Country music star Jason Aldean has no regrets.
As the dust began to settle on the controversy surrounding his song “Try That in a Small Town” and its accompanying music video, the singer is once again stirring the pot. Appearing on the podcast Coop’s Rockin’ Country Saturday Night, on Wednesday, Aldean defended the song and video, which was pulled from CMT rotation after critics complained that it promotes gun violence and racism.
“Country music is blue-collar music, man, it’s for the everyman. I’ve got eyes, I can see what’s going on,” Aldean said. “I don’t care which side of the political fence you want to stand on.”
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The 46-year-old said critics had made “the song and the video into something that it’s not,” but despite the clapback, he said the outcome was “pretty amazing, actually.”
The song hit No. 1 on iTunes soon after the peak of the controversy and became an anthem for those on the right.
“If you’ve got common sense, you can look at the video and see, I’m not sayin’ anything that’s not true,” he added of the clip, which drew heat for featuring footage of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. A portion of the video was also filmed outside the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, where 18-year-old Black man Henry Choate was lynched by a mob in 1927.
“We just live in a world that does that, I’m not going to go out and explain myself every time somebody gives their own opinion of what my song or video means.
He said fans looked at the song “going, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t understand what the big deal is.’”
“If you’ve got common sense, you can look at the video and see that I’m not saying anything that’s not true in the video, I’m showin’ you what happened — I didn’t do it, I didn’t recreate it—it just happened, and I saw it, and I’m not cool with it, and that was essentially what it was all about,” Aldean said.
“To me, what I was seeing was wrong, and nobody would say anything, especially in the music industry or entertainment industry. It just kind of reaches a breaking point to where you’re like, ‘Somebody needs to say something, and if nobody’s gonna do it, then I’ll be the guy.’”
Aldean added that “to see the response and the way people rallied around that song and video was pretty amazing actually.”
