Such people probably have no concept of metonymy whatsoever. When, for example, Simon Cowell tells advancing American Idol contestants “Welcome to Hollywood”, I suspect for people like your interlocutor that it never dawns on them that Cowell is circumlocuting that the contestants are moving on to the next round and that these will occur at a studio in Hollywood. Instead for them, the entity of Hollywood — liberal, gay, Communist film-producing, corporate-geographical entity — has just sucked in another young’un.

So it seems plausible that Nashville might be such an abstract entity – especially with such programming as “Nashville Star” possibly feeding their figure-of-speech-less misconceptions.

That’s hilarious.