Jason Aldean — A Meditation on Mediocrity
Trigger warning: this is a bit of a hatchet job…I can casually enjoy Country Music more than this essay might suggest.
It’s funny when I consider that nothing much has been inspiring me to write these days. It’s even funnier to consider that one thing to get the gears grinding would be Jason Aldean’s remarkably unremarkable song, Try that in a Small Town. Aldean is an icon of the country music scene — if you’re a bit of a purist and see modern country music as (mostly) empty-headed trash (I’m pretty sure Johnny Cash took the genre to the grave with him…no offense intended to Garth Brooks — you tried, baby), understanding Aldean is essential to structuring a rational critique of modern civilization.
So who is this guy?
Aldean was raised up to be a performer. His parents pushed pretty hard for this. And like many performers groomed to seek public approval since childhood, his musical style feels awkward to me — combining the worst elements of 1980’s hair metal with a hard-partying, twangy jingoism that speaks to a mind that never quite needed to escape from high school — a projection trapped under the shadow of a faded generation. It’s country music for people that think the suburbs are “close enough” to rural America; people who get a little too excited at the thought of trucks and firearms (what are you gonna do? Shoot me? 😜). It’s the music you listen to when you just gotta go coaling. Because you’re the kind of person who thinks that’s a good idea.
He’s emblematic of that culture every critic despises: the one that demands we accept things as just “fun”, rather than asking us to consider our relationship to our pleasures. The kind of artist who accepts his blinders, and spits it back in our faces like it’s normal to be blind. He also bears a striking resemblance to a hairless chipmunk.
Aldean himself comes from a middle-sized city in Georgia — the fourth largest in the state. Neither of his parents were connected in any meaningful way to agriculture. And this shows up if you know what to listen for — judging by his song, Big Green Tractor, he knows as much about farming as I do about manufacturing meth (a popular pastime in America’s heartland, yet seldom celebrated in the genre). His breakout hit, Hicktown, is mostly a homage to “mudding” (which is totally fun but maybe not quite worth the money or the mess) that he didn’t actually write. In fact, over the course of his musical career, he has been credited as a writer only on four tracks. He says this is because he’s his own worst critic and doesn’t like his own writing. Assuming this is true, judging by the hackneyed, cliched shit he pumps out anyways, his original work must be cringeworthy indeed. Think of him as the opposite of Taylor Swift (Swift has made a slave out of cliche — Aldean is rather the other way ‘round).
Most of his music is about wandering off into some poor fool’s pastureland, getting some unfortunate girl drunk in the back of a customized pickup truck, and waving guns at strangers on the way home. Oh — and bonfires. It’s shit, as I learned during my 30–40 minutes of thumbing through his canon. Some of its laugh-out-loud funny though, and through it, I began to understand a little more what’s gone wrong with the American right.
What struck me the most about Small Town was the musical tone. It’s a softer song than some of his other hits (My Kinda Party is more rock anthem than “country” song). It has this weird ballad vibe. It could be another song about some pretty thing with blue jeans and a fetish for trucks and uncomfortable sex. But instead there he is, singing about lynching strangers with an almost sinister calm. Its unironic and tone deaf bravado is set to music that you could sleep to. It’s discordant. But that’s what passes for conservative propaganda these days — an entire musical culture dedicated to modern White America’s depressing, memoryless mediocrity. It’s not that they meant to cause offense. No one in Jason Aldean’s world probably knew anything about the history of the Maury County Courthouse. Why would they? Ignorance serves as a kind of currency in Aldean’s world.
Like the broader American right, his ideology is the product of old sitcoms and a fervent refusal to read challenging books. The reactionary violence he promotes is the kind of garbage that comes when a man’s idea of the world is wildly out of step with the reality of it. Eventually something has to give. Thank goodness guns are so easy to get. Try that in a Small Town is a song about that emergent hysteria and moral panic, written by people that don’t understand either. Theirs is a breed of savagery that depends, first and foremost, on stripping context away from the things that scare us. And then freaking out when someone points out that they keep doing this.
I’m hardly the first to suggest that the cultural machine that of the modern American right is essentially a massive grievance generator. It idealizes violence and fear, and plunges endlessly into dangerous dreams of immortality and autonomy (the worst people you’ll ever meet are the ones who think they need to live forever). In this world, history isn’t studied, instead it’s revered like some aimless god. Patriotism is purely symbolic and can never be a product of our shared commitments to build a more inclusive union.
Aldean hypes these tropes well, citing mostly crimes of poverty and complaints about racial injustice as the stuff that you can’t get away with in his mythical small towns (you do need to see the video to get a proper sense of his trauma). While not explicitly racist, if you know your history, it’s clear what he’s referencing, even if he claims to be completely unaware of any of that. While he never accuses anyone of having gotten “uppity”, he might as well: the Small Town music video uses quite a lot of imagery from Black Lives Matter protests in order to hammer the larger point about urban settings being scary (not to mention full of these uppity, antiestablishment types).
But it’s not just me saying this. Aldean, in response to the controversy his song drummed up, tweeted:
“Try That In A Small Town, for me, refers to the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief. Because they were our neighbors, and that was above any differences. My political views have never been something I’ve hidden from, and I know that a lot of us in this country don’t agree on how we get back to a sense of normalcy where we go at least one day without a headline that keeps us up at night. But the desire for it to — that’s what this song is about.”
Here’s what I see when I read this: “modernity is destabilizing and weird. ‘Normalcy’ is me and is therefore desirable. My life was better when I was a child. They made me grow up and I don’t think it’s fair. So I watch a lot of Fox News.” It’s what happens when myth meets intergenerational trauma.
Jason Aldean is, as far as I can tell, a terrified child hiding behind a a guitar and a couple chords. But then, these are the repeated refrains of the modern right; a culture made up of angry Peter Pan wannabes. Whatever his small-town fantasy, he’s not trying to bring greater harmony to the world, but rather recommending us to vigilanteism. It’s immature and shows little evidence of introspection. Because I think that Steven King was closer to the truth: “Small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.”
(I also rather like, “There’s little good in sedentary small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil — or worse, a conscious one.”)
All that said, Jason Aldean should probably be forgiven for this particular song. And probably his whole career. Because the truth is, I think the guy’s just dumb. I believe him when he expresses shock at the response this track has earned him. It’s not as thought anything he’s ever produced artistically suggests that he’s capable of self-reflection. Reading his responses to interview questions I sense a man who, while charismatic, has little going on upstairs and really struggles to square the seeming contradictions that life presents him with. He’s another empty icon muddling his cultural inheritance up with nostalgia and wishy thinking, performing music that conjures a kind of hazy dream in which no one would dare call out the “good ‘ol boys” as terrorists. Which, I’ll remind you, he doesn’t write anyways. He is, in short, just a figurehead, cluelessly embracing by the same impulses that can only lead to disappointment. The same disappointment that gives us mass shooters, fascism, and religious extremism — an endless doubling down on failed ideas.
If he possessed a modicum of awareness, it might be ironic. As it stands, it’s just sad. A profoundly disappointing mediocrity.
