The Jason Aldean controversy is just the latest point on a sorry continuum

Plus, the return of Roséwave and a farewell to Tony Bennett

View this email online July 22, 2023 by Stephen Thompson Amanda Marie Martínez looks at the history that led to Jason Aldean’s controversial country hit; plus, the return of Roséwave and a farewell to Tony Bennett. Jason Kempin/Getty Images Much of this week’s music news revolved around country singer Jason Aldean’s controversial song and video “Try That in a Small Town,” which has been criticized for, among other things, glorifying vigilantism. (Here’s Emily Olson’s explainer for NPR.) My own critique of the song, as someone who grew up in a town of 1,300, isn’t much more nuanced than an overwhelming desire to laugh in the face of a guy from Macon, Ga. (population: 153,000 plus suburbs) who seems to earnestly believe that no one in a small town has ever assaulted a police officer. So we got a deeper thinker than me to weigh in on “Try That in a Small Town” and the history that places it in context. We’re leading this newsletter with part of an essay by Nashville writer Amanda Marie Martinez. (If you want to read more — and you should, it’s great — the whole thing is here.) *** "Try That in a Small Town" is far from the first country song to attack cities using racist dog whistles. "Try That" is most clearly a descendant of Hank Williams Jr.'s "A Country Boy Can Survive" (1982), which claims, "You only get mugged if you go downtown," while warning: "I got a shotgun, a rifle and a four-wheel drive, and a country boy can survive." But Jason Aldean's latest release invokes and builds on a lineage of anti-city songs in country music that place the rural and urban along not only a moral versus immoral binary, but an implicitly racialized one as well.  The urban-versus-rural divide, and the antithetical moral characteristics projected onto them, is not unique to country music and has roots hundreds of years deep, at least. Raymond Williams's 1973 book, The Country and the City, analyzes this binary in literature dating back to the 16th century. The Bible contains cautionary tales against leaving home in search of indulgence, as described in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The discourse over city and country has evolved over time, and taken on its own identity within country music. Songs that pine for an idyllic rural past have been a part of country music since the genre was first invented as a marketing category for rural white Southerners in the 1920s. Some of the earliest country songs, like Fiddlin' John Carson's "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane," recorded in 1923 and often celebrated as one of the first country records, yearns for a rustic home. Carson's song, like many others in popular music at the time, was a minstrel tune, commonly performed in Blackface, and written in 1871 and presented from the perspective of a former slave who longed for a pre-emancipation past. Carson also regularly performed at KKK rallies. Animosity towards urban areas in country songs grew particularly pronounced in the post-World War II decades — just as the majority of country listeners urbanized. Songs like Ray Price's "City Lights" and Stonewall Jackson's "Life to Go" (both recorded in 1958) depicted cities as dirty, lonely, violent places. Cities outside the South were a frequent target, as in Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" (1963), Ben Peters's "San Francisco is a Lonely Town" (1969), Buck Owens's "I Wouldn't Live in New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Damn Town)" (1970) and George Jones and Tammy Wynette's "Southern California" (1977).  Most often, the city was framed as a place that led to immorality for women, as heard in Bare's "Streets of Baltimore" (1966) when a man takes his woman to the city but she's left "walking the streets of Baltimore." Elsewhere, one could only expect to find murder, heartbreak and decay in the city. The country, as described in hits like Dottie West's "Country Sunshine" (1973), Merle Haggard's "Big City" (1982) and up to more recent years in songs like Tim McGraw and Faith Hill's "Meanwhile Back at Mama's" (2014), continued to be depicted as idyllic. At the end of the 1960s, Merle Haggard released perhaps the most famous anti-city country song, "Okie from Muskogee," which celebrated small-town life and lambasted college protests, anti-war demonstrations and those who let their "hair grow long and shaggy like the hippies out in San Francisco do." While some argue Haggard's lyrics were tongue-in-cheek, generations of country music fans since, along with presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who both invited the singer to perform at the White House, have not taken it as such. While "Try That" echoes the anti-urban sentiment of "Okie," it goes further, imagining city folks invading the country and expressing a desire to assert control over them and defend the small town from city influence. The song addresses those who might "carjack an old lady at a red light" or "pull a gun on the owner of the liquor store," and footage in the video makes clear references to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. As Andrea Williams, a Nashville-based author, journalist and cultural critic, told me, "The video reflects a desire to control the actions of people in and outside of these towns, people who have grown tired of the exclusionary, oppressive antics of Aldean and his ilk — people who are, most often, Black."  