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Jason Aldean’s Try That In a Small Town has gotten substantial media discussion and has been covered here as well, with one of the themes I see being country, conservative, and small-town defenders noting that the song isn’t actually particularly violent compared to rap. While I think this is obviously true, there’s been something about it that has rubbed me wrong, and I finally put my finger on it while I was running with some country music in my ear from Spotify recommendations. The song that got me thinking for the first verse in Bryan Martin’s Wolves Cry:
Much like the Aldean kerfuffle, one distinguishing feature from rap violence is that there is implied instigation on the part of whoever’s going to be left to lie, but the verse above leaves much less ambiguity about what happens if you cross Martin on his land. Martin’s music has a decent bit of this sort of edge, with Everyone’s an Outlaw clarifying that this isn’t exactly a Back The Blue situation:
…
This clearly articulates honor culture values, that you’re morally obligated to do what’s right, including stepping up and killing someone if necessary. These themes aren’t at all uncommon in country music, although they’re usually not as aggressive in the most popular music.
Returning to my point, what I’ve realized bothered me about resorting to comparisons to rap is how whiny, pussified, and self-pitying it sounds to me. While some people did just just reply that honor culture is good, that men should be willing to commit violence against outsiders that wrong them, there was this appeal to how the black people can get away with being tough and cool and they’re way tougher and cooler than country white people, which played into the hands of people that write things like this Rolling Stone article:
For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream. Don’t whine about black music! Respond to this criticism by saying that it’s much easier to appeal to PMC fears of chud expression, that liberals said they favored free speech, and that this is a serious art form that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negatives. Have they ever listened closely to country singers and thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people that they grew up alongside in the trailer park? It’s doubtful.
I grew up in a rural, heavily white area, and the men I knew from that area really do represent the sort of rugged individualism and willingness to engage in violence embodied in some country music. Some of this spills over into behavior that I’m not personally a fan of, maybe even “toxic masculinity”, but I think it’s a culture that’s worth articulating and defending, not one that can only be defended by way of saying that black culture is worse. Jason Aldean is the light, poppy version of this, but country music really does have a fair bit of violence, and it’s good, actually.
king von being a serial killer (no, seriously) makes his bragging about killing people 'a serious artform that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negative ones', while jason aldean being a poser who most certainly didn't come from a small town dealing out vigilante justice means his music isn't just crappy country music, it's advocating for white nationalism. he should try collabing with kyle rittenhouse for authenticity next time.
What the fuck. His rivals are about as bad.
I knew about 50 Cent, XXXTentacion, Tupac and so on but this level of systemic childishness drives the point home finally. It seems «hip hop stars» live with anime or RPG levels of disregard for mundane rules-based reality, fighting and killing each other and being let go by the guards after some modest cooldown, to compose a memorable «diss». America really is the land of endless possibilities.
With some notable exceptions, a lot of famous rappers, even the ones from genuinely rough neighborhoods and who maybe even sold street level drugs for a few months, are usually not gangsters or killers and making pretty much everything they say up (ie Tupac was a college kid and professional actor who turned his acting abilities into creating a badass persona that's nothing like early footage of him).
Von and his peers, in contrast, are part of a recent subgenre of rap called drill, where authenticity of violence is seen as inseparable from the quality of music itself (which is usually really bad). The characters you see there are so bad it's nearly unreal and part of the appeal for their fanbases is a horrified-but-can't-look-away novelty of watching people act out real, literal gang wars in music form. For Chicago in particular it's all the more strange because almost all of the nationally famous artists grew up on the same street, a lot of them in the same housing complex. Imagine being a sixteen year old recording songs in your closet where you talk about the petty squabbles you've had with the kids who grew up a few doors down from you, but thousands of people across the country follow closely and weigh in.
I want to make an effort post about the weirdness of the genre and its cultural implications but don't really trust people here to be decent about it.
I'd love to see an effort post on this.
I had never heard of drill before - but even if you're not a rap fan I think there's something to appreciate here.
The concept of neighborhood beefs escalating due to YouTube fame, and the soundtrack of this becoming internationally famous feels amazingly cyberpunk.
It really is. It's simultaneously a story of the way modern technology allows anyone to create their own music and gain a vast internet audience, combined with a bizarrely anachronistic story of teenagers waging blood feuds in major American cities and creating literal war music about it like vikings.
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I mean Chicago policing is legendary for its general incompetence and neglect. But yes, there’s a reason why some Americans view hip-hop as a uniquely corrupting influence.
