Music
Why a “canceled” song is atop the pop charts—and country singers hold the Top 3 for the first time ever.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Terry Wyatt/WireImage.
In the closing weeks of 1969, Merle Haggard took “Okie From Muskogee” to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart for four weeks—and, somewhat more surprisingly, No. 41 on the Hot 100, the closest he’d come to cracking the pop Top 40. The song was Haggard’s eighth country chart-topper but his first single ever to touch the pop chart, despite—or really, probably because of—its anti-urban ethos and vituperative spirit. A piss-and-vinegar ode to small-town life, “Okie” was a chin-out celebration of what rural folk didn’t do: “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/ We don’t take our trips on LSD.” Most especially, the song was a takedown of progressive protest culture: “We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street” and “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy/ Like the hippies out in San Francisco do.” As Haggard scholar David Cantwell aptly describes it in his book The Running Kind, the song was “a single, ideologically loaded shotgun blast … one early return of fire in what became termed the Culture War.”
About that “loaded shotgun blast”—one thing “Okie” didn’t espouse, openly or even covertly, was taking up arms against lefty protesters. Maybe that’s why actual hippies and beatniks, from the Grateful Dead to Phil Ochs to the Flaming Lips, later covered it. Haggard’s lyrics were snide and pointed, certainly, but they were also funny—more a dunk on lefties than actually menacing. Haggard later admitted the song started as a joke.
Is Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” a song, or a Fox News polemic set to music?
Other than a 1973 Christmas record, Haggard never came close to crossing over on the pop charts again. But for a little while in late ’69, “Okie From Muskogee” was the record commanding the zeitgeist—even normie-radical Tommy Smothers was talking shit about Merle Haggard on TV. For its cultural resonance alone, “Okie” probably should’ve been a top-charting pop record. Sure, the competition was stiff—the Beatles’ Abbey Road was the No. 1 album that week, and crowding the top of the singles chart were classics by the Jackson 5, Led Zeppelin, the Supremes, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Also, the Hot 100 back then factored in only pop radio—country stations only reported to the country chart—and there was nothing like streaming to measure exactly how much Americans of all stripes were consuming any given record. But even without pop crossover, you can picture a 1969 pop chart where Merle Haggard’s spiteful small-town anthem cracked the Top 40, maybe even the Top 10.
Nowadays, America’s charts capture much more finely tuned data that measure songs’ resonance across our populace, for better and worse. And 54 years later, the Hot 100 not only hosts but is topped by another vituperative rural anthem—the words “Small Town” are even right in the title. Only I wouldn’t call it even a little bit funny. Its singer certainly seems deadly serious.
Is Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” a song, or a Fox News polemic set to music? Right up front, let me say that the answer to why this song is No. 1 is the media headlines more than the melodic hooks. (Which, to be fair, are considerable—Aldean’s chorus can really overtake your frontal lobe.) It’s No. 1 thanks to a form of consumer data activism that is becoming ever more commonplace on the charts in the 2020s. Just in the last fortnight—which is when everything about this song blew up—much has been written, tweeted, and ranted about Aldean’s piece of musical agitprop, all of which has fueled digital consumption and hence the song’s inevitable Billboard explosion.
How inevitable? When “Small Town” debuted at a gobsmacking No. 2 last week, behind a No. 1 song by BTS alumnus Jungkook, I waited a week to write this column, as I was convinced Aldean would go the distance to No. 1. Knowing what I know about how the Hot 100 works, I had a sinking feeling the conflagration kicked up by “Small Town” would remain inflamed at least long enough for Aldean to wait out Jungkook. Not unlike the fanbase stirred up by this summer’s stealth movie blockbuster Sound of Freedom, the audience aroused by a new anthem about taking up arms against a perceived woke mob—and aggrieved about Aldean’s dog-whistle warning about those guns being taken away—wasn’t going to back down instantly.
