Try This in C-Town.
If you haven’t already watched the video for Jason Aldean’s latest, don’t, but I feel the need to discuss the atrocity that it is. Dog whistle doesn’t even begin to describe the bullhorn of a racist statement that this video is, but some people need to have me break it down further so they can understand, here goes. I want to start by saying one cannot prove a negative, so proving this music video and song is not racist is an impossible position to take. I will try to bring into context the loud racial components to this mess of a song, good old Ludwig Van would be happy to be deaf today.
‘Try that in a Small Town’ is the title and I just want to point out some statistics that are relevant: among the United States population, urban residents are 44% white, suburban 68% white, rural 78% white. So among racist dentists, 4 out of 5 recommend living in a small town, and to act like the word ‘urban’ isn’t a code word for black is to deny reality. This is directed at the Black Lives Matter movement, and it is completely irrational to pretend that they don’t have things to riot about. Even though some of it is literally stock footage of rioting, they sneak in just a few spare frames to make sure you know that this is real, and happening in those ‘Democrat run cities’:
How did they find such a reputable source for riot coverage in Atlanta? Again, to act as if this isn’t intentional is absurd. If a news outlet paid out three-quarters of a billion dollars so you wouldn’t get to see the rest of Tucker Carlson’s private messages, and for intentionally misleading their viewers, you wouldn’t use them in your music video. Does he have a moonshine sponsorship yet with these lyrics? ‘Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right’, yeah, like all those good old frat boys at Fox News who keep you uninformed when they’re not triggering multi-million dollar settlements for harassing women.
And the pandering would not be complete without the Farmers (86% white in the U.S.), despite the fact that 80% of the food in the supermarket is produced by a handful of corporations. We needed a story from a sad old-timer to tell us about how people used to build barns for each other, and how it was a simpler time, and they just had faith in the lord and the crops grew. Yeah, there used to be a lot of small towns like that, they were called plantations. This song and music video is Joseph Goebbels level white propaganda, and unfortunately in modern America that still has an audience.
So what happened in that, ‘Small Town’ of Newtown, Connecticut where all those children were murdered at school? Where was that, ‘gun your granddad gave you’ then? Is the murder of 20 children in a small town not something we should be focusing more on than the small town values that are shown in the video? Let me temper that thought with another one about the small town of Uvalde, Texas where 19 children were murdered as local police held their dicks for over an hour. It wasn’t until the, ‘big city’ border patrol showed up to stop this sociopath that the chaos ended. But please, tell me about how some small town cop with a complex was, ‘cussed out’ and ‘spit on’ like it’s a national tragedy.
We see Aldean and his band playing in front of a courthouse and we’re supposed to think, ‘law and order’ is a small town value, but to whom? I think what should be in subtitles is the fact that the courthouse shown was the site of a race riot and of the small town value of, ‘lynching.’ That’s right, Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a 1927 lynching of Henry Choate, a black teenager and the Columbia race riots of 1946 led by African American veterans of World War Two who rioted against the Jim Crow laws they were subjected to. Is serving in the military not a ‘small town’ value? And after all who is more deserving of the right to, ‘stomp on the flag and light it up’ than a veteran who helped beat the Nazis only to come home to the same racism Hitler espoused?
If you’re still having trouble grasping as straws as to, ‘was this racist?’ Let me familiarize another formerly widely held term for municipalities of a certain size: sundown towns. Sundown towns are defined as all-white municipalities that openly practiced racial segregation through discrimination in local laws, intimidation or violence and got their name from the signs that emphatically said, ‘Colored people to leave town by sundown.’ Small town values right there if I ever have lived in one, and I have. Cities celebrate their diversity, small towns celebrate their ignorance.
Gimme Fuel, Gimme Five, Gimme That Which I Desire
‘Where the Streets Have No Name’ is my first musical memory in my Delphos home because I have parents with taste in a wasteland of country music. If you ever find yourself in an argument with someone who is a country fan and they are trying to legitimize that mess, I have found a tried and true, ‘kill shot’ argument. Simply, either in your most sarcastic, or maligned hick accent voice, tell them, ‘She thinks my tractor’s sexy!’ If they give pushback, simply continue in the same voice, ‘It really turns me on.’ For me, 100% of the time this has ended the argument, and then you can talk to the person about their favorite SEC team.
‘Semi Charmed Life’ by Third Eye Blind was the first song I can remember that inspired a hope to get out of small town nowhere. Not because of the lyrics, about your girl coming around and (Radio edit: being very friendly to you). I want to be clear it also wasn’t because it introduced me to the concept of the drug crystal meth. It was because I remembered hearing it when we would go to the relatively close semi-city of Ft. Wayne, or the real city, Columbus, on the radio. Years later when I got the album I realized it was one of the best of the 90’s and I knew young me had a good ear. Covering, ‘Jumper’ was never anything short of a pleasure.
‘Hash Pipe’ in 2001 was my introduction to Weezer, I’m as confused as you are as to why it took that long. It bashes you in the face in the first 10 seconds with that power chord blast and falsetto opening, when the music video came on I was like, ‘Who is this and how can I be a part of it?’ This of course led me to back track to the Blue Album and Pinkerton as soon as 2001 bandwidth would allow, and what a treat that was. Weezer/Foo Fighters was my first concert, and as the fella says, ‘So I can die with a smile on my face, without feelin’ like the good lord gypped me.’
‘Yellow’ was my introduction to Coldplay, and unfortunately back then where I am from you had to hide the fact that you liked them. This was certainly not helped by the smash comedy hit ‘The 40 Year Old Virgin’ scene from 2005 where the lovable Paul Rudd states, ‘You know how I know you’re gay? You like Coldplay.’ Despite the ignorance I was surrounded by, there was no amount of homophobic slurs hurled in my direction that would have stopped me from loving the Parachutes album. ‘Yellow’ is simple, with a great guitar hook right away, and is basically perfect as a song.
‘Enter Sandman’ and ponying up five dollars American at Walmart to get the Metallica Black Album this month was what I would consider a sign of personal growth. I’ve always had an apprehension toward Metallica because I don’t consider myself a metal fan, but I have forever, as any guitarist should, appreciated the musical aptitude. So after reflection, limbering my mind, and turning it up to 11, ‘Enter Sandman’ is fucking legendary. The guitar is great, the relentless energy of it is great, I’m a sucker for the wah-wah effect, just a banger to the end.
Fox On The Run
‘Fox On The Run, your scream and everybody comes runnin’, take a run and hide yourself away.’ I have to agree with the 1975 Sweet song if I was a lawyer advising Fox News on their landmine filled future. As more private messages are revealed to the public about the stratospheric gymnastics that Fox hosts were doing on air vs. their actual feelings, I have to quote The Hives and say, ‘Hate to Say I Told You So.’ This may never reach a Fox News viewer and that’s fine, but I hope they know the level to which they have been duped.
My distaste for Fox News as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party goes back 25 years to when I first started paying attention, and the caviar appetizer was my high school speech teacher telling all of us that, ‘The O’Riley Factor’ was a good example of something balanced. Hold on, I need the Stones now, ‘Gimme Fucking Shelter!’ There was no greater example in the early 2000s of an entitled white man claiming bullshit ideology about how working hard was all you needed to do to be successful in America and completely ignoring what I’m about to get into.
I’m so sick of it being called, ‘woke.’ I would refer to it as, ‘awake.’ As in, I was awake when I was reading about our history as a country, and when I was in college classes giving months worth of details on the subject. I’m sorry this makes you uncomfortable Florida white people, but this country was built by the genocide of the people who already lived on this continent and the early economy was based on systemically enslaving Africans beginning in 1619. Maybe if you step out of your retirement communities for a minute you can, ‘woke’ the fuck up.
Back to the Fox on the run, Tucker Carlson is one of the most detestable media personalities in history, and he went over the line again this week. While his company is in the midst of a 1.6 billion dollar lawsuit he decides to show the highlights of his 40,000 hours of January 6th footage given to him by McCarthy to lie again and come to the conclusion that it was a tourist visit. That there was minimal violence at all and the Qanon Shaman should be released. Cherry picking small clips does not remove what I saw live that day, and to insult your viewers’ intelligence shows that you are without a doubt the worst thing to ever come out of La Jolla, CA.
Tucker, as Jon Stewart so aptly put in 2004 on your show Crossfire, ‘You’re hurting America.’ Your show was quickly cancelled after that and I hope the same fate is in the near future for your show now. The amount of bad information and intentional deception on this network is, I hate to say, not that surprising to me. Their viewers have consistently scored the lowest when current events questions are asked of any news outlet, and I hope they lose the lawsuit. I gotta go to The Clash for this part, ‘You start wearing blue and brown and you’re working for the clampdown.’ Since, ‘woke’ has been highjacked, I wanna say then why can’t we stop calling them MAGA and start calling them the fascists that they are?
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