Controversy surrounding "Try That in a Small Town" comes as the country music business has been pressured in recent years to reckon with systemic racism that's defined the genre throughout its existence. Despite claims that the industry is working to make country music more inclusive to artists and fans of color, news that the video for "Try That" was filmed at the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where a lynching occurred in 1927, suggests the country music business is at worst deeply complicit in maintaining the genre's racist reputation, and at best woefully inept to correct it. Given how similar controversies have evolved in recent years, Williams predicts little will change, saying those in the industry "who ignore the daily, slow-simmering racism and emerge only when the pot boils over will go back to whatever else they were paying attention to before." Read Amanda Marie Martínez’s full essay at npr.org/music. Newsletter continues after sponsor message More to read, watch and hear Tony Bennett was a giant, with a career that spanned from the early 1950s all the way through 2021’s Love for Sale, a duets album with Lady Gaga that got nominated for album of the year at last year’s Grammys. The superlatives and milestones are too numerous to list here — though Walter Ray Watson’s obit for NPR does a nice job conveying Bennett’s incredible venerability and reach — so I’ll just say that the singer’s death at 96 feels like the end of an era. NPR Music’s Lars Gotrich had quite a week. First, he booked GWAR to play the Tiny Desk — a momentous occasion recently chronicled by CNN. Now, as if to remind us all that he contains multitudes, Lars has assembled this year’s entry in his seven-years-running Roséwave series: a 106-song playlist to accompany The Best Summer Ever. What, you think we were going to let the summer of Barbie — the ultimate Roséwave motion picture, if you ask me — pass without putting out a Roséwave playlist? As hip-hop celebrates its 50th birthday, NPR Music is mapping its story on a local level, with more than a dozen city-specific histories of the music and culture. You can bookmark the full series here — and keep revisiting it as more stories are added throughout the next few weeks — but you also shouldn’t miss its latest installments, in which Jewel Wicker examines “how Atlanta became the center of the rap universe" and Dart Adams explains “how Boston quietly triumphed as a seminal rap city.”  Speaking of useful primers, All Things Considered producer Noah Caldwell sat down with a pair of musicologists — William Robin and Kerry O’Brien, who authored the recent book On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement — for a look at minimalism’s pioneers, geniuses and under-appreciated innovators. Don’t miss the accompanying playlist, which includes everyone from Philip Glass and Brian Eno to The Who and David Bowie, with detours through the work of Sufjan Stevens, Meredith Monk, sunn O))) and many others. As Matthew Perpetua points out in his thoughtful review of Blur’s new album The Ballad of Darren, Damon Albarn doesn’t exactly need to keep making Blur records; after all, Albarn’s other project, Gorillaz, is far more commercially successful than the band that made him famous. But The Ballad of Darren is no afterthought: It’s a stately, low-key portrait of a band in midlife. “It’s a very adult, low-key work,” Matthew writes, “and not in the way those words can sometimes be used as a pejorative, to dismiss music that doesn't address emotions with the vividness of youthful first exposure.” Tiny Desk Elizabeth Gillis/NPR “Yo, is your greenroom a greenroom?” Cypress Hill’s B Real posed that question to our own Bobby Carter in the run-up to the pioneering hip-hop group’s Tiny Desk debut, and we are here to report, for the record, that smoking, vaping or otherwise ingesting marijuana is strictly forbidden at NPR headquarters. Somehow, Cypress Hill was able to recover from our rigorous and unblinking enforcement of this policy and perform a killer five-song set with an assist from Money Mark. Also this week: Sparks’ incredible career spans more than 50 years — my 80-year-old mom has been a superfan for decades — but the group keeps winning over converts. Watch Ron and Russell Mael perform three songs from their new album (The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte) and one classic, 1974’s “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us.” One More Thing Have you heard that there’s a Barbie movie out this weekend? It’s true! Let’s all observe the occasion by listening to a last-minute addition to the film’s ever-growing soundtrack: a patiently paced cover of Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine” by Brandi Carlile & Catherine Carlile. Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? Follow NPR Music on Spotify and Apple Music What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: nprmusic@npr.org Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Looking for more great content? Check out all of our newsletter offerings — including Books, Pop Culture, Health and more! 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