Jason Aldean and the Nashville Outrage Machine

A still from Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” video

Most mainstream country music artists don’t write their own songs. I didn’t know this, growing up listening to Nashville’s Finest. While some artists, like Willie Nelson and Loretta Lynn, write much of their own material, most mainstream country is written by contract songwriters, much like how most rock music was written by Brill Building songwriters before the Beatles popularized the idea that rockers should write their own material.

This includes Jason Aldean, whose latest lukewarm yodel, “Try That in a Small Town,” polarized music fans recently. With its thinly veiled hints of violence against both criminals and protesters, and its music video shot at the location of at least two lynchings, has drawn enough ire for CMT to discontinue airing the video. The battle, however, has driven the song up some charts, because come on now, controversy sells.

Except, again: Aldean doesn’t write his own material. Four Nashville contract writers scribed “Try That in a Small Town”: Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison. The latter two are members of Aldean’s backing band, and probably appear in the controversial video (I couldn’t pick them from a lineup). Of the thirty-eight singles Aldean has released to date, he has writing credits on exactly none.

Aldean isn’t the first Nashville artist to release songs described as pro-lynching. Without Googling, I can quickly name Charlie Danels’ “Simple Man,” and several songs by Hank Williams, Jr. Daniels and Williams are arguably worse, because they do write their own material. Aldean could defend himself by claiming he’s just parroting contract writers’ words (though he hasn’t). Daniels’ and Williams’ violent fantasies are decidedly their own opinions.

Jason Aldean live on stage last week

The longer I live with this, though, the more I realize: that makes Aldean’s position less defensible, not more. Because Aldean signed away much creative control over his stage persona, he must surely live surrounded by corporate bureaucrats who vet decisions. Production management, record company executives, PR professionals, and others must’ve read they lyrics sheet, heard the studio rough mixes, seen the video storyboard, and said: “Let’s run with it.”

Giblin and Doctorow write about how tightly controlled today’s music industry generally is. The Big Three music conglomerates—Universal, Sony, and Warner—are completely controlled by bean counters and MBA graduates, not by musicians, like in Johnny Cash’s heyday. Output is tightly controlled, and no single gets released without extensive human and software scrutiny to ensure it sufficiently resembles past hits, which is probably why most “hit” music is repetitive.

“Try That in a Small Town” must’ve endured countless layers of scrutiny before being released, and the chance that nobody heard or read the lyrics without realizing they were racially coded is infinitesimal. The chance that nobody on the creative or technical team didn’t know that the Maury County Courthouse, where the video was shot, saw two lynchings, is laughably small. Somebody, probably several somebodies, green-lighted it anyway.

(As an aside, Aldean, like Daniels and Williams before him, never directly references race. He uses racially coded terminology; “carjack” in particular has been a racially coded term since at least the 1990s. But none of these artists directly mentions race. That’s how dog whistle language works: they use jargon they know their audience will interpret racially, but only obliquely. Then they blame their opponents for directly mentioning race first.)

For that many people to ratify shipping a sundown town anthem, the decision must’ve been conscious. Somebody within the bowels of the corporation must’ve deliberately decided to sell a song guaranteed to evoke anger. The corporation, therefore, must’ve willfully decided to poke a wasp’s nest, presumably because controversy sells. The polarizing conflicts arising from this song aren’t incidental; they’re almost certainly calculated and intentional.

This just demonstrates that old saw, that the rich aren’t your friends. They’ll pick your pocket while telling you that “other” over there—that immigrant, that anti-police protester, that Hollywood hillbilly—is your real enemy. They’ll burn your house down to collect the insurance, then act dumbfounded when you ask who struck the match. I believe that’s what happened here: they provoked a fight for the money.

And the longer the story continues, the more free publicity it receives. Given what we know about how money moves in the music industry, very little probably goes to Aldean himself, or his contract songwriters. The beneficiaries of this controversy are his record company, a BMG subsidiary, and his concert promoter, which is probably LiveNation. This fake controversy is a cash subsidy to billionaires. And we keep supplying it.