Welcome to my first VIP piece, I hope you like it.
The other day I talked about the controversy surrounding Jason Aldean’s song ‘Try that in a Small Town.’ First off, if you haven’t watched it, take about three minutes out of your life and do that, just so you know what everyone is talking about:
I mean, when a work is controversial and it doesn’t cost you anything, you should examine it, to see if the fuss is justified. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people say something is the most awful thing, ever, only for it to turn out to be not that bad.
In any case, before I get to Rolling Stone’s latest silliness, let’s review what I said the other day about it, briefly.
First, just because a singer says something doesn’t mean he or she means it. For instance, Johnny Cash once said he shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die and … well, he didn’t. It was a song about a fictional murderer, in prison, written from the perspective of the murderer.
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Second, whether this is Jason Aldean’s own thoughts or not, he is not making a threat or advocating violence. He is making a prediction. He is saying that if you do a number of things in a small town, you are likely to face violence.
Third, not every act of violence he is predicting would be wrong or illegal. There is such a thing as self-defense and the defense of others in the law. But he also mentions violence for things like stomping on a flag, which is not legally or morally justified. And he talks about resistance to gun control.
And my deeper thought is that whether you agree with the viewpoint portrayed in the song or not, people should really listen to it. I’m not saying they should put it their daily rotation when they are out and about. People don’t have to like the music or the message. But it’s a warning that the leftward tolerance of criminality is going too far. It is also a warning that gun control will be resisted. In fact, if that is Jason Aldean’s actual views, that suggests that he might have gone from embracing some gun control after he witnessed a massacre in Las Vegas to saying more or less, ‘from our cold, dead hands.’ If they’ve lost Aldean, everyone should be interested in why. If you are a gun grabbing type, you’d want to know what the left did wrong to lose him and if you are a true supporter of the Second Amendment, you would also want to know what the left did wrong to lose him so maybe you can figure out how to make sure they lose other people, too. I speculate about some of the reasons why they might’ve lost Aldean in that prior post.
And honestly, the controversy also seems to be premised on the idea that regular people across America are going to hear that and for the first time in their lives, think that carjacking, holding up a store and even burning the flag justifies violence, or think for the first time in their lives that maybe they shouldn’t just comply if a new gun control law is passed. His liberal critics are afraid he is going to persuade a bunch of small town people with that song, but I think they’ve got it backwards. To be blunt, I’ve heard a lot of regular people say similar things for years in the small towns and the suburbs, just listening to regular people talk. I wouldn’t be shocked if whoever wrote that song heard similar conversations and those conversations inspired the song. In other words, the left seems to think this is coming from the top (Aldean) down to regular folks, when I suspect it is the opposite: It is coming from the bottom, up.
But let’s get back to that first point. It might not even be how Aldean feels. I just glossed over this, but I see people claiming he didn’t even write the song—though I keep seeing other sources say he did, so I don’t know. But even if he did write it, as I said, sometimes a song is pure fiction, and written from the perspective of a person who isn’t the singer. And when I was making that point last time, I cited lyrics from Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, Johnny Cash and Cyprus Hill. Younger readers are not likely to know this, but Cyprus Hill is a straight up gangsta rap group which got heavy rotation on MTV in the 90’s (you see, kids, at one time MTV actually showed videos on their channel). And I didn’t put them down (I enjoy their music, actually, which is why I know that lyric off the top of my head). I didn’t even talk about them very much. This is literally all that I said:
To give one of hundreds of examples, Cyprus Hill once did a song called ‘Hand on the Glock’ where they describe a shootout where ‘self-defense turns to the offense’ which is about as explicit as one can be that the force you are using is not purely lawful self-defense.
Well, apparently, I am an evil right-wing troll for pointing this out:
Commentary: Right-wing trolls are trying to take some heat off of Jason Aldean by talking about hip-hop instead. Don’t take the bait. https://t.co/6R2Frk5aPV
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) July 20, 2023
And the article is pretty much as whiny was you would expect:
This is a familiar pattern to anyone who’s paid attention to the past few decades of conservative punditry. When the heat gets too high on the right wing, they try to change the subject to hip-hop.
Sure, Jan.
These talking heads go after hip-hop because it’s a convenient punching bag. It’s much easier to appeal to Americans’ latent fear of Black expression than it is to defend something like Jason Aldean’s video.
In other words, black expression is good, white expression is bad, because reasons. In all seriousness, now that Rolling Stone is going all in on pretending that one can rationally denounce Jason Aldean while defending Ice-T’s song Cop Killer ...
