Another Stupid Song Banning

Jason Aldean's Song is Classless Trash, but it Shouldn't Be Banned

“Banning” songs is stupid. I’ve written about it before here when the Waukesha School Board banned a Dolly Parton(!) song.

It’s all so counterproductive, all it does is bring more attention to the song. People want to know “What is this that everyone is making a big deal about?” More often than not, people listen to it, find out how benign and unnoteworthy it really is, and mock the uproar. But the ban crosses the hurdle of the hardest thing for a record to do; bring attention to it and get it heard. If it has a nice hook or appeal in anyway, it leads to a hit record.

Which brings us to today’s banning¹ nonsense, the uproar of Jason Aldean’s new song “Try That In a Small Town.” After it was banned it became the #1 song on the Country Music charts.

As we did with Dolly’s song, “Rainbowland,” let’s first look at the lyrics.

So far, it’s kind of what you’d expect from a country music song. There is a level of arrogance about it, giving the perspective that this kind of shit is tolerated in big cities (its not really) and that only small towns stand for certain values (in truth, you are just as likely to see all of this in a small town as you would a large city). The implied threat at the end is a little troubling but it’s the same kind of veiled advice Humphrey Bogart says in “Casablanca” when he suggests to the Nazi commander are some sections of New York he recommend the Nazis stay away from.

This verse contains one of my favorite strawman arguments; “They say…” WHO exactly says? Really! I’ve never heard a single politician (or anyone really) in my life actually say “We’re going to round up and take everyone’s guns!” It’s such B.S. it would make me laugh if it didn’t make me cry thinking of the ramifications. Aldean should know all too well about those ramifications; he was on stage when a gun nut decided to shoot up his concert in the worst mass shooting in American history. If he thinks things would have been different in a small town in that situation instead of Las Vegas, that’s just wishful thinking. Still if he wants to cater to the gun a**hole crowd, that’s his prerogative.

The “good ol’ boy” reference is a little troubling too, since that conjures up images of redneck, dixie-waving racists. The choice of Aldean’s video was also unfortunate in this regard as it was the sight of a lynching, only underscoring it.

And then that’s the song. He reiterates the chorus a couple more times but that’s it. It’s far from obscene. Not even indecent. Tasteless and classless, sure. But those are perspectives and opinions, not really any real cause for banning or censorship. Frankly, what I found the most disconcerting about it was the cognitive dissonance of talking so much about small town values and then staging the video in a location that looks anything but a small town.

It has more in common with Tony Keith’s “Courtesty of the Red, White and Blue,” with it’s pseudo- patriotism and beligerence. At least that song had the benefit of timing, in that it was released post 9/11 and spoke to how a lot of Americans were thinking at the time. Looking back, it just sounds more like a pep rally song rather than a song about America’s greatness.

Neither song is particularly good in my opinion, but they do speak directly to the attitudes of people in rural America. They don’t like people looking down on them. They believe in a set of values that can come off as monolithic in practice; for instance, they revere the American flag as a form of patriotism and freedom, but admonish someone treating the flag without the same level of reverence in demonstration of those freedoms. Their sense of pride and patriotism are more in line with the way one supports a local football team than it does the messy ways the Constitution is upheld in practice. Oh, and they like country music over hip hip and rap, which closer reflects the rural lifestyle better, but also explains why they prefer Aldean to Cardi B singing “W.A.P.”.² Those are the reasons I don’t care for the songs that much, even though I grew up in a relatively small town.

But those are my opinions. It would be utterly offensive to my set of ideals if ANYONE had the power to basically say “this kind of art is tolerable, while this other set is not.” While I like to think my taste is diverse enough to appreciate good and bad art alike, there have been times I’ve dismissed certain songs or movies or shows out of hand only to come around and appreciate them years later as my mind and tastes expanded. It’s why freedom of speech, choice, and expression are one of the reasons America is great, and why one person SHOULDN’T choose what is fit for all. For all those liberals in an uproar about this, who proclaim to be paragons of empathy and tolerance, for them to condemn this song is pretty hypocritical. They could just as easily write a song that speaks and resonates with small town life, focusing on the values they hold dear (John Mellencamp was particularly good at this), but choose not to, because its just easier to point and shame.

And then they wonder why rural America votes Republican all the time.

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

If we’re going to talk about banning and censorship of songs, we have to talk about Luther Campbell and the 2Live Crew.

I was in high school when 2Live Crew released “As Nasty As they Wanna Be.”³ Did I hear about them through MTV, or word of mouth, or radio airplay? Nope.

I heard about them because they were banned. A Broward County (Miami) judge had come down and labeled the album “Obscene” in a court of law, based on community standards, and that it could be rightfully banned. It made national news. I found out about 2Live Crew from Dan Rather of all people. My initial reaction?— I wanted to hear what it was that got this judge all up in a tizzy. From the verbal introduction using lines from “Full Metal Jacket” and from which the title and lyric were sampled, it had a good hook. The bassline drew you in too. The lyrics were pretty ribald. N.S.F.W.

It was the kind of stuff my 17 year old self would play over an over on my headset but never on the stereo which would tip off my parents. The rest of the album was more of the same, just moreso. In truth I always wished Luther could be more creative with his lyrics because the music on its own was actually pretty good. The base mentality of the lyrics never really got out of the gutter. I look back at it now and just shake my head at how truly nasty it really was and wonder how I played it as often as I did.

But it brings up my point; I never would have discovered 2Live Crew but for the uproar of people making a big stink about it. Cities all across the country (mostly in the south and west) banned the album. It became a huge deal. So what did Luther do? He asked Bruce Springsteen for rights to the riff of “Born in the U.S.A.”⁴ and made ANOTHER hit out of the whole affair.

You’d think people would learn, but here we are today going through the exact same beats.

PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories

First Amendment cases always fascinate me. The greatest heros in 1A cases are usually the very same people most despise, ridicule and hate. I mean think about it. People most agree with don’t invite controversy; its the ones we disagree with most where people want to discuss the communities’ standards of decorum over the artist or advocate’s right to speech, assembly and expression.

One of the best films to demonstrate this is the Milos Forman⁵ film “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” Flynt was the owner and purveyor of softcore porn, “Hustler” magazine. As such, he faced hundreds of obscenity suits around the country, and relished demonstrating the hypocrisy of those calling his magazine obscene. In perhaps the best scene of the movie where he drills the point home, Woody Harrelson, completely embodying Flynt’s ethos, single handedly shows the difference between taste and what he thinks should be out of bounds. N.S.F.W.

But to me the one that truly exemplifies the ridiculousness of trying to ban something is the famous “George Carlin- 7 Dirty Words” skit. This went all the way up to the Supreme Court on what you can and cannot say on broadcast radio and television. This almost seems tame by today’s standards. Again, N.S.F.W.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

The radio station that played Carlin’s skit, and the basis for the Supreme Court lawsuit, lost in a 5-4 decision.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

We’re going to give it to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who gave what is perhaps the single best line in Supreme Court history when it comes to what is obscene. ⁶

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. In this context, “banning” isn’t exactly correct. In the case of Dolly Parton’s song “Rainbowland,” it was a measure by a government entity banning the song from school functions. In Jason Aldean’s case, it’s CMT, a very large outlet for country music, opting to take the song out of rotation. Nonetheless, it did so out of pressure from certain groups and amounts to a form of censorship.

2. A repugnant song which has a level of novelty to it but that metropolitan America didn’t really seem to have a problem with.

3. Luther Campbell was a pretty savvy marketer. Even he understood most retail outlets for music were never going to let the most profane lyrics he had on the shelves, so he always created a more bowdlerized version of his albums. At the same time he released “As Nasty as They Wanna Be,” he released “As Clean as They Wanna be” for places like KMart and Target and all. It didn’t sell nearly as well, but it did help maintain a brand awareness that the album was available and that kids could go elsewhere to get the “better” album.

4. Springsteen later admitted he regretted that. To him that song is more personal and about the troubles experienced by Vietnam veterans, and not the anthem others have made it to be.

5. Forman himself grew up in Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia, and his career is full of freedom of expression as influence, from Hair, to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Man on the Moon.

6. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).