If you’ve read this far, you already know, to paraphrase Merle Haggard, which fightin’ side you’re on. Rather than belatedly debate the song’s meaning—and its plainly gaslighting stance on race and social protest—I want to do some forensics on exactly what happened here: not only why “Small Town” is No. 1, but why country songs have locked down the Top 3 of Billboard’s big pop chart for the first time in its 65-year history. Each of these Hot 100 smashes—Aldean’s “Small Town” at No. 1, Morgan Wallen’s former No. 1 “Last Night” at No. 2, and Luke Combs’ cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” at No. 3—could be argued to be a different flavor of problematic. But controversy-courting activism isn’t fueling all of these hits. To give country music its due, even before Aldean’s song showed up, the genre has been having a moment.
You might say that moment started late last winter, when Wallen dropped One Thing at a Time and proceeded to lay waste to the charts. While country’s current wave spans an impressive array of hitmakers from Combs to Jelly Roll, Kane Brown to Lainey Wilson, without question Wallen is the rising tide lifting the rest of country’s boats. Wallen’s third album has now spent 15 of the past 21 weeks at No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard 200 album chart. He will likely return there before the summer is out: The LP has been momentarily interrupted for a week or two here and there, but Wallen remains lodged in the Top 3 regardless, ready to bounce back into the penthouse anytime the competition wanes—even when it’s stadium-filler Taylor Swift.
As I noted when Wallen’s “Last Night” went to No. 1 on the Hot 100 in March, streaming is what explains his consistent chart dominance. A hard core of Wallen’s fans streams his music, almost to the exclusion of everything else, reliably every day. For country fans in general, who were slower to adopt streaming services and still buy downloads and even compact discs in greater numbers than most pop, rock, or rap fans, Wallen—with his hip-hop–conversant production and albums packed with more than 30 tracks—is the killer app, the content that convinced them to adopt a new technology. (As I told the industry magazine Country Insider a few months ago, Wallen’s hits are for country fans what Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms was for first-time CD buyers or what The Matrix was for those new to DVDs.)
To digress from country music for a moment: The only 2020s audience likelier than country fans to buy CDs and downloads are K-pop fans. Which explains how, last week, Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” was momentarily outgunned on the Hot 100 by “Seven” by Jungkook, an erstwhile member of the on-hiatus South Korean juggernaut BTS. The BTSers are all trying their hand at solo careers. Back in April, Jungkook’s BTS bandmate Jimin also debuted atop the Hot 100 with his solo debut single “Like Crazy,” and its chart performance was virtually all sales. It never caught on at radio and is already off the Hot 100. Three months later, Jungkook’s new hit, which features American rapper Latto, is doing quite well at U.S. radio and generating a more even mix of airplay, streams, and sales, but in its debut week, his sales were still massive. Given its radio-friendliness, “Seven” might well hang around a while, but it’s already down to No. 9.
So: For K-pop fans, data activism takes the form of buying any BTS-adjacent product in week one to overcome the genre’s frequently meager U.S. radio airplay (which, fans insist, is the result of radio programmer racism and xenophobia). For right-leaning music listeners—of country music or any genre—data activism is similarly weaponized, but never as effectively as it was for Aldean these past two weeks.
Were you aware that, back in March, multiply indicted former president Donald Trump had a No. 1 hit? Not on the Hot 100—the song “Justice for All,” credited to “Donald Trump and the J6 Prison Choir,” sold 33,000 downloads in a week, enough to top Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart. The single interpolates Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance into “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is apparently sung by a group of about 20 “J6” inmates. Digital Song Sales is one of the three main components of the Hot 100—topping it is kind of a big deal!—but in the absence of radio play or much meaningful streaming, “Justice for All” bubbled under the Hot 100.
I mention this curio as a yardstick for right-wing musical propaganda’s normal chart performance. Like K-pop fans, conservative music fans tend to hit download stores to make their point—a dollar download counts more for the Hot 100 than does a micropenny stream.