King Von's shooting happened in Atlanta, but probably similar levels of care and ability
Atlanta is also known for ‘policing exists to help insurance companies do paperwork, not to catch criminals’, yes.
Atlanta culture is fascinating to me. It's essentially run by an affluent black elite whose view of the black poor is often about as dismissive and contemptuous as the average dissident right twitter user's. It was interesting in the 2020 riots (which did affect downtown Atlanta, but less so than many other cities like Portland or Seattle) for the mayor to come out and essentially say "no fucking around in my city".
I mean, sure, Portland and Seattle set the bar very high in that respect - they’re both cities with well-organized and experienced antifa/anarchist movements, where the police had already been somewhat hamstrung prior to this round of riots - but I remember Atlanta being struck very hard by the riots and by the subsequent surge in crime. I’m thinking of the very memorable scenes of thousands of rioters descending on the CNN headquarters, scaling its tall sign out front, smashing its windows, and threatening to actually occupy the building while its staff were inside live-broadcasting.
The attack on the CNN building (arguably more political violence than just rioting of the looting variety as it was in most of the rest of the country) happened on the first day of major protesting in Atlanta. The next day the curfew was announced and the mayor and governor jointly called in the National Guard, and activity continued to decline from then on, even when there was a very widely publicized police shooting in the city over the following weeks they only managed to burn down a Wendy's. This in a city that's like 50% black, vs much worse riots in cities with vastly smaller black populations and no serious history of recent radical leftist violence as in Portland and Seattle (eg. Kenosha is 10% black, Minneapolis is 19% black). So I think my point stands.
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I have to admit that King Von and YNW Melly have a degree of authenticity when it comes to being actual vicious murderers that most people in music simply cannot lay claim to. I think this reflects an actual difference in the underlying reality of the communities they come from, where the black murder rate in bad neighborhoods really is shockingly high, but the rate of hillbillies killing each other simply isn't. What, exactly, is necessary for someone like Martin to be authentic? I don't think he needs to have actually killed someone, simply being armed and sincere in his conviction that he would defend his home if needed is sufficient.
In either case though, I don't have a problem with rappers that rap about things they haven't done or country singers appealing to their audience without personally being poor and backwoods. For all of the talk that Aldean isn't from a small town, I've been to Macon, and while it's not tiny, it is a pretty typical small Southern city - I don't really doubt that he has some sincere connection to redneck culture. I'm no more affronted by that than by the Dead South actually being Canadian.
Let's take a look at Detroit which annually has about 50 murders per 100,000 people.
Let's assume that 90% of the murders in Detroit are committed by men between 15 and 30. For Detroit, this group is around 70,000 people, or around 11% of the city's population.
So this group of 70,000 young men commits about 280 murders a year. Let's assume that the average murderer kills 2 people, leaving 140 murderers per year out of the group of 70,000.
Over 15 years, this would mean that the cohort of 70,000 produces 2,100 murderers.
By age 30, about 3% of Detroit's men will have committed homicide. The chance of being a homicide victim is probably even higher. These are not small and rare numbers we're talking about. If a rapper from one of these areas is bragging about killing people, it's not outlandish that they are telling the truth.
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In most of the United States, high concentrations of black people are found only in large Urban areas. In the South, the black population is more diffuse. Most medium-small towns in the South have a black neighborhood, and some are majority black outright.
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This website might be useful. Unfortunately, most of the detailed data is hidden behind a fee. Here is their page on St. Louis crime by neighbourhood.
This news story is suspiciously short on numbers, but it does have one:
which places that rural area just under the national average of 6.5/100k.
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Rural whites in those states are unusually murderous by the standards of whites, but the state-level rates are substantially driven by black homicides. I don't have aggregated data, but here's one example for Missouri. If you want to really start exploring, I think the CDC Wonder database is probably the best starting point, although that'll give victimization data rather than data on the killers.
Good call. does this link work for everyone else? It's a sorted list of homicide victimization rates by county, and it sure seems to be more scattered than I would have thought. There are a few rural counties up near the top, but I don't have the geographical knowledge to actually analyze the data in a timely manner.
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Do you think that murder rate is driven by the rural areas or say St Louis?
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I think the assertion is more like ‘if you’re a young black man growing up in bad parts of, say, St Louis, by the time you’re 20 you definitely know multiple murdered guys your age and possibly some murderers too’. So to some extent even a relatively law-abiding young man in such a community could write ‘authentically’ about this stuff. The rappers who get clowned on for not being authentic are more people who grew up middle class and well away from the ghetto, like Drake or Tyga.
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Does someone need to have actually killed somebody for their statements about defending home and neighbors to be serious art? It seems like more and more people have these bizarre culturally illiterate ways of dealing with art as though if you haven’t done it or don’t agree to everything that happens in your art, then it’s not real. Does Eminem need to smoke a blunt to write about drugs?
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It’s also just an example of a journalist dressing up a musical artist in a way their fans, peers, and they themselves wouldn’t recognize. I follow the Chicago rap scene somewhat; uniformly drill fans (including his own) regard Von as uncontroversially a psychopath. Nobody defends him as an artist trying to express tortured truths; it’s basically a meme joking about how he’s totally 100% in hell. That’s part of why he’s fascinating as a character, because how could a real human being be that ridiculously, cartoonishly evil.
I don't know. This particular "we're reflecting our harsh environment" is a very common hypocritical cope in hip hop - see the Straight Outta Compton trailer
TBH in general rappers often ride the line on glorifying vs describing and the same rapper can do both.
That being said, I expect progressive journalists to totally ignore these tensions.
While they may form a unified front when rap is criticized by Geraldo Rivera and other right wingers, Hip hop fans are well aware of them and even make fun of the types who defend people like YNW Melly and King Von.
In a sense it almost feels like kayfabe or a habit in rap: someone like Young Thug gets caught up and is almost certainly guilty, people feel like they have to routine noises about how "They" are trying to get black men and how awful the legal system is just for form but everyone also seems to know the guy was just caught dead-to-rights.
Straight Outta Compton is of course written by people much more similar to a Rolling Stone journalist than a gangbanger turned popstar. There's also levels to this kind of thing and worth distinguishing between the broader genre of rap, where it's mostly about tough talk but fake in real life (ie NWA were not gangsters, aside from Eazy-E, and basically brought him on for credibility), in contrast to drill, where the whole point of the subgenre is to be an authentically scary person in real life. The latter tend to make way more agressive music and be 0% apologetic about it.
Consistently my experience here is that the people making these kinds of noises are third party types with little exposure to the subjects they're defending. If you look on the drill rap subreddits whenever someone gets arrested the general reaction from the front row fans is "what an idiot".
It was written with the direct supervision of the surviving and prominent group members, like the Rami Malek Queen movie, and it's been criticized in a similar way for representing their self-serving viewpoint.
And rappers need no help with the fundamental hypocrisy of "brag about committing crimes constantly" followed by "fuck the pigs for harassing me though" from white Rolling Stone writers.
From a recent hit song, All My Life:
Like, Lil Durk is a direct product of the incredibly violent Chicago drill scene. Yet he's whining about being "harassed" by cops like he's Miles Morales facing Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk.
Or hell, The Game who actually is a Blood from Compton, in Ali Bomaye:
I mean, this one isn't even internally consistent; after equating policing with slavery, he gives us two reasons independent of the fact that he's a gang-banger and gang-promoter for why he was stopped. This is exactly what I mean about it almost being a reflex.
(BTW: Game's From Adam is a perfect example of the latter half of the "glorify and then problematize" game such rappers play. )
I spent more time on /r/HHH and Youtube so maybe it leans more normie. But, when I look at say...criticism due to Meek Mill being on parole for years, (people leave out the fact that it's cause he kept violating it) you do get "Meek should stop being an idiot" but also "the System is awful" (despite Meek having a ton of advantages and being a spoiled brat)
Also: the entire debate about using rap lyrics - which some people frame as a grand injustice - seems to be a prime example of this phenomenon: the examples people go to are almost certainly guilty but the system is also somehow malicious for using them as evidence when it can be corroborated.
And like I said, they weren't gangsters. Ice Cube was the driving force then and the one who added the most input to the film now, and he was a college kid with a degree in architecture and a passion for the arts.
The verse you're quoting is by J. Cole, the example par excellence of an effete college kid becoming a rapper. Lil Durk is more likely to say:
re:
This might be it man. All I'm saying is normal people, including and especially normal black people who listen to drill and even like Von, don't think he's a hero or a misunderstood martyr or something. Everyone knows he's a scumbag, shit just sounds hard. Same way people like watching mob movies or whatever, it's fun to play the villain.
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