The Jason Aldean video is just the tip of the country music iceberg
The IndependentThe best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. In 1966, country star Marty Robbins independently recorded the pro-segregationist song “Ain’t I Right,” a vicious attack on Civil Rights organizers which labeled them all a “bearded, bathless bunch” of communists. In 1977, Merle Haggard recorded “White Boy,” a song in which he says he’s a white boy who “doesn’t want no handout livin’”—not very subtly implying that Black and Asian people are lazy, and do. But the fact remains that Aldean’s angry cocktail of nostalgia, country music, and an implicitly white conservative status quo is very much in the mainstream of country music tradition and country music politics. “Try That In a Small Town” isn’t everything that country music is.
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