Jason Aldean tried his ugly and explicitly threatening song “Try That In A Small Town” on the world stage earlier this summer, and he’s still in the process of finding out that a lot of people didn’t take too kindly to its message. The controversial country star is (rightfully) going to be stuck defending this one in interviews for a very long time.
After generating multiple rounds of headlines with lyrics like “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up / Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck” and multiple whiny rants about cancel culture (all while the single flew up the charts), Aldean still doesn’t understand why the people he seems to hates seem to hate him right back.
When asked on a recent episode of CBS Mornings how he reacted to people calling the song racist, Aldean simply replied “how?” “There was people of all color doing stuff in the video,” he continued. “That’s what I don’t understand. You know, there was white people in there. There was Black people. I mean, this video did not shine light on one specific group and say, that’s the problem. So anybody that saw that in the video, then you weren’t looking hard enough in the video is all I can tell you.” No mention, of course, of the eagle-eyed viewers who were paying so much attention that they not only pressured his team into removing a clip explicitly referencing Black Lives Matter from the video, but also proved that some of the “real news footage” he used to make his point wasn’t actually real at all.
The video also garnered intense backlash for being filmed in front of a Tennessee courthouse where a Black man was lynched in the 1920s. According to Aldean, though, it’s unfair to hold him accountable for what could have been fixed by one simple little Google search. “I’m not going to go back 100 years and check on the history of this building,” he said (via Variety). “Honestly, if you’re in the south, you could probably go to any smalltown courthouse, and be hard-pressed to find one that hasn’t had a racial issue over the years at some point. That’s a fact.” Oh, Jason. You’re so close to getting the point.