By Marissa
I’ll admit it – there are not too many more interesting things to say about Jason Aldean and his wife Brittany cozying up to Donald Trump, as they both did during the recent Republican convention. Pivoting to MAGA has worked well for him (and the folks in Nashville who may vote blue but profit gloriously from his success!) as the relevance of his actual music began to dwindle. He’s found his base and secured it: I saw a “Try That in a Small Town” bumper sticker on a car in a very not small town in a Long Island, NY emergency room parking lot. We all know this really means “try that around cishet white people,” and that has nothing to do with the size of your town (a reminder that Aldean was never from a small town, anyway). Bigots: they’re everywhere.
But there is something particularly special when it comes to the category of ferocious hypocrites about the Aldeans – and anyone in country music who claims to understand and have lived in a small town or Appalachia or rural America – supporting one of the world’s biggest grifters, JD Vance. Now, I’m not from Appalachia, either, but I never pretended to be: Vance, on the other hand, has created a career around his fable of Kentucky life that smelled rotten to every Kentuckian I have ever known or spoken to from a mile away. Including, and this is where country music comes in, most of the musicians we hold near and dear as the best of their or any generation.
“I’ll give this to J.D. [Vance],” Sturgill Simpson told the Trillbillies podcast in 2020, one of the most incisive and vocal early critics of Vance when his book, Hillbilly Elegy, began to take off (another good podcast to seek out is Appodlachia, if you’re interested in this sort of perspective). “Like so many coastal elites that have come to eastern Kentucky to point out all its problems, much like them he offered no solutions, but just found a way to get fucking paid for it. Twice.” Vance was born in Ohio and piggybacked on his grandparents’ story (who grew up in Breathitt County, KY) to paint a narrative with his rise from poverty to Yale at the center, woven together with stereotypes of Appalachian folks he claimed to be a part of but failed to even remotely understand or gain empathy for. Vance consistently called lazy the very people singers like Aldean are trying to reach – though, at the end of the day, they’re both two privileged white men who made careers on rural American mythmaking, so I am sure they have a lot to talk about.
This paradox all became memeified in the best way as Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has been emerging into the national spotlight, because his message is a perfect foil to Vance’s grift and he’s been at the center of speculation around who could be chosen to serve alongside presumptive presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“Let me just tell you,” Beshear told MSNBC, “JD Vance ain’t from here,” going on to talk about how Vance’s painting of Eastern Kentuckians as lazy is completely antithetical to what republicans (and country music artists) claim to value, namely the “coal miners that powered the industrial revolution.” I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that country music is very much a genre that is supposed to honor the coal miner. So how can any self-respecting country artist support this ticket? It’s amusing when it’s not depressing.
And thus, a hashtag was born: #HeAintFromHere, where Kentuckians absolutely roasted, and have continued to roast, Vance. It’s a beautiful thing that not only provides a little lightness around a genuinely terrifying man, but helps simultaneously dispel myths about Appalachian folks that are continually peddled to this day all while sharing collective tradition. And they are EXCELLENT:
A hashtag is just a hashtag, but this one happens to illustrate how the myth of JD Vance (that plenty of liberals helped build, too, in their gross misunderstanding and stereotyping of Appalachian folks) is the polar opposite of the “small town” idea that Aldean and his ilk try to preach. Aldean would be tweeting #heaintfromhere at Vance if he we running as a democrat (and Vance, lacking any sort of true moral core that can be detected, would run in whatever party would have him and make him rich and famous, but I digress). It’s a furious web of contradictions and self-owns far too broad for a hashtag, but one that does a nice job nonetheless. Vance represents exactly what country music doesn’t speak for, making Aldean’s sales pitch even more hollow than ever, as he supports the ticket he sits on. So keep those hashtags coming.
And don’t wash the fucking cast iron skillet. Even I know this.
I was already very much looking forward to your forthcoming Passage du Desir write-up, but all the more so after this.
For a great read on this I suggest this from the always excellent "Bitter Southener"
https://bittersoutherner.com/hillbillies-need-no-elegy-appalachian-reckoning
I grew up 5 minutes away from JD's Middletown, OH and my families life and path were very similar to his. That said, I learned different lessons that his vapid hate of people who struggle. I learned that Big Business (the coal mine owners) were in it for profit and screw the working class rubes who they hired. At least he can pronounce "Mamaw" correctly but that's about it.