, murders) won’t be tolerated. For years, it worked. Post George Floyd, it was deemed racist, and we have seen the ramifications of defunded and non-proactive police forces, of district attorneys with sky-high non-prosecution rates, and of court systems with massive backlogs that keep recidivists on the streets for too long. Black lives have been lost as a result.

The music video, censored by CMT, does contain scenes of lawlessness, rioting, and anarchy that mirror those we saw in Minneapolis, Kenosha and other cities during the BLM movement. The closest it gets to lynching is that Aldean sings outside the Columbia, Tennessee, courthouse in Maury County, which the media have jumped to point out was the scene of a lynching back in 1927.

Okay, but it’s also a historic building, and Aldean’s song does not reference that horrible incident. Sure, some small towns have negative racial history, but he’s not talking about that history. His song is about small towns in 2023 not 1927. This is obvious from the news footage in his video.

All of these recent moments (referring to Bud Light, Sound of Freedom, and Aldean’s song) represent regular folk fighting back against the narratives foisted on this country by the left in the last few years. (To state the obvious, this paragraph does not refer to the horrific lynching. However, we fail to see the analogy between condemning people robbing liquor stores and carjacking elderly women, as referred to in Aldean’s song, and people being horrifically lynched for racist reasons almost a century ago.)

Jason Aldean’s song is the musical equivalent of Kid Rock shooting cans of Bud Light. He is just saying of the recent trends and narratives, enough.