But collectively, the aging download technology generates fewer overall Hot 100 points than streams (or radio spins) do, and 33,000 downloads isn’t enough to move the needle. (Compare that figure to the 153,000–254,000 downloads the solo BTS members generated with their chart-toppers.) Other right-wing singles in the past few years have followed this pattern—polemics like Kid Rock’s “We the People,” Tom MacDonald’s “Fake Woke,” and Bryson Gray’s “Let’s Go Brandon” each sold a few thousand downloads in a week and topped Digital Song Sales but came nowhere near the big pop chart’s Top 40.
So how did “Try That in a Small Town” pull it off? The big differences between all these singles and Aldean’s are the size of the star and the size of the right-wing outrage (and, you might say, the size of the music video budget).
Aldean has been an A-list country hitmaker for nearly two decades. He broke through on Hot Country Songs back in 2005 with “Hicktown,” which played as a bro-country anthem a half-decade before the bro-country era. Through more than a dozen Hot Country or Country Airplay No. 1s, Aldean has proffered a fairly consistent man’s-man form of 21st-century twang. Interestingly, his music has periodically incorporated hip-hop tropes. His 2011 No. 1 “Dirt Road Anthem,” in which Aldean himself rapped the verses, is considered a signature example of “hick-hop,” and a remix featuring rapper Ludacris even briefly cracked the pop Top 10. And the 2014 No. 1 “Burnin’ It Down” was full-on country trap, with a synthy hip-hop backbeat, years before Morgan Wallen. Through most of these hits, Aldean was a small-C conservative, espousing red-state values (he co-owns a hunting company) with little in the way of overt politics. Even a brush with horrific gun violence—Aldean was the performer onstage at a 2017 festival in Las Vegas when a gunman opened fire into the crowd, killing 60 people—didn’t much change his political profile. Only in the 2020s, roughly around the time his wife Brittany Kerr Aldean became more outspoken about her anti-trans beliefs, has Jason become more tied to political activism.
“Try That in a Small Town” seals the deal. The song appeared back in May as a standalone single and was embraced by country radio like any Aldean single, debuting in the middle of Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. “Small Town” was not penned by Aldean himself. It’s the handiwork of four Nashville journeymen including Kelley Lovelace, who’s written scores of country hits—including, funnily enough, Brad Paisley’s pro-diversity anthem “American Saturday Night.” But in Nashville, songwriters are, pardon the expression, guns for hire, who channel the persona of the front-line star they’re writing for. At first, even with lyrics as incendiary as “You cross that line, it won’t take long for you to find out—I recommend you don’t” and “Got a gun that my granddad gave me, they say one day they’re gonna round up,” the song attracted little attention outside of country circles. And not all that much even there: To this day, “Small Town” still hasn’t risen on Country Airplay above its initial No. 24 debut. (Country radio programmers embrace fiery politics, but only to a point. Aldean is also now an aging hitmaker compared with the likes of Wallen and Combs.)
It was only when the music video materialized in mid-July that all hell broke loose. Even then, it took a few days. Released on Friday, July 14, the video featured Aldean and his band performing in front of the Columbia, Tennessee, courthouse—the same one where, infamously, the 1927 lynching of Henry Choate took place—interspersed with stock news footage of left-wing protests from around the world. Four days later, with little explanation, country video channel CMT pulled the video. The yanking would itself have gone unnoticed if not for a Billboard story revealing it on Tuesday, July 18. That’s when the mainstream media headlines—and the right-wing backlash—finally kicked in.
For chart purposes, these days of the week matter, because that Tuesday news explosion was when sales and streams for the song blew up. Billboard’s chart-tracking week runs from Friday to Thursday, so Aldean had only half a week to leverage the outrage machine. Even with that handicap, the song’s numbers were massive: 228,000 downloads sold for the week—75,000 more than Jungkook’s, and Aldean sold the bulk of his total in half the time. (In the first two days after the newsbreak, Billboard reported “Small Town” was selling more than 100,000 downloads per day.) Those initial numbers rolled into last week’s chart, when “Small Town” went from nowhere on the Hot 100 to an instant No. 2. It probably would’ve taken No. 1 if not for streaming, which gave Jungkook the edge.
One week later, with Jungkook taking the typical K-pop second-week tumble, and Aldean’s single glowing hot from a controversy that was still only days old, “Small Town” had an easy ride to No. 1. Just based on timing, I already expected a full seven days of feverish consumption to give Aldean the win, but then, in the middle of that week, six seconds of Black Lives Matter protest footage were edited out of the video, reportedly due to third-party copyright clearance issues, inflaming right-wing fans anew. As Fox News viewers and TruthSocial denizens continued rallying to buy and stream Aldean’s hit and stick it to the libs (Aldean’s wife is now crowing about how the would-be cancellation of the song “backfired”), “Small Town” sold another 175,000 downloads and more than doubled in streams to 30.7 million. In short, anti-wokeism is big business, and Aldean’s chart command, to be fair to country music, is more about right-wing shit-stirring than country per se.
The other two hits in the all-country Top 3 took their own paths to the top of the charts. The mega-success of Wallen’s “Last Night”—which has spent 14 weeks atop the big chart and might not be done—may have been propelled at first by anti-woke agitation, but that was followed by inarguable pop crossover. It started its life fueled largely by Wallen’s hardcore fandom—the audience that loves Wallen either despite or because of his bare-minimum apology for his 2021 N-word incident—but then became a for-real pop radio hit. At this writing, “Last Night” is No. 2 among all radio songs and even ranks fifth in audience at just pop (not country) radio stations. On the Hot 100 overall, “Last Night” has piled that growing airplay on top of a solid foundation of streams that keeps the song at or near the top of the Streaming chart every week. It’s impossible to tell how much of Wallen’s gargantuan streaming numbers is red-staters having Wallen’s back and how much is genuine fandom. Especially after what Aldean just pulled off, it would be foolish to rule out the former. Still, big-city Top 40 stations aren’t power-rotating “Last Night” to appease Trump voters.
As for the song currently parked at No. 3, Combs’ reboot of Tracy Chapman’s 1988 folk-and-B classic “Fast Car” warrants its own intersectional doctoral thesis. But it is arguably the most organic hit of the three. A cover that Combs had been performing live for years before he formally recorded it in the studio, “Fast Car” was buried on the back half of Combs’ album Gettin’ Old before unsolicited radio interest prompted Columbia Records to try it as a single.
Only reinforcing that Chapman’s song is so sturdy it’s hard to mess up, Combs’ cover has mostly earned plaudits for its faithfulness. It must be said that Combs’ decision to leave the line “Now I work in the market as a checkout girl” intact was likely motivated by song publishing laws that permit remakes without songwriter approval so long as lyrics are left intact. Still, the reclusive Chapman herself has voiced admiration for the remake, even as she has made some serious bank on it. She has also set chart benchmarks: When Combs’ “Car” topped the Country Airplay chart a few weeks ago, Tracy Chapman became the first Black female songwriter to score a country No. 1 with a solo composition. This impressive achievement has nonetheless spawned think pieces about how it took a straight white male singer to bring this Black woman’s song to the top of the country charts. On the Hot 100, Combs’ cover has so far peaked at No. 2, four spots higher than Chapman’s No. 6 berth with the song in 1988. Like Wallen’s “Last Night,” Combs’ “Fast Car” both earned its way onto pop playlists and serves as a depressing reminder of the cultural limits of country crossover.
But no crossover is less crossed over than the song sitting atop the Hot 100 this week, Jason Aldean’s base-affirming ode to small-town vigilantism. If it has expanded country music’s audience at all, it’s only with hardcore conservatives who care more about the controversy than the music. Back in March, I prematurely called Wallen’s chart-topper a “small-tent” hit that wouldn’t do much to create new country fans. Five months later, I concede that “Last Night” has won thousands more blue-state listeners than anyone could have predicted. But Aldean’s hit, overwhelmingly fueled by the MAGA faithful and the already converted, might as well be a pup tent.
Black Lives Matter
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Why Is This Song No. 1?
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