This is the outlet that celebrated and defended Ice-T's "Cop Killer", and put him on the cover in regards to that call for violence. Today, they are melting down when Jason Aldean does not call out for violence directly. Grow the hell up. https://t.co/A0MOX7pYoN pic.twitter.com/0uPqzs6x4n
— Brad Slager: CNN+ Lifetime Subscriber (@MartiniShark) July 20, 2023
… it’s really hard to conclude that this is anything but discrimination—either by race or viewpoint. And while it would be fun to pretend this is racial discrimination, we all know that it is the viewpoint that is making them mad. They don’t like self-defense or defense of others even when it is legal, they don’t like patriotism and they really hate that Second Amendment. Indeed, just to be fair, here’s that song:
Now, since Rolling Stone thinks it is really important to notice that this isn’t actually a rap song, let’s acknowledge that. It comes from Ice-T’s metal band, ‘Body Count.’ I like Ice-T’s rap music and I like metal, but, honestly, I never heard anything from that band that seemed like good music.
And is fair to say that even with the introduction we can’t assume that he isn’t playing a part. My gut says that it is best described as Ice-T fantasizing about killing cops, motivated by his real anger. But we know he didn’t actually carry it out, so there is unquestionably an element of fiction to that song. And since Aldean doesn’t even live in a small town, there is clearly an element of fiction, there, too.
Sadly, the Rolling Stone writer goes on:
Never mind that this is the same ideological movement that’s always talking about free speech — the hypocrisy is nothing new. Neither is the failure to consider hip-hop as a serious artform that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negative ones.
‘The hypocrisy is nothing new,’ Rolling Stone says while defending its own hypocrisy. Seriously this is hypocritically accusing other people of hypocrisy while defending hypocrisy. It’s like hypocrinception.
Think about it. The charge of hypocrisy is itself hypocritical. Rolling Stone is upset that Jason Aldean made a song that is in their eyes offensively violent. Surely, they can understand that you can criticize a work without saying that the person should be censored—because they are doing exactly that with Aldean. So, getting snitty at conservatives saying (paraphrase) ‘what about gangsta rap (and other violent music Rolling Stone is fine with)’ doesn’t contradict the conservative belief in freedom of expression. If Rolling Stone can criticize Aldean without somehow suppressing free expression, so can the people pointing out that gangsta rap can be much, much worse.
And as if we needed more hypocrisy, they complain these people are not taking rap seriously as an art form, while apparently not taking country seriously as an art form. Indeed, whether you think Aldean’s song (or Ice-T’s song for that matter) is art is beside the point. He is expressing something that should be heard.
And, yeah, I said ‘Cop Killer’ was something that should be heard. Like I said about Aldean, I didn’t think Ice-T is like Moses on high telling people things that never occurred to them before he said it. He was one of many people expressing his anger at police brutality and other forms of corruption. Maybe you don’t think police brutality and other forms of corruption were all that bad back then, but he was like the canary in the coal mine, telling you about a well of anger toward the police that needed to be addressed somehow. Maybe the answer is to do a better job policing the police, or maybe the answer is to find ways to convince people that the police were not as bad as claimed. Maybe a person could take it as a wake up call to improve relations between each community and the police that patrol those communities. But the correct response shouldn’t just be ‘I’m offended.’ It should be to figure out what that song and the sentiment driving it tells us, and how we can make it so he (and many others) aren’t so angry about the police.
Anyway, the Rolling Stone article ends by basically saying ‘pay no attention to the hypocrite behind the curtain.’
But there’s no point engaging with this kind of argument, because there’s no real argument being made. This genre of right-wing Twitter typers just hope that if they can get you to think about hip-hop, you’ll be distracted from asking how a mainstream, multi-platinum country star could think it was OK to make a song and video that skate right up to a despicable line. Don’t take the bait.
Seriously, ‘Cop Killer’ comes much closer to any supposed ‘line’ than Aldean’s song. Either it is all okay, or none of it is.
And you’ll notice that there is literally no attempt to distinguish between gangsta rap or ‘Cop Killer’ and Aldean’s song, except one is country and the other is not, and one involves black expression and the other doesn’t. So what this article is really doing, besides whining a lot, is using one of the most basic tricks leftists use when you have caught them behaving badly: Attack the sincerity of their critics.
That’s what they mean by ‘trolls.’ The term ‘troll’ in relation to discourse is relatively new and its meaning is being hashed out in real time, but generally speaking, is claiming people are being disruptive and insincere. And Rolling Stone is making a similar claim when they say that ‘no argument is being made.’
Of course, an argument is being made. We are saying this, you complete nitwits: We thought it was well established in our culture that musicians often play roles and therefore say things that we don’t approve of. We also thought that even when they mean it, it is acceptable to discuss all kinds of violence and criminality, because we should be open to all kinds of discourse. 'Don't kill the messenger,' and all that. And I’m pretty sure that it was gangsta rappers setting those precedents—although to be fair, Johnny Cash was talking about wanton murder long before gangsta rap was a thing.
(And I won’t even pretend to know if he was the first.)
Now if people like this nitwit at Rolling Stone want to suddenly say certain violence in music is bad and we shouldn’t talk about it, then they need to jettison a whole bunch of music they like. Gangsta rap, which revels in criminality is singled out because it is an entire subgenre dedicated to criminality. And if you aren’t willing to do jettison that kind of music, Rolling Stone, then just shut up about Aldean and admit you were wrong. Don’t waste an entire column whining about being called out on your craven hypocrisy.
