Summer is almost half over, and I’m still looking to see what the “song of the summer” is going to be.
That’s not as easy to determine as it used to be before top 40 radio playlists lost their tastemaking dominance to TikTok, YouTube, and other newer technologies.
Every summer used to have its song — or songs. Sly and the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime” brings sun-burnished memories of 1969 back to mind. Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” brings the mellow side of the 1970s back to mind.
More recently, “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X reminds me of 2020, when that country-flavored song won the rapper, singer, and songwriter the Grammy for Best Music Video, despite some purists who questioned — questionably — whether the Black artist’s song was “country” enough. The TikTok generation, among other consumers, came to the rescue. By late summer 2019, users of platforms such as YouTube and Spotify had streamed “Old Town Road” more than a billion times.
It may sound a bit naive now, but I actually felt encouraged by the rise of a Black star to such heights in country music, especially after I later found out he also was gay. The times are changing, I thought, even in country music.
Well, I later found maybe not so much.
All of which serves as the backdrop for the current summer’s new, racially charged controversy in the music world: Jason Aldean’s hit song “Try That in a Small Town,” a catchy anthem that has been selling like the latest iPhone to some music consumers; while others want to cancel it as unsubtle hate speech.
I call it a bold display of the right-wing resentments that have fueled Donald Trump’s MAGA movement — “Make America Great Again,” if you somehow haven’t heard of that — and undoubtedly will be heard at the former president and current candidate’s campaign rallies soon.
I first heard of Aldean as most people probably did, after a gunman opened fire on the crowd attending his performance at a 2017 music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada. He killed 58 people (two others died later from their injuries) and wounded more than 500 before he then killed himself in the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Like most music stars, especially those who still are trying to make a name for themselves, Aldean is known to have steered clear of politics rather than risk alienating his audiences, much like Michael Jordan’s famous observation — delivered in jest, Jordan insists — that “Republicans buy sneakers too.”
Yet, the rise of Trump and the outspokenness of the music star’s Instagram ,…
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