At least three different times during the last week, I sat down to write about Jason Aldean’s song, “Try That in a Small Town” and its backlash. Each time, I’d start to dissect the video—the criticisms and the questions—and each time I’d abort. Often mid-sentence. Whatever the electronic equivalent is of crumpling up a piece of paper and tossing it into a wire waste basket, that’s what I did.
The false starts didn’t come from fear of touching the topic—it’s not especially scary—but more from a sense that I wasn’t sure what to say. Did the world really need one more person pointing out how ridiculous it is to imply that anyone—on the left or the right—wants to live in a world where it’s ok to “sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk” or “car jack an old lady at a red light”—the lyrics that open the song?
This description invoked nothing for me so much as a morbid curiosity around what it would be like to wander the lawless streets of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange or maybe to meander through 18th century Australia in the parts that were penal settlements for Britain.
Then I saw a headline this morning that read “Jason Aldean, Decrying ‘Cancel Culture,’ Has a No. 2 Hit.” After slapping myself on the side of the head, much like you’d hit a stuck pinball machine—I had to do something to stop my eyes from rolling endlessly upwards at the headline—I thought, maybe I have something to say after all.
The author of the article was making the reasonable point that it’s simply nuts for Aldean to decry cancel culture, as he had recently at a show. What kind of pathetic culture aimed at “cancelling” people increases the target’s income—driving up streaming numbers and generating a massive amount of attention? Critics may have gotten his song kicked off of CMT, but he was clearly doing just fine.
Here’s the thing, though. Trying to understand “cancel culture,” through the lens of whether the consequences are ever actually sufficient to cancel someone has never made any sense. How do you know if someone is cancelled anyway? Is it like that episode of Black Mirror—White Christmas—where the character is visually blocked at the end, condemned to live out his life where everyone sees him as faceless blob? If that’s the standard, then, going back to Aldean for a moment, having a chart-topping song hardly seems worthy of complaint.
Too often, this is how criticisms of cancel culture are framed. As in, does anyone really get exiled or punished in some thought-criminal kind of way? When posing the question like this, examples can be difficult to produce. Of course, there are the tragic cases, like the San Diego Gas and Electric employee who was fired for apparently cracking his knuckles out his car window in a manner that, to someone, looked like a white power sign.
For each of those scenarios, though, there’s the Matt Damon case, who in one moment is getting blasted for talking about a “spectrum” of bad male behavior and a few months later is starring in an SNL cold open as Brett Kavanaugh. Damon’s career was hardly any worse for the wear. Or there’s Scarlett Johansson, who was criticized for her comment that she, as an actor, should “be able to play any person, tree, or animal,” but whose career can hardly be described as floundering.
But what if we’re fundamentally posing the wrong question? Instead of asking whether people are really being erased from polite society—which is basically like asking whether the consequences constitute the reputational equivalent of a mortal wound—we should be considering whether there was ever an infraction in the first place.
In other words, instead of asking whether the SDG&E employee was able to find another job, we should ask whether he did anything wrong. In what world are social penalties determined and doled out by whoever has the most heightened sensitivity? When was that decision made? And in what world do we, in every instance where there are multiple possible ways to understand a person’s motivations, call people out for the worst possible interpretation of those motives?
In this alternative way of looking at cancel culture, the question isn’t whether Damon’s or Johansson’s careers were damaged—they don’t appear to be—it’s whether there should be any penalty for their comments at all.
What does this mean for the Jason Aldean video? It means we should probably back up a step before piling on. When it comes to the criticisms, what exactly are we talking about?
Regarding the site, did Aldean pick the location because of its history as the site of lynching in 1927? Did he not have anything to do with picking the site at all? Was it chosen simply because it’s been the site of other shoots? Does any of this matter? More generally, does a location’s violent and racist past therefore disqualify it from being used for anything going forward? Is there a statute of limitations? How long? Who decides?
Or is the real issue whether the video’s footage was real, which is what Aldean claimed? Is lying or being ignorant about the veracity of footage cancel-worthy?
Is the problem is that his lyrics are menacing—"Well, try that in a small town. See how far ya make it down the road”—or exaggerated to the point of being hagiographic? After all, he describes small towns as being “Full of good ol' boys, raised up right.” Can the population of any town anywhere really be accurately described in such simplistic terms?
If those are the criteria we’re using, my guess is there are a lot of other songs that should also get caught in the web of condemnation.
Ultimately, when it comes to understanding which social rule(s) Aldean broke, we owe it to one another to be clear. As an attempt at a first step in that direction, I’ll propose a few potential candidates based on my read of the critics. Aldean violated a norm by:
Knowingly (or unknowingly) filming at a location where there’d been a lynching
Using menacing lyrics
Criticizing Black Lives Matter
Claiming his footage was authentic when it wasn’t
Painting an overly simplistic, and rose-colored, vision of the virtues of small towns
Whichever it is that he violated—and perhaps there’s more than one—it’s high time we hashed out these norms in the open. My guess is that, in the process of doing so, we’d find ourselves in a much bigger, yet necessary, conversation about how we understand the world more generally.
My only comment on your story is the idea that people aren’t really being cancelled. I have two friends who have lost their jobs after saying something complete accurate. I can give you a long list of professors and teachers who have been fired. And the idea that if you are wronged you can sue doesn’t cut it. Of course I live in Seattle where if the next city council election doesn’t turn out the current council we are headed in the same way as San Francisco, ie: a dead city. The woke culture (they named it woke themselves) is killing cities and I’m taking my company to eastern Washington if it goes bad. I’ll be voting for republicans for the first time in my life because I’m losing my business since people don’t want to run the gauntlet of heroin and armed robbery and generally reprehensible behavior to come near my once successful business in what was a beautiful city. This is our last chance to save. So I’m with Aldean as long as he wasn’t thinking racially. And that we will never know. I’m very sad liberals have gone off the rails. Both extreme sides are batshit crazy but they both out shout the reasonable middle. Nobody cares about people like me but they are about to lose my 70 jobs. SF is already dead but I’m still hoping we can save Seattle. The City Council refuses to listen to business and the jobs are starting to leave. Keeping my fingers crossed.