Country music stardom now functions partly as political identity signaling against cosmopolitan taste

Evidence

Fierce partisanship against liberalism also emboldened some country music stars to push back against the encroachment of omnivore monoculture into their provincial sound. Jason Aldean’s 2023 hit single “Try That in a Small Town” championed rural vigilantism against social justice protesters. Its video was filmed in front of the Columbia, Tennessee, courthouse where a white mob lynched eighteen-year-old Henry Choate in 1927. (Aldean denied any historical allusion.) Republican candidates played it at rallies, positioning it as a culture-war anthem. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 810

Categorization

• XREF: The filming location echo of a 1927 lynching connects to how the ‘provincial sound’ being defended carries a buried racial history, parallel to skin-tone signaling dynamics in country’s origins in the writer’s prior notes.