Sometimes, whether I want it to or not, my years in Texas show up. My pick-up truck, my country radio station, and my constant attempts to recreate the boot scootin’* I did at West Fraternal Auditorium through two degrees at Baylor give me away. I have added pink decals to my truck and sometimes turn down the radio because trucks and country music code very differently in the hippie mountains of Asheville where I now live.
Country music, itself, sometimes codes differently even to me, now that I am the mother of a straight, white American male. I just hadn’t heard how much it focuses on getting drunk and breaking the law until I caught myself singing along with my fifteen-year-old son in the car.
He and I usually have our best conversations on drives, so the last couple of weeks in country music news have given us some things to debate. First, Jason Aldean’s anthem to gun rights and small-town vigilantes caught my son’s attention even through the headphones he usually has tuned to something else entirely. We listened and talked about the implied threats in the song. (Here is the song if you haven’t heard it: https://youtu.be/b1_RKu-ESCY )
Admittedly, he may be more sensitive to this because he lives in a two-mom home and has numerous lgbtq friends. He has heard us debate whether to put any kind of flag or sign in our yard in our small town. So our conversations about the dog whistles in Aldean’s songs have been interesting. He couldn’t wait to talk about the fact that the song has made it to #1 and what that likely says about how right-leaning folks are being fed a steady diet to fuel their hatred of anything “other.” My son sees this song in line with the January 6th participants, the whiteness of the Christian right, etc.
He has had his first job this summer; he works at the minor league ballpark because they will hire 15-year-olds and pay twelve bucks an hour plus tips. He thinks he’s rich. So I was the one excited to bring up news of another song this week.
We listened to little-known Oliver Anthony’s southern anthem, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” with dismay. (Here is the song if you haven’t heard it: https://youtu.be/sqSA-SY5Hro) The tired south vs. north riff again fills my country station with hate-filled verse: “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat. And the obese milkin’ welfare. Well, God, if you’re five foot three and you’re 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.”
Like Aldean, Anthony seems to be giving voice to the white, male rage we’ve seen increasingly on display since 2016. The title of the song alone suggests confederate flags as context. Then the welfare and fat-shaming in his verse undercut his “we southerners are all in this together against our common enemy” suppositions of the title.
My son loves statistics and loves to use them to point out flaws in logic, so he was thrilled to point out that obesity rates are far higher in the south, and they absolutely are not limited to people on public assistance. I asked him how he felt about the “us vs. them” theme of the entire song, and this led to a great conversation about what neighborhoods, small towns, and communities in general ought to be about.
I’ve continued to think about these conversations and about the two songs. They have both reached #1, and I want to know who is listening to them to assure this success. But, more importantly, I want to know how we have gotten to a place where we define what’s good about small towns as guns and good ol’ boys and we talk about our once proud history of social safety nets with disdain for, according to most reliable data, these life-saving measures for people in need in our neighborhoods. For our neighbors.
I want to know and care about my neighbors, honestly regardless of their music tastes, their attitudes about gun control, their class, race, or religious differences. I want my small-town to be open to new ideas, not threatening to folks who come in with new and different ways of being. I want to support my neighbor’s business instead of giving my money to a box store. I want to figure out what all parts of the country have in common and celebrate and learn from the meaningful differences.
And I want my son to appreciate all kinds of music, and maybe even visit Texas long enough to learn to two-step one day. I also want him to see public outrage over songs by angry white men when we are always ready to condemn anger when it is uttered by men of color. In short, I want my music to reflect my values, like justice, economic opportunity, and, above all, love for all. Maybe it’s time to turn my radio back to the folk music station.
*There will be boot-scootin’ at our San Antonio event. I can teach you if you don’t know how!