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

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