Deviant Behavior In Songs A-Team And Country Boy Can Survive

There are many theoretical approaches for explaining deviant behavior, such as rational choice, symbolic interaction (differential association, labeling), functional (anomie and social disorganization, strain), conflict, feminist. These theories can explain deviant behaviors in songs A-Team and Country Boy Can Survive.
A-Team song describes a story of a young woman, who is addicted to drugs. She struggles to pay her bills, but still hopes for a better life and even takes some attempts to earn money by selling magazines. After her unsuccessful efforts she does not see other choices, but make money from prostitution. It is hard to tell what is exactly happening in her mind, but she looks stressed, miserable and at the end decides to end her life by taking drugs. There are few theories that can explain her

deviant behavior.

One of them is differential association, which suggests that people learn behaviors from others. From differential association theory perspective, her deviant behavior is a result of learning it from her social group members. Perhaps, her peers are also drug-addicts and also sell their bodies on a street. Someone had to show her the way to do these things. In addition, her behavior could be explained by labeling theory. People call her a drug user “they say she is in the class A-team” since she was eighteen years old. So, she might have accepted the label of a drug-user and acts accordingly to this label.
“A Country Boy Can Survive” song is about the ability and skills that country people use to survive during hard times. It basically tells us that they are not worrying about social distress in a country, because they are independent enough, unlike city folks, and can provide everything for themselves. Country people have their own subculture with their own norms and values, and sometimes they even violate dominant group norms. The song says for example “we make our own whiskey and our own smoke”, or “I’d send him some

homemade wine”, which are considered as illegal actions. From conflict theory perspectives, deviant behaviors are caused by interest groups conflicts. The actions of interest groups sometimes are necessary for survival. Country people do not accept some of the dominant group norms and challenge them. In this song, their acts are victimless and they might think they should not be disallowed. Strain theory of Merton can also explain these behaviors. According to this theory, the gap between the goals and the means to meet those goals cause a strain, which leads to a deviant behavior. There are five ways that people adjust to the strain: conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion. Country people might accept the goals, even if it is just meet the ends and provide for the family. But they reject the way of reaching these goals. Instead of maybe working a couple jobs, they separate themselves from the society and find their own ways to provide for the family. According to the strain theory they belong to innovators. They can kill a deer with their shotgun and skin it, plow a field, catch fish, grow tomatoes, make homemade wine. And most of the ways they use do not violate dominant group norms, except growing marijuana, making wine and sending it to someone else. The reason for deviant behaviors can be explained by social conditions, which make reaching the goals difficult and force people to find other ways to accomplish them.
There are other theoretical perspectives that can explain deviance in both songs, but in my opinion, the approaches that I chose explain it better than others.