I mean, lots of small towns in the US are quite nice and pretty quiet.
Statistically, some places do have higher assaults or burglaries, and on the very rare occasion they have a murder, their per capita rate is astronomical. But, anecdotally, the town i grew up in of ~8000-10,000 people had its first murder/suicide since I think the 50s. So that year it looked horrible statistic wise, but I’d consider it considerably safer than Kansas City.
And there are definitely people like that in this dude’s song. But there are a lot more people who AREN’T like that. He’s painting a broad brush and projecting.
Also, I learned he grew up in a city with over 100k people - that’s not a small town. Is this guy the Kid Rock of country music?
“Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk / Carjack an old lady at a red light / Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store / Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like / Cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you’re tough / Well, try that in a small town.”
One of these things is not like the others. One of these things ain’t the same.
I see a lot of anger for the racist asshole that sings this song. But I ask that we take a moment and spare some of that anger for the racist assholes who wrote it (Kelley Lovelace, Kurt Allison, Neil Thrasher, and Tully Kennedy according to Rolling Stone) and the racist asshole who produced it (Michael Knox, again according to RS). Not to mention the director of the video (Shaun Silva, via americansongwriter.com). It truly takes a village of racist assholes to bring a pro-lynching, gun-fondling paean to fear-mongering hatred to market in 20-ever-loving-23. Let’s hope that each of these folks experiences a sudden increase in their time away from work. But then they’d probably say me thinking they should lose their jobs is equivalent to some form of extrajudicial mob justice.
I’m sure your town is lovely, but statistically speaking the violent crime rate is higher in rural areas than in urban areas in both countries. Conservatives just love to spread stereotypes of how bad the big cities are.
That’s the message the song brings, too - “You, too, can be a gun-toting freedom-loving hick like me, living in a fantasy land of immediate violent restitution for mostly-imagined slights.”
I keep expecting at some point the residents of Small Town America (to the degree that’s even a definable, cohesive population) to be offended by the people like this who pander to them as unsophisticated cretins who live in mortal terror of this cartoonishly silly and racist view of the “City.” And I’m still waiting.
I guess there are few things new under the sun and this is just a more explicit (and far less catchy) song than Hank Jr.'s Country Boy Can Survive. And man, when you are less subtle than Hank Jr. in your crapulence, you should ask yourself some serious questions.
This is the problem too many folks want to overlook when considering history from the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements. We know that violence and “vigilante injustice” committed against members of marginalized groups goes beyond the police, and that the struggle to stop it never ended. It’s why we still have people who have killed unarmed POC treated with leniency while getting expressions of support/funding from racists, sundown towns, and modern versions of The Green Book:
Folks who create and promote messages of support like this song know…
I guess some folks would prefer to make the discussion about cities vs small towns, because that’s a far less uncomfortable conversation to have.
While doing a quick search into Canada’s history of racial lynchings ( so as not to misspeak) I found the number of historically documented lynchings in the US from 1882 to 1968 was “about 4,742;” which means there were countless lynchings and race massacres that were never even recorded for posterity.
