A common complaint from the rightward flank of America’s culture wars is that conservative voices are absent from contemporary pop culture. Like the devil, they mutter, the left has all the best tunes. Hollywood, the music industry, the mainstream media, Ivy League colleges, Silicon Valley and all the other commanding heights of the knowledge economy are overwhelmingly dominated by progressives. Democrats get Springsteen and Beyoncé. Republicans are stuck with Gene Simmons and Kid Rock.
There is more than a grain of truth to this, so all the more reason to sit up and pay attention when unabashedly right-wing entertainments make a dent in the music charts or at the box office, something that has happened twice in the past month with the success of Jason Aldean’s country anthem Try That in a Small Town and Alejandro Gómez Monteverde’s action thriller Sound of Freedom.
What do they have to say? Both have stirred controversy. “Try that in a small town/ See how far ya make it down the road/ Round here, we take care of our own,” sings Alread, addressing an imaginary army of would-be carjackers and liquor store robbers against the backdrop of a Tennessee courthouse while footage of big-city protests and clashes with police is intercut with images of manly men with Stetsons and rifles.
Alread has expressed surprise at suggestions that the song glorifies racist vigilantism. “There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news,” he said, possibly forgetting that his small town is “full of good ol’ boys, raised up right/ If you’re looking for a fight”.
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The video, which was re-edited after release for “copyright reasons” to remove footage of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, was filmed in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, site of the 1920s lynching of a black teenager, Henry Choate. Critics have compared the song’s sentiments to the segregation-era “sundown towns” that banned black people from entering after dark on pain of prosecution or worse.
Try That in a Small Town was the best-selling country song to debut in the Billboard charts in 10 years, rising as high as No 2.
Actor Jim Caviezel said barrels of body parts were being traded for tens of thousands of dollars. This sort of thing may appear too outlandish to take seriously, but it is believed by millions of people
Sound of Freedom, which opens here at the end of August, caused ripples when it took an impressive $150 million at the box office in July, not bad for a film that cost $14.5 million and was going head to head with big mainstream releases from the Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones franchises.
It is very loosely based on true events, and stars Jim Caviezel – best known for playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ – as Tim Ballard, founder of anti-human-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad. That organisation has been linked to the far-right QAnon hoax movement, which spreads disinformation and lies, including the claim that senior leaders of the Democratic Party operate a clandestine paedophile ring.
Sound of Freedom has not been made available to preview here yet, but American reviews describe a fairly run-of-the-mill action revenge drama in which Ballard and his team pursue traffickers from Mexico to Colombia in order to rescue kidnapped children. The film has been praised by Elon Musk and by Donald Trump, who held a private screening at his Bedminster golf club.
Interviewed on former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Caviezel – who rarely comes across as coherent – babbled about chemicals being extracted from trafficked children’s bodies in Ukrainian biolabs to provide anti-ageing drugs for American elites. Barrels of body parts were being traded for tens of thousands of dollars, he said. This sort of thing may appear too outlandish to take seriously, but it is believed by millions of people, and has become foundational for large swathes of the conspiracist right.
What’s equally chilling is that both Try That in a Small Town and Sound of Freedom, while subject to plenty of criticism, have also been widely described in mainstream US media as “conservative”, implying they’re legitimate parts of political discourse. That discourse, it seems, now includes nostalgia for the Jim Crow era, blood-soaked racial revenge fantasies and the fever dreams of an insane cult whose roots lie in the proto-Nazi forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
There are signs that the success of both song and book may be due in part to a kneejerk “own the libs” reaction by right-wing consumers as part of the doom loop of modern US politics. Alread slipped down the charts rapidly after his original surge and Sound of Freedom benefited from some unusual marketing techniques, which may not be applicable again. But both provide a disquieting insight into the dark forces bubbling just below the surface of modern American society.
