How to Tell if You're From a Small Town

J. Cole is a fairly famous rapper from Fayetteville, North Carolina.  I'm from a small town about 25 miles from Fayetteville.  It has recently come to my attention that J. Cole also thinks he is from a small town and it's kind of breaking my brain.  Earlier this week I listened to the live album Forest Hills Drive, recorded in Fayetteville.  After performing the song "St. Tropez" Mr. Cole explains that it's about coming from a small town and dreaming of more.  This is perplexing me because Fayetteville already has so much more than my town does, like twenty times the population for starters.  I love movies and comic books but there are no movie theaters or comic book stores in my town.  Fayetteville has more than one of both, which is why I drive for 45 minutes every other weekend or so to watch movies and buy comics.  Actually, my town does have two closed down movie theaters, neither of which has shown a movie to the public in over a decade or ever had more than two screens.  Fayetteville has a half dozen fully operational multiplexes, and a mall, and a good sized airport, and the single largest military base on the planet.  This is not a small town, it is a medium sized city.  In his defense, J. Cole is not alone in this delusion.  Taylor Swift also seems to think that she came from a small town, as evidenced by her 2010 song "Mean," in which she declares her intentions to move to a big city.  It could be from the point of view of a much younger Swift who lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, but it is more likely from the perspective of 2010 Swift who had lived in Nashville, one of America's most famous cities and headquarters to the massive country music industry, for the better part of a decade.  I worry that an epidemic is on its way that causes celebrities to be confused about the size of their hometowns so I've come up with a few guidelines to help keep things straight.

You have to leave the town on a regular basis to get the things you want

As previously mentioned, I drive 25 miles to Fayetteville a couple of times a month to enjoy the big city amenities denied to me in my actual small town.  I also work in another city smaller than Fayetteville.  Actually, most people I know have jobs outside of the town they live in.  Small town life is defined by a relative scarcity of resources.  On TV every hamlet has one of everything, but in my experience everything is a little more spread out.  You can get what you want but it's going to eat up some your precious time and gas money.  You can go to a city like Fayetteville that is lacking very little, or you can go to the movie theater in one town or the bowling alley in another or the shopping center in another.  In modern day America living in a small town means leaving it.

You can say "It's a small town you've probably never heard of" and be right

Small towns typically don't have much name recognition.  If a stranger from a distant part of the country is aware of your city and knows what state it's in you are not from a small town.  Nashville is a world famous city and bears a name synonymous with an entire genre of music.  Fayetteville is part of a triangle with North Carolina's capital Raleigh and another major city, Durham.  If someone knows Raleigh and Durham, there's a decent chance they know Fayetteville.  When TV personalities do local promos they say "What's up Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville."  If Seth Meyers has frequently said the name of your city it is definitely a city.

It takes less than a minute to read the Wikipedia page

An extensive Wikipedia page means two things: there's a lot to know about the topic and someone(s) cared enough about it to put all that information in one place.  The bigger the city the bigger the Wikipedia page.  The page for Fayetteville is about five times the size of some nearby actual small towns.  Small towns are boring.  They don't have identities and there's nothing interesting about them.  Their only claim to fame is the two or three people who made it out and made it big, but usually not big enough for anyone to care about them, including the people in the town.  Fayetteville's "Notable People" section alone takes up almost as much space as my town's entire Wikipedia page.  That is not a small town.