Jason Aldean's 'Small Town' is part of a long legacy with a very dark side

Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town," which over claims that the song and its new video promote white supremacy and violence, 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 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