The 2020s File Feature
Try That In A Small Town
Try That In A Small Town — Jason Aldean and the Song That Detonated a Culture WarCountry music has always had a complicated relationship with controversy, bu…
01 The Story
Try That In A Small Town — Jason Aldean and the Song That Detonated a Culture War
Country music has always had a complicated relationship with controversy, but few songs in recent memory arrived with quite the explosive charge of Try That In A Small Town. The summer of 2023 was hot in every sense, and Jason Aldean stepped into the middle of it with a track that became less a song than a referendum: on rural identity, on the direction of the country, on what country music was allowed to say and who got to say it. The heat it generated was not incidental to its commercial success; the controversy and the chart ascent were deeply intertwined, the one feeding the other in a cycle that demonstrated, not for the first time, how cultural friction translates directly into streaming numbers.
Jason Aldean at a Career Crossroads
By 2023, Aldean was one of country music's most consistently charted artists, a veteran of the Nashville system with a long run of hits stretching back to the mid-2000s. He had survived the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting at his own concert in Las Vegas, one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, and had emerged from that trauma with his profile if anything larger than it had been before. When Try That In A Small Town dropped in mid-2023, he was an artist with nothing left to prove commercially who was making a very specific kind of statement about American life and about which version of that life he believed the culture owed more respect to. The statement was calculated and it was personal, and neither of those things contradicts the other.
The Controversy That Accelerated Everything
CMT pulled the song's music video from rotation after critics pointed out that it featured footage of civil unrest filmed in front of a courthouse with a documented history connected to racial violence. The decision ignited an immediate firestorm. Supporters framed CMT's move as censorship; critics maintained the visual context was indefensible regardless of the song's stated intent. Social media amplified both positions with characteristic intensity. The controversy did exactly what controversy does in the streaming era: it sent millions of curious listeners to platforms to find out what the fuss was about, and streaming numbers spiked in ways that translated almost immediately to chart movement.
A Rocket to the Top
The chart arc was extraordinary and essentially unprecedented for a country crossover in that period. The song debuted at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 29, 2023, then climbed to number 1 the very next week, on August 5, 2023. The speed of that ascent, powered almost entirely by streaming and download spikes during the controversy cycle, was remarkable even by modern standards. Over 20 weeks on the chart, the song became one of the most discussed country crossovers in years. 80 million YouTube views accumulated as the track continued to circulate through devoted fan communities and the ongoing cultural debate simultaneously.
What It Meant for Country Music
The song's success raised questions the Nashville establishment had to reckon with seriously: about the genre's political identity, its relationship with broader American culture wars, and its audience's appetite for explicitly confrontational content that took sides rather than papering over divisions. Whether you found the track bracing or troubling, its commercial performance demonstrated that there was an enormous audience for this kind of forthright rural identity politics in musical form. Aldean's chart achievement that August was as much a cultural data point as it was a commercial one, a record of what a significant portion of the American public was feeling and wanted articulated without softening or qualification. The song's chart trajectory raised questions that Nashville's promotional infrastructure and broader country radio gatekeepers were still processing long after the controversy had moved on to its next cultural target, because the questions it forced to the surface about genre identity and political belonging didn't have easy or comfortable answers.
Whatever your position on the debate it sparked, the track is worth a listen for the sheer force of the cultural moment it crystallized and claimed.
“Try That In A Small Town” — Jason Aldean's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of Try That In A Small Town — Community, Confrontation, and Identity
Songs that ignite genuine cultural controversy tend to do so because they touch something real, even when (especially when) that real thing is deeply contested. Try That In A Small Town presents a vision of rural American identity built around community solidarity, law enforcement loyalty, and the notion that certain behaviors acceptable in a city would be met with swift collective resistance in a small town. The song's meaning, like the song itself, depends enormously on who is listening and what context they bring to it.
The Small Town as Sacred Space
In the song's symbolic geography, the small town is a place of specific values: neighbors who know each other, hard work honored and recognized, firearms normalized as tools of self-protection rather than symbols of aggression, and community norms enforced not just by law but by shared social expectation. The narrator's message to hypothetical outsiders is essentially that this place operates by different rules, and you would do well to understand that before testing them. For a significant portion of Aldean's audience, this is an affirming portrait of a way of life that feels chronically underrepresented and frequently condescended to in mainstream media, entertainment, and political culture.
The Language of Confrontation
The song rehearses a series of behaviors associated in its cultural moment with urban unrest and political protest, then poses the rhetorical question: would you dare try that here? The challenge is both literal and symbolic. Literally, it invokes community self-defense and the protection of local order. Symbolically, it positions rural conservatism as a coherent identity with the will to defend itself against what it perceives as cultural encroachment. This rhetorical structure resonated deeply with listeners who felt their communities and values had been either systematically ignored or actively demonized by cultural and political institutions over the preceding years.
Why Critics Pushed Back
The opposition to the song centered primarily on the music video's imagery rather than the lyrics themselves. Critics argued that airing footage of racial justice protests in a song framed around suppressing outsider behavior carried specific and troubling resonances that the track's defenders either didn't recognize or chose to dismiss as irrelevant to the song's intent. The debate about intent versus impact, always a live wire in American cultural conversation, burned particularly bright in this case and remained genuinely unresolved even as the song ascended to number one.
A Document of Its Moment
Whatever one concludes about the song's politics, it functions as an unusually precise document of a particular American cultural mood in 2023: the defensiveness of communities that feel economically and culturally marginalized, the conviction that mainstream institutions are openly hostile to their way of life, and the desire for music that reflects those feelings back without apology or softening. Songs that achieve that kind of emotional accuracy for their intended audience tend to chart; this one went straight to number one in its second week.
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