Maybe it should have been titled “Small, narrow-minded in town”, instead of trying to reflect that closed mindset as the whole “Small town”.
That “mindset of fear” exists in all size towns and spaces. We need to open our eyes, and hearts, and work on ourselves towards understanding what in our social environment triggers our fears.
Rebecca Solnit
22 July 2023
Why is it we’re supposed to believe Real Men only come from the country and also they’re scared shitless of the city, where unarmed ladies like me stroll about among the beautiful diversity fearlessly? Also Jason Aldean who sings a song about guns and being a white supremacist bully scampered offstage in Connecticut early in his set because he had played golf all day in the sun and felt bad and that’s neither responsible to the job the audience paid him to do or a very impressive way to manage yourself. Jason “We take care of our own” can’t take care of himself. p.s. Lots of crime in small towns, starting with family violence and working its way up to mass shootings and racist violence, and they had their own major drug crisis.
San Francisco is full of refugees from small towns that wanted to kill them for not fitting in.
NPR: “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. Cities are painted as spaces where crime, sexual promiscuity and personal and financial ruin occur, while the “country” is meanwhile framed as a peaceful space where happiness reigns. 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.” p.s. I wish people wouldn’t use darkness as a pejorative.
Jason Aldean’s ‘Small Town’ is part of a long legacy with a